FRIDAY, 19 MAY 2023 FROM 7:30 PM
NAVY BLUE - OONA DOHERTY
Boris Hristov House of Culture

“We arch up into the Galactic black of deep space. Scattered with shooting stars, with bodies tearing through the night sky a deep acrylic blue.”
The Northern Irish sensation Oona Doherty, awarded with a Silver Lion by the Venice Biennale in 2021, is visiting Plovdiv with her new work NAVY BLUE.
The performance, co-produced by Big Pulse Dance Alliance, features original music by Jamie xx and Sergei Rachmaninoff and will be presented on 19 May at the Boris Hristov House of Culture.
Tickets are available at EasyPay box offices nationwide and online at the EPAYGO network.
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Oona Doherty uses her raw realism to embody a string of emotional states and existential questions in front of the audience. Her choreography mirrors life as a preordained transience, dance as the offspring of feelings, and the human being as a tiny dot in the bottomless stretch of the universe. In the performance NAVY BLUE, you can float on the surface, but you can also sink.
A dozen dancers in working-class uniforms move to the music of Rachmaninoff and Jamie xx, progressing through different moods – anxiety, pain, alienation, longing, determination, and enthusiasm. The darkness of the night surrounds them, or it might be the oppressive infinity of the universe that makes us all insignificant and temporary. A gloomy blueness, but with a ray of hope. An oppressive algorithm of insignificance but with the possibility of escape.
The graceful and delicate opening of the piece is like the azure water before the deep, and Doherty’s performance with a frank monologue hits like a cold shower. What is the point of the dance? What is the point of anything at all? Do our actions and words matter if life, as we measure and perceive it, is but a speck of dust in the grandeur of the cosmos? Doherty asks the big questions of existence, and the answers lie within each of us – more together than apart.
Praised as a star of the contemporary dance scene with her first solo pieces about the brutal beauty of Belfast, worker exploitation, sexuality, and religion, Oona Doherty has reached the world’s biggest stages with harsh topics, and in 2021 won the prestigious Silver Lion for Best Young Artist at the Venice Biennale for Dance. NAVY BLUE is her new and largest-scale work.

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/866419144613237