Baltic Dance Platform 2022: Very Good Minutes

“Very Good Minutes” is a performance by two couples, movement artists Elīna Gediņa and Rūdolfs Gediņš who worked together with visual artists Krista Dzudzilo and Reinis Dzudzilo. They created this work thinking about the third couple – the legendary Latvian avant-garde theatre director Asja Lācis and German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. This performance, referring to Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, arises from the conversation between movement art and visual art. Both couples are deeply convinced that these art forms complement each other and are able to form a strong wholeness. The production is intended as a bodily conversation without words between a woman and a man. They are both trapped in their relationship as in the red cube, which marks the inevitable coexistence of two people and is full of play, absurdity, misunderstanding, anger, joy, sexuality, winter and summer.

Elīna Gediņa graduated from the Department of Contemporary Dance Choreography of the Latvian Academy of Culture in 2011. She works as an independent movement artist both creating contemporary dance performances and collaborating with local and foreign artists. Gediņa works as a movement director and performer for theatre performances, operas, concerts and cinema. In 2020, she received Latvian Theatre Award Spēlmaņu nakts in the category Movement Artist of the Year.

Rūdolfs Gediņš is an independent dance and theatre artist with a bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Dance Choreography and a master’s degree in Theatre Directing. Since 2020, Rūdolfs has been a member of theatre troupe KVADRIFRONS. His work consists of movement directing in collaboration with different theatre, opera, film and music artists from Latvia and abroad, as well as creating and performing in contemporary dance projects.

Krista Dzudzilo and Reinis Dzudzilo are a married couple and creative tandem who work in visual arts, theater and opera. Conversation is an essential part of their work, both between themselves and between the work and the viewer. Their work tends to be monumental, thus expanding the work of art as a cut-off in time and space. They have both graduated from the Latvian Academy of Arts, Krista from the Department of Visual Communication, Reinis from the Department of Scenography. They have received the Prague Scenography and Theatre Architecture Quadrennial 2019 Award, Latvian Theatre Award Spēlmaņu nakts, the Design of the Year Award, the Latvian Academy of Arts Award, the Purvītis Award 2021 final and the Grand Music Award 2020 for concert performance.