Maja Delak is a choreographer and dancer. She studied contemporary dance at CNDC L’Esquisse in Angers, France, and at numerous dance seminars, lead by internationally renowned pedagogues. She was, from 1993 to 2002, a member of the international dance group En-Knap, and a programme leader of the realization of a high school programme for contemporary dance, provided for at the Pre-School Education and Grammar School Ljubljana. In her choreographic opus, Maja Delak has traversed numerous worlds, which – despite the different themes and approaches to work – whirl into an anchorage of the author’s dance and performative poetics, with which she is making a clearer and clearer definition of the methodologies of contemporary art and dance. In 2006, Maja Delak established institute EMANAT, with which she aims for the affirmation of contemporary dance – both with performance production as well as with a book programme (Transitions series) and education (variety of research and educational projects). In 2010 she won the Prešeren Fund Award, the highest recognition for achievements in the field of art in the Republic of Slovenia.
The stage represents a bright reflection where one confronts one’s own double, a wild place of transformations and recognitions. It is like a pond in which Narcissus sees himself, and like the deep forest in which the voice of Echo is lost in resonance. The performance Mezzanino by Maja Delak remains in the space between wilderness and discipline, ancient mythology and realism, individuality and blending, birth and death, love and pain. The narrator of stories, who breaks and catches the rhythms of the dancers, represents the soundscape of the performance, generating different real and abstract landscapes, while the stage on which the dancers live becomes an infinite mirror, observing more than reflecting.