With over thirty years of experience as a choreographer, performer, dance film director, teacher & mentor, platform organizer and dance facilitator, Andrea Boll (Switzerland) operates at the intersection of dance, film and society. Her work combines artistic precision with embodied research, creating spaces of resonance between movement, image, inner experience, and audiences. She runs a company under the name bollwerk and a dance film festival in Zurich, DANCE ON SCREEN.
This time, the Ljubljanica River transforms into a stage for testing limits, collective endurance, and a physical dialogue with natural forces. In Downriver, the dancers of En–Knap, together with the audience as companions, set off along the current. Their journey is both a physical challenge and a sensory experience, alternating between resistance and surrender, strength and vulnerability. The Ljubljanica becomes the stage, the river the choreographer, and the path unfolds according to the group’s experience and the space. Water, a symbol of life and a mysterious force in many cultures—Leonardo da Vinci called it “the blood of the planet”—is in Downriver experienced by the audience as an element that both cleanses and tests.
The audience is invited to become part of this struggle: step by step, breath by breath, feeling the power of the group resisting the current while also discovering the moment when an individual yields and allows themselves to be carried away. In this act of surrender lie fear and vulnerability, but also an unusual, liberating release.
The performance is part of the DOWNHILL DOWNRIVER DOWNTOWN trilogy and takes place outdoors, in dialogue with the city and its natural corners.