Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik: Cage Open: A Truck Passing by a Music School

The dance performance Cage Open: A Truck Passing by a Music School (2025) by Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik filled every seat at Stara mestna elektrarna when it premiered at CoFestival 2025. The excitement was so palpable that it seemed as though electricity might once again begin to flow through the historic industrial building of the former power station. Bringing together a large ensemble of outstanding artists, unusual instruments and international guests, the performance is not easily restaged. This October, it returns for its first revival.

This co-production by Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia (CoFestival, 2025), DUM – Artists’ Association and the UHO Association / Forum of New Music brings together exceptional dance and music artists who recreate, with remarkable precision, the playful, idiosyncratic and magical avant-garde world of American composer John Cage (1912–1992), while responding to it through contemporary choreographic imagination and skill. Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik have carefully selected compositions from the extensive oeuvre of one of the most celebrated American composers of the twentieth century. The members of the Forum of New Music Ensemble perform them with meticulous attention to Cage’s unconventional uses of musical instruments, combined with considerable interpretative imagination.

The encounter between live music and the choreographic inventiveness of exceptional dance improvisers offers a rare opportunity to imagine, together with the performers, how an artistic event might bring different avant-garde approaches to music and dance into an exciting and inventive dialogue today—with something of the same sense of discovery and exhilaration that animated such encounters in New York and elsewhere around the world in the 1960s.

For additional information about the performance, see: https://cofestival.si/2025/andreja-rauch-podrzavnik-milan-tomasik/

Music: John Cage: Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Variations III, In a Landscape, Two6, Perpetual Tango, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, Music for Marcel Duchamp
Project concept: Rok Vevar, Jasmina Založnik
Choreographic direction: Milan Tomášik, Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Created and performed by: Bojana Robinson, Martin Kilvády, Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik
Members of the Forum of New Music Ensemble: Nina Prešiček (piano), Deyan Muc (violin), Urška Rihtaršič (harp), Alenka Jezernik (percussion), Jože Bogolin (percussion), Peter Jeretina (percussion), Klemen Juvančič (percussion), Rok Zalokar (electronics)
Music selection: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik
Lighting design: Borut Bučinel
Spatial design: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik, Milan Tomášik and Borut Bučinel
Video: Darko Sintič
Video editing: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Photo: Urška Boljkovac
Executive production: Mojca Prešern Levstek, UHO Association

Production: DUM – Artists’ Association
Co-production: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, DUM Association, UHO Association (Forum of New Music) and Kino Šiška (CoFestival)
Organisation of the revival: NDA Slovenia, DUM – Artists’ Association and UHO Association, in collaboration with Bunker and Kino Šiška
Post-production supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and City of Ljubljana