A warm welcome on behalf of the members of the Committee for the Ksenija Hribar Award granted this year by the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia for the second time. Ksenija Hribar Awards are aimed to promote the development of contemporary dance arts, to motivate the talented artists and to acknowledge lifetime achievements of the individuals whose artistic, educational and theoretic accomplishments left a mark in the local milieu. With the exception of the lifetime achievement award, the awards in all other categories acknowledge the accomplishments in the field of contemporary dance over the last two years. This year, they will be granted in eight categories: lifetime achievement, choreography-author, dancing-performing, light design, sound design, criticism/theory/dramaturgy, production and teaching.
A huge number of performances produced in 2013 and 2014 made the work of the Committee members Pia Brezavšček, Blaž Lukan and Sabina Potočki quite difficult. There were a total of 29 applications, further to which the Committee members exercised our right to complement these applications with our own proposals. Thus we additionally reviewed 35 performances applied to this year’s Gibanica as well as recognised creativity of some individuals outside both application categories. Our work was anything but easy but it was even more difficult to select only three award-winners directly related to the field of choreography and dance. Whether 13 awards granted in 2013 were too many or about half of them awarded by the Association this year is not enough is a question to be reflected upon after the festival. Any award is like a living organism; it is born, it grows up and also changes. Ksenija Hribar Award is practically a new-born and no doubt the Association granting the award will find a proper “measure” in the future.
Our wish as the Committee members is that the only award for the achievements in the field of contemporary dance will find its home on this precious and heterogeneous art scene which hardly has any right of domicile in Slovenia, and that Ksenija Hribar Award will serve to bring the scene together rather than divide it. But above all we wish that even larger number of substantiated applications from most diverse fields of art would be submitted in the future.
On behalf of our three-member Committee I would like to thank the Association’s President Teja Reba to have honoured us with the selection of this year’s award-winners and for her help. Let me say that we gladly did our work and we did it to the best of our abilities bearing in mind also the pioneer of Slovenian contemporary dance the award is named after. As a Committee member who co-founded the Dance Theatre Ljubljana with Ksenija Hribar and worked with her until her premature death, I would like to sincerely thank Rok Vevar, the entire staff of Gibanica Festival and all the participants of the panel on Ksenija Hribar. Jointly and with a lot of goodwill they organised not very extensive but invaluable accompanying programme dedicated to the life and work of our too often neglected and ignored great name of the contemporary dance. With Ksenija Hribar in mind, thank you for your attention and let me now give the floor to Vito and Uroš to disclose the names of this year’s award-winners.