SOFT SPOT

Soft Spot is an experimental physical performance born out of a collaboration between dancers Martina Hajdyla and Soňa Ferienčíková and choreographer Adrienn Hód. Through improvisation and research into the physical body, they explored the relationship between body, personality and meaning. What do we perceive when we look at the human body? What does the face, the gesture, the posture, and the movement tell us? How do we communicate with others through the body? Soft Spot plays with the blurring of human qualities, asks what defines us as humans, and looks for the hidden, sensitive “soft spot” in us.

About the company

The independent dance group ME-SA was established in 2008. The company works as an open platform, combining original projects with invitations to guest choreographers from the Czechoslovak dance scene and abroad. In 2013, ME-SA became part of the Aerowaves TOP 20 Priority Companies List for the first time thanks to the project Much More Than Nothing created by Peter Šavel and Stano Dobák. The company has thrice been nominated for the Dance Piece of the Year Award. In 2015, one of ME-SA’s founders, Martina Hajdyla Lacová, was awarded the Dancer of the Year Award for her performance in SuperNaturals, another piece by ME-SA listed in the Aerowaves Selection for 2015. In 2016, Martina Hajdyla Lacová was nominated for the prestigious Czech Thalia Award for her performance in the solo project L- One of the Seven. ME-SA has presented its projects at various festivals, including APAP/NYC, Spring Forward, Czech Dance Platform, Tanec Praha, Edinburgh Fringe, etc.

BOD.Y
The brainchild of Slovak dance artist Soňa Ferienčíková, BOD.Y is a non-profit organisation focused on the creation and production of new dance works by young Slovak and international artists. BOD.Y is interested in contemporary theatrical dance that fuses performative disciplines, as well as dance films, video art, and site-specific performance. The organisation also initiates the creation of new works and is open to proposals from artists from all fields. BOD.Y´s works are presented in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Germany, Spain and Latvia.

HODWORKS company, founded in 2007, develops productions in which Adrienn Hód deconstructs contexts of body, movement, space and music, rebuilding them in surprising ways. Her company is comprised of a small nucleus of freelance dancers that have kept on collaborating in recurring constellations for several years now. With their productions, Adrienn Hód has managed to be selected for the European dance network Aerowaves three times and she has won the Rudolf Lábán Award and the Zoltan Imre Prize in Hungary on multiple occasions. Hód conceives of theatre as a safe space in which topics and discourse may be fathomed to the full extent of their depths and made visible artistically. Whether dealing with the radical exploration of naked bodies in Dawn (2014), evoking extreme conditions of emotional and linguistic expression in Conditions of Being a Mortal (2015), or sending her dancers, as flashy chorus girls, into an ecstatic stream of consciousness between personal stories and fragments of current social discourse as in Grace (2016), she always tries to push the boundaries of performative depiction and open new spaces for perspective and narration beyond taboos and the conventions of gaze and expectations. The stage is an area of play for her, subducting itself from determination or interpretation of its signs. Her productions arrive at completely new dance forms and dramaturgical principles, again and again, radically rethinking the possibilities inherent in contemporary dance. HODWORKS emphasises the complexity and radicalism of personal expression, laying bare the multilayered constructs of identity. In this manner, Adrienn Hód’s works may also be read, in the context of endangered artistic and personal autonomy, as marking a movement of defence and re-obtaining said autonomy.

Adrienn Hód is a Budapest-based choreographer, who has been leading the internationally acclaimed contemporary dance company HODWORKS since 2007. In her creations, she deconstructs the framework of body, movement, space and music and rebuilds them in surprising ways. During studio work, she creates intimate situations in which dancers are offered space and trust to open up their physicality, sensations and emotions. Hód’s method is based on improvisation that appears in a structured frame on stage. She is not afraid of working with the unknown.

Soňa Ferienčíková is a Slovak dancer, performer, teacher and the founder of the dance organisation BOD.Yngo. She started her professional dance education at the National Ballet School in Bratislava and continued with studies in Prague (Academy of Performing Arts), Antwerp (The Royal Conservatoire) and Salzburg (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance). Sona is also a certified Pilates instructor (Steele Pilates, NYC). |In addition to contemporary dance, she is involved with experimental and documentary theatre and dance film. Her latest solo EVERYWHEN was nominated for the prestigious Slovak theatre award DOSKY 2018 and has been performed across Europe and in Mexico.

Martina Hajdyla is a Slovak dancer and choreographer based in Prague. She graduated from the J.L. Bell Conservatory in Banská Bystrica and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She is a founding member of the dance group ME-SA. In 2015, she won the Dance of the Year Award for her performance in SuperNaturals. She was nominated for the prestigious Czech Thalia Award for her performance in the solo project L – One of the Seven in 2016.