Conductors IVAN JOSIP SKENDER, VJEKOSLAV BABIĆ
Coproduction with Zagreb Music Biennale
According to the Cambridge dictionary, adjective broken has several related meanings. It can mean something that is broken, interrupted, something that no longer functions, someone extremely discouraged or sad, something damaged, ruined or ended. In such an order, an associative array of the breakup of a romance is created; series of attempts and failures, discussions and negotiations, periods of crisis but also times of care, love and consolation. Everything broken, like a bone, seeks a way to be rebuilt, although often in an entirely new form. Everything damaged, whether it is skin, open wound or relationship, should heal with time. Yet, behind each of these processes relating to breaking, destroying, recovering, and caring stay scars, traces, memories, artefacts of something
that once was here, of something that seemed eternal and magnificent, indestructible. With time, the body understands that the scar remains much longer than any wound. The new ballet project of the CNT in Zagreb is a coproduction with the Zagreb Music Biennale that took for its staring point the successful project of the Museum of Broken Relationships that collects items that have remained after broken romances.
After an international open call where artists were asked to send their works on the topic of broken relationships, the Zagreb Music Biennale invited three composers and the Ballet of the CNT in Zagreb, three choreographers. After the selection, the composers and choreographers were commissioned to create three new ballets that will be shown in the same evening. That way a paradox situation has been created. Gathered around the topic of farewell, breaking up and dispersion, artists respond with encounter, dialogue, and open experiment. In this process, their task is to rejoin
everything that is broken, fragmented and dispersed, to blend the new music score with new choreographies, to negotiate their author positions, make connections
between the fractures and discover mutual points in sharp contrasts. At the breaking point, through encounter, find again space for negotiations, adaptation
and compromise, three preconditions not only for art, but for every new love.
