The 14th edition of Spider Festival brings together opposites and unexpected encounters: the energy of youth and the power of age, harmony and disruption, trance and awakening. Through movement, we’ll shape new realities—resisting, remembering, and reinventing. We’ll tune into the voices of trees marked by ruin, invent a dance against tango, and revel in the instant where tradition collides with rave, in that charged pause before falling in love, before uprising.

On Victory Day, Leja Jurišić and Miklavž Komelj read a dialogue between Capital and Revolution from Pasolini’s Stilna žival, echoing his closing verse: “And yet, this is a day of victory!” The event featured interventions by Darko Suvin (online), Boris A. Novak, Alice Pamuk, and Janez Kardelj, who also exhibited a painting. The interior was of course, designed by Petra Veber.

With this initiative, our intention was to offer direct support for artistic excellence by providing choreographers with concrete financial recognition. Thanks to the donations gathered, we were able to contribute to the main award of the Biennial, granted to Klemen Kovačič for his work Agmisterij. The award was not simply a gesture of praise, but a resource aimed at enabling the continuation and deepening of his creative practice.

Join us at Studio Pekinpah (Trg prekomorskih brigad 1, 4th floor) as we mark the 10th anniversary of Tomaž Šalamun's death and 100 years of the Surrealist Manifesto. Through words, movement, and presence, we’ll summon the birds so they cease to fear — for death is but a mistake of naming, and dance is yet to come. Interventions by Miklavž Komelj and Leja Jurišić, with guests Tibor Hrs Pandur, Marko Rop, Dan Rosenberg, and more.

Matej Kejžar has been awarded the Croatian Theatre Award 2024 for House Bolero, recognised as the best performance in the dance category. Performed by an exceptional cast and produced by the Studio for Contemporary Dance, the piece highlights Kejžar's distinctive approach to movement and expression. With scenography and lighting by Petra Veber, this award marks a significant moment for contemporary dance. Congratulations to Matej and everyone involved!

Join us on Wednesday, November 6 at Studio Pekinpah in Ljubljana for the presentation of Djuna Barnes' Antiphon, now available in Slovene. The event will feature a blend of spatial installation, live performance, and reading, with a focus on engaging the translator in dialogue. A unique opportunity to experience one of the most enigmatic works of 20th-century drama.

Tatiana Kocmur will once again explore the topic of sexual violence in a provocative environment with her new project Meso⏐Flesh. Unlike The Following Body, which focused on the sheer brutality of trauma, Meso⏐Flesh focuses on the story of rekindling love after the traumatic encounter with sexual violence, presenting the audience with a story of regrowth through pain.

Welcome to Spider Festival 2023, a Dance study of the digital space as a field of resistance to the hegemonic contemporary choreography interfaces. We invite you to tilt in and out and encounter empty frames filled with organic materials. Welcome to the place of opacity, inhalation, and reflection. Bring all the data and expectations, and let all thought be metabolized by idiosyncratic dancers who feel their way through the world imaginatively and artfully.

This is a story about oscillations between certainty and indeterminacy. Rejecting the traditional relationship between Dance and Choreography means attentively following the myth of Aphrodite’s birth. Born from foam, Aphrodite evokes images of irregular rhythmic patterns, the spectacle of movement over movement, and the voyage from one pattern to another. Will the cut between one and the other always mean the end of repetition, a kind of end of reproduction? How will we handle this change? Will we?

This is a story about oscillations between certainty and indeterminacy. Rejecting the traditional relationship between Dance and Choreography means attentively following the myth of Aphrodite’s birth. Born from foam, Aphrodite evokes images of irregular rhythmic patterns, the spectacle of movement over movement, and the voyage from one pattern to another. Will the cut between one and the other always mean the end of repetition, a kind of end of reproduction? How will we handle this change? Will we?

Notes to Antiphon by Petra Veber and Leja Jurišić is the conclusion of the first phase of reading The Antiphon, the great work by Djuna Barnes, as well as an announcement of the Slovenian translation by Miklavž Komelj, which will be published by cf.

Anamaria Klajnšček and her team blend music and dance to explore the potential of a ceaseless collective flow of thoughts. Movements trigger sounds that constantly drives new motions, all reflecting cognitive processes. An interlace of four individual entities, fighting for attention, diving into a whirl of shared thoughts with a single motive: to keep going on.

The dance piece 303 draws its title from the analogue synthesizer Roland TB-303 which was highly popular in the past decades but was later replaced with digital machines. Inspired by the intense digitalization of our lives during the pandemic, the project focuses on the relationship between our time's analogue and digital realities.

