Matija Ferlin

In 2004, Matija Ferlin launched a long-term project titled Sad Sam. This series of pieces creates a tension between the Croatian expression “now I am” and the psychological colour of an auto-fictional character, implied by the Englishness of this title. This attention to the present moment, the driving force of Ferlin’s writing, has been expressed in multiple variations: Sad Sam Revisited (2004/06), Sad Sam Almost 6 (2009) or else Sad Sam Lucky (2012). Pursuing his collaboration with the writer Goran Fercec, for this new episode, the choreographer has taken on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. In the form of a solo, he grapples with this monumental oratorio and invests it as a landscape formed by the sediments of lived experience. Ferlin sets out to explore the relationships between choreography, speech, intimate narrative, dogma and physical performance, which deal with suffering and endurance, transcending the limitations between the probable and the impossible, the rational and the intuitive.

Matija Ferlin studied at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam before moving to Berlin. On returning to his native town, Pula, in Croatia, he developed explorations at the crossroads between performance, video, exhibition and design, and has worked with numerous stage directors and visual artists. His pieces have been presented at a large number of festivals, such as Ex-Yu in New York, Rhubarb in Toronto, the Contemporary Dance Festival of Bogotá, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales in Seine Saint Denis, or Impulstanz. Sad Sam Matthäus is to be premiered at the Wiener Festwochen 2021.