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.
Spread Your Wings is a performance of surprises. Its unpredictable originality surpasses everything we have seen on our dance and dance-and-theater scene, while its methodology of craft, and the seeming dramaturgic looseness and confusion interfere with the essence of choreography as such. What are the blessings for which I find this performance so important? The first is to be revealed on the most general level: attention is turned to the dancer (performer in Kovač's terminology) rather than to the superior authority – choreographer. In terms of representation, it signifies confrontations, and moments of collision between the process of creating conceptual order and the planned, continual destruction of this order by means of improvisation, and between the closed and codified parts of the performance and the open ones, where coincidence enters the game, It is exactly in the structuring of oppositions such as order and chaos, movement and rest, tension and relaxation and their bodily forms – collective and individual principles, that the purity of both montage and dramaturgy of the performance is hidden.