Ballet triptych
“Prayers of my Body”

Idea for Project and Costume Designer: Aleksandar Noshpal
Playwright: Sonja Zdravkova-Dzeparoska
Choreographers: Ivana Kocevska, Andrijana Danchevska, Sasha Evtimova
Composers: Daria Andovska, Aleksandar Grozdanovski, Aleksandar Pejovski
Set designer: Mihajlo Stojanovski
Visual Artist: Florijan Changa (R. Albania)
Film Montage: Dorijan Milovanovikj
Multimedia and Graphic Design: Laze Tripkov
Poetic reading: Nikola Ristanovski
Assistant Costume Designer: Angela Bogeska
Lighting: Yakup Yakup, Nino Mitevski, Pero Marachkov

PRAYERS OF MY BODY
ballet show (triptych) inspired by the poetry cycle of the same name by Aco Shopov, on the occasion 100 years since the poet’s birth

CYCLE – BIRTH (NATIVITAS)
Act One: Choreographer: Ivana Kocevska, Composer: Darija Andovska

CYCLE – WEAVE
Act Two: Choreographer: Adrijana Danchevska, Composer: Aleksandar Grozdanovski

CYCLE – ASCENSION (IN PERPETUUM)
Act Three: Choreography: Sasha Evtimova, Composter: Aleksandar Pejovski,composer: Aleksandar Pejovski, Performed by conductor Sasho Tatarchevski with the Women’s Youth Choir at MKC, soloist: Katerina Grkovska (soprano), organ: Janinka Nevcheva, harp: Sarah Mejs, piano, string orchestra and tape. Sound recorder: Alen Hadjistefanov. Music from the album FIROM Requiem was used.)

Assistant of Choreography: Ksenija Sindzikj (R. Montenegro)

Performing: Soloists and Corps de Ballet

PRAYERS OF MY BODY
Ballet triptych

The creation of a dramatic preposition for Shopov’s poetry was an ectatic interplay of meaning, state, emotion, nuance, aroma, and color… It’s an intoxicating process of probing the deepest chimeras of his poetic expression, but additionally looked at through the lens of the structured matrix of stage work. Starting from the discourse of performative dance, the idea was to accomplish a translation and conversion of the written word into movement.

The show is founded on twelve poems by Aco Shopov, eleven from the cycle Prayers of my Body and the poem Birth of the Word, which fit rather naturally into the cycle of poems. Shopov’s poems are powerful, but subsequently intimate stories painted over into a new, different medium. The poet frames the body in his own poetic interest, but the body is, on the other hand, a tool, a sign in the art of dance. Because of this unification of Shopov’s word and the idea of the body as his originating inspirational paradigm, using dance as a language gave way to a natural and relatively organic transition. The show aims to create a performative alchemy, a symbiosis of expression, a contemporary synchronicity.
For the show’s needs, the poems are structured into a triptych, from which each part contains four poems tied in a thematically-functional frame. The three thematic cycles are connected through a thread that ties each cycle’s poems’ subject matter, each one emerging through their respective names: birth, weave, and ascension. The suggested grouping is not only structured to reflect an appropriate mathematical division for each cycle, but more-so to produce contextual sense, which results in an excellent functionality of the poems as separate subsections. The three layers have their own marks and thematic fullness. Each of them has its own fluctuation, from an introduction to its own sense of culmination and resolution, which leads once again to the emergence of a new exaltation in the coming of the next cycle.
The strength of Shopov’s poetry as a playwright forced me to do one unorthodox intervention relating to the verbal component, that is the decision to include the spoken segments of his poetry and to integrate them into the music, scenes, or to present them as a letter present in the scene’s design; a decision which lended the performance a unique quality of its own.

Sonja Zdravkova-Dzeparoska