On the idea, concept and initiative of Giorgi Aleksidze Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet Artistic Director, Choreographer Mariam Aleksidze and Company Director, Tbilisi State University Professor David Maziashvili and with the support from the Embassy of Israel, Giorgi Aleksidze Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet implemented the project “Mariam meets Miriam”.
Within the framework of the project Israeli Choreographer, Dancer and Performing artist Miriam Engel conducted creative workshop for the company dancers. On June 11, at the Silk Theatre, in accordance of Prof. David Maziashvili’s concept Giorgi Aleksidze Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet presents an evening of two outstanding works of Mono Contemporary Choreography Mariam Aleksidze’s Marijan and Miriam Engel’s Zazel.
M A R I J A N - Mariam Aleksidze animates on stage the diaries of one of the first professional female Georgian poets, Marijan – Mariam Tkemaladze-Aleksidze. Mariam Aleksidze’s original video performance “Marijan’s Room” was staged in 2020 at Marijan’s historical flat in Sololaki, presenting a mono-choreographic performance to the viewers remotely at the time when artistic processes were suspended throughout the world. Mariam Aleksidze worked on the concept, artistic ideas and text together with David Maziashvili.
The text written by Marijan in 1925 is full of her personal emotions: these thoughts, truly intimate on the one hand, are also universal and very topical today.
Z A Z E L - Shot from a Gun – The true story of Rosa Matilda Richter, an acrobat in a traveling circus who every evening was ejected from the mouth of a cannon.
1877, Rosa Matilda, a young circus performer meets 'Farrini the Great', a shrewd producer and businessman who invented an innovative machine for shooting objects and people in the air, and even patented it. Very quickly she becomes a big star - Zazel - the human projectile and performs the dangerous stunt around the world.
Choreographer Miriam Engel, in collaboration with the music composer Yigal Myrtenbaum in an immersive piece that unfolds the story of Zazel, from the fateful meeting with Farini to the moment of launch, to the bittersweet end.
A musical dance piece on the seam between sanity and insanity, between the private and the public, between control and the illusion beside it. Zazel is the hero and the victim, the maiden and death, the act and the bystander, in a gradually building process of accumulation and vigilance until the climax, to the cannon shot, the work formulates a new contract with the audience that invites us to observe and realize that maybe we are all Zazel.