Welcome to Spider Festival 2023, a Dance study of the digital space as a field of resistance to the hegemonic contemporary choreography interfaces. We invite you to tilt in and out and encounter empty frames filled with organic materials. Welcome to the place of opacity, inhalation, and reflection. Bring all the data and expectations, and let all thought be metabolized by idiosyncratic dancers who feel their way through the world imaginatively and artfully.

Filip Štepec in Jernej Potočan nagovarjata čas, v katerem Google brskalnik najbolje pozna naš notranji svet. Za izhodišče vzemata nereflektirano vskadanjost, beg med štiri stene, skrite fantazije, ki pa se paradoksalno zrcalijo v naših brskalnikih.

Ljudje posegamo v gozd, a je tudi moč gozda, da oblikuje ljudi, neizogibna. V gozd si gremo celit rane, v gozdu rane nastanejo, tišina gozda ni nenasilna, glasnost sveta prav tako ne. Z Rdečim gozdom Leje Jurišić se sooči pet plesalk in plesalcev, koreografinj in koreografov. Nastaja omnibus soočanj z gozdom in rdečo.

Spending Time Dancing presents Matej Kejžar’s artistic experimentation with Dancing discharged from the drive for choreography. In order to relieve dance from the burden, constructed in the concept of choreography, the burden of a carefully planned succession of movements as progress, the dancers indulge in the processes that defy the linearity of both movement and time. They compost.

A hybrid improvised music concert and dance performance by Beno Novak, Boštjan Simon, and Elvis Homan, awarded as the best performance of the 12th Biennial of Slovenian Contemporary Dance Art Gibanica 2023.

Join us in disrupting the normative, the fixed, the harmonious. Enter the sphere of exploration, attentive listening and subtle encounters, dance, cinematic performances, music performances, DJ sets, hangouts, and interactions. Welcome to Spider Festival 2022!

The East is Best project is aimed to develop network connections, endorse artist's visibility and expose new international projects. The nature of the partnership is rooted in balance and equity between the partners as they symmetrically share their know-how, experiences, and resources, to enhance live communication between regional producers, artists, and audiences.

For quite some time, the dancer and choreographer Leja Jurišić has been developing her interest in the arts that in their time transformed the field of art, those that had cut into it, stirred it up, and redefined it. This impulse and focus can be observed in her creative work; she collaborates with artists from various fields to create pieces in which she can cross the conventions and boundaries of a dance performance. In the new piece entitled CONCERT, the horizon of the leap from the dance arts is even bolder, even bigger.

A ‘favourite album’ as a choreographic frame where dance resonates between proto-knowing, rhythm, musical force, listening and hearing, narration and abstraction. From this ‘favourite album’ a new dance piece arises, a new dynamic territory. Within music, in a parallel which is precisely here.

A monument: a structure, a tangible structure, a lasting tangible structure as a reminder to a historical phenomenon, a fixation of a specific memory arising from the fear of loss of memory. Now: to make one who is movement itself into a monument.

Uspešno smo zaključili projekt S kulturo v svet! - zaposlitve in usposabljanja na področju mednarodnih trgov v kulturi 2020. Projekt sta sofinancirali Republika Slovenija in Evropska unija iz Evropskega socialnega sklada

Pekinpah’s first collaboration with Urška Medved has created three new variations of visual performance Consequence! A fresh take on body and textile and of the trails after the performance takes place.

To have art wait for better times? Thanks, but no thanks. Here comes the 10th (TENTH!)
Spider Festival – festival of radical bodies, radical dance, radical thought. Tivoli Park in
Ljubljana, June 16 to 20. Just like last year, but different, never the same. Long live the
movement!

Ni mogoče čakati zaman Miklavža Komelja in Leje Jurišić je soavtorski projekt dveh umetnikov, ki prvič sodelujeta. Odločila sta se, da bosta delila skoraj enoleten ustvarjalni proces, znotraj formiranja končnega umetniškega dela pa ne želita sprejemati kompromisov, zato sta ustvarila vsak svoje avtonomno delo z naslovom Ni mogoče čakati zaman.

Pekinpah v sodelovanju s Centrom za kreativnost vsak prvi petek v mesecu nudi brezplačno svetovanje, kjer nagovarjamo samostojne umetnike_ce, producent(k)e ali skupine, ki bi radi_e začel_e_i delovati ali delovati bolje na uprizoritvenem/umetniškem področju.

Matej Kejžar is arriving with the continuation of his complex project Language Sausage (LS) and presents us with a solo dance piece LS-Digital. He confronts the digital and the bodily. The digitalist paradigm is not something he takes for granted or dismisses easily. On the contrary, he calls for an contemplational and artistic immersion into the core of this topic.

The 2020 international edition of the 9th Spider Festival took place between 17 and 20 June in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Our dance floors was set in the natural environment of the Tivoli Park and other partner’s sites in Ljubljana.