Iztok Kovač is a choreographer and founder of En–Knap. Following the international success of his solo How I Caught a Falcon (1991), he became one of the key figures in the development of Slovenian contemporary dance. He founded En–Knap Group, Slovenia's first permanent contemporary dance ensemble, and serves as artistic director of both En–Knap and the Španski borci Cultural Centre. His works have toured internationally for more than three decades. Additionally, his artistic practice includes six dance films, international pedagogical work, guest choreography and the direction of major national events in Slovenia. During the Covid period, he initiated Stage360, developing dance works in virtual reality.
The performance Masters of Time brings the themes of Romantic ballet—Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, three cornerstones of the classical ballet canon—into the field of contemporary art. Its fundamental operation is a distinctly modernist gesture. The work proceeds from the assumption that, within the history of ballet, modernism never fully occurred on an ontological level. It therefore excavates a lacuna within the canonised discourse of ballet and inhabits it with the progressive artistic impulses of the twentieth century. This gesture is grounded in the belief that every artistic practice must, alongside proposing solutions on the level of form and content, continually return to a fundamental question: What is our practice? In this case, the question becomes: What is ballet? Or, more broadly: What is dance?