BIO

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Alise Madara Bokaldere is a Latvian dancer / choreographer.  She works very closely with the details and nuanced movement in her creations, focusing on performance presence, movement quality, and concept. She graduated from The Latvian Academy of Culture in 2018, with a BA in The Art of Contemporary Dance. She was nominated for the Latvian Dance Awards 2018/2019 and the Estonian Theatre awards 2020.
 

Bokaldere has worked both in Latvia and abroad, collaborating with people and venues like Jorge Crecis (ES, choreographer), Jason Dupree (UK, Circus director), and Kanuti Gildi Saal (EST, theater venue). She worked as a part of an Estonian experimental performance collective called "The Biofilm Sisters" and is currently working with Estonian contemporary circus company "Big Wolf Company".
She is part of the collective "Art for rainy days" which merges contemporary dance and contemporary circus.

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WORDS FROM MY COLLABORATORS:

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Alise creates simple aesthetic performances underscored by the complexity of the human condition. Her minimalism doesn't start and end with her physical approach but transcends into all the areas of her artistry, encompassing every aspect of her creations. This allows the work to feel like a giant whispering in your ear.

 

Her attention to the most nuanced allows the audience to fall into the space that she creates, giving you time to attend to the dripping of water or the crease in the trousers of a performer. And with that space, it affords the time to reflect in the present, on your own being.

 

Her work is incredibly moving. The silence of her work holds the same beauty as that of finding commonalities in a stranger's eyes or the tragedy of loneliness in an empty room.

 

Alise's touch in creations is always light and thoroughly thought out, not overcomplicated. She allows the work to speak. Not through dramaturgical narrative, but through the individual experiencing her work.

Alise's natural gravitation is towards divine beauty: simple things done well to create powerful images. Her work is no frills, refined and raw. You get the sense that, were you to ask her, she could explain every choice down to the finest detail.

She is very much at home in the metaphysical & conceptual. As part of her process, she enjoys just as much the lengthy discussions about the minutiae of her subject as the physical creation of it. Crucial for Alise is that the work has to mean something to her, it has to be deeply felt, researched in depth, and performed with an almost religious commitment.