Tomáš Danielis, Marek Godovič / Radical Empathy: CUSTOM VIEW
“Custom view”, an assisted solo by Tomáš Danielis and Marek Godovic, is a contemplation of how people make decisions and look at the world through the prism of Danielis’ own life. By questioning interpretations of reality, issues of freedom, perception of relationships, and even basic human behaviour itself in (not so) different cultures this work poetically examines the society in which we live together. Based on Danielis’ life and career as a pretext and life Godovič’s dramaturgy presents a mixture of different dance languages and virtuosity squared off by sociology and Wittgenstein’s philosophy on stage.
“Custom View is an honest statement and summing-up of a mature dancer and choreographer Tomáš Danielis, who has worked for more than twenty years in diverse artistic and cultural environments. This gives him a mandate to compare and evaluate, yet he goes beyond mere naming of the positives and negatives. Danielis’ performance offers us, through the balanced presence of text and movement, a glimpse into the intimate space of his own work and life, at times indulgent, at others dramatically precise and ironic. He contextualizes the vocation of the artist in our society, raising many fundamental questions about the meaning and necessity of art itself.”
(Petra Fornayová)
Performing: Tomáš Danielis, Marek Godovič
Dance, text, light design: Tomáš Danielis
Life dramaturgy, text, stage manipulation: Marek Godovič
Music: Vladimír Godár, Anthony Rouchier, Ľubomír Panák, Gioachino Rossini, David Bowie, Pat Metheny
Assitent: Soňa Kúdeľová
Graphic design: Matej Lacko
Production: Biela Noc / White Nights, Zuzana Pacakova, Veronika Malgot
Tomas Danielis, choreographer and media artist is known for creating artworks founded on the totality of perception, aiming at integral arts. His choreography engages in a type of dramaturgy overruling the primacy of music and libretto in dance, engaging instead with sociological works on stage. After working on the mechanics of power, he founded the collective Radical Empathy in 2021, where, along with his colleagues, he explores empathy, the fundamentals of human perception and interaction, and their impact on creation sociological structures. His work is characterized by a high intensity of movement expressiveness, a defined intellectual concept, and uncompromising dramaturgical stylization. His choreography is composed of extraordinary images, expressed in a rich physical language and complemented by spare poignant and often ironically funny texts, making it as comprehensible as music, sculpture, painting, or architecture. Danielis´s works have been presented in over 20 countries across three continents. His most notable creations include Custom View, Faidrós, 21&Counting, Mainly Love and Carry. In 2016 and 2017, Danielis served as the head teacher and resident choreographer of Ballet Moskva, where he created performance Equilibrium, based on game theory research, as a part of a series exploring mechanics of power, with a particular focus on abuse of power. From 2007 to 2009, he was the artistic director of International Bühnenwerkstatt Tanztheater Festival Graz. His teaching engagements have taken him to Charleroi Dans, Henny Jurriens Amsterdam, NRW Düsseldorf, CODARTS,TQW Wien, Hot Summer Kyoto, Dansehallerne Copenhagen, Bora Bora Arhus, Ballet Moscow, Danceworx New Delhi, Tsekh, Ukrainian Contemporary Dance Platform, International Bühnenwerkstatt Tanztheater Festival, Anton Bruckner University Linz. Tomáš Danielis has received numerous awards for performing arts and choreography, including the 2007 Contest – TanzRat Wien, a special prize for choreography and performing arts at the 2007 Theatre Arts Festival in Rybnik. As a performer, he was part of the Reumert Award-winning productions Men and Mahler (2013) and Rite of Spring – Extended (2014) as a member of Danish ensemble Granhøj Dans.
Radical Empathy is an art group created in Autumn 2021 by Tomáš Danielis as a reaction to contemporary events. Its main goal is to support creating and distributing contemporary art pieces as sociological probes. Radical Empathy focuses primarily on creating performative art (dance and stand-up), original texts (mainly for performing arts), photography and media work. It does that without geographical restriction, but with (critical to) the European region and events in mind. The first art pieces created by the group had been Mainly Love inter-media performance (Nuit Blanche Festival, 2021), Custom View (Moyzes Hall Bratislava, 2022), followed by the photographic exhibition Entelechiea (Arteska Detva, 2022). People, whom participated on this 2 events are Tomáš Danielis, Marek Godovič, Soňa Kúdeľová, Zuzana Husárová, Lenka Sršnová Ľubomír Panák, Anthony Rouchier, Samuel Velebný (as curator of exhibition). In their work together they used, re-used and recycled besides documentary materials also works of David Bowie, Pat Matheny, Vladimír Godár, Gioachino Rossini and others.