Tibur Trulik
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Tibor Trulik’s dancing career began to take shape in his hometown Bytča, where he studied dance at the Primary Art School under the guidance of dance pedagogues Marta Bušfyová and Mária Zagatová. Besides dance, he also completed the Secondary School of Construction and Industry in Žilina. Later, he graduated from the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, where he received a master’s degree in social pedagogy.

Trulik has worked for the Dance Studio Theatre in Banská Bystrica since 2004; at the Studio, he has collaborated with many eminent personalities, including Zuzana Hájková, Tomáš Nepšinský, Daniel Raček, Tomáš Krivošík, Stanislava Vlčeková, Pierre Nadau, Milan Tomášik, Anton Lachký, Peter Mika, Jozef Fruček, Stanislav Dobák, Andrej Petrovič, Katarína Zagorski, Miloš Galko, Tomáš Danielis, Julyen Hamilton, Zuna Kozánková, Lívia Mendez Balážová, Sebastián Mendez Maligna, Jakub Nvota, Jozef Vlk, and Michal Náhlik. Since 2005, he has led regular dance courses for children and adults, dance workshops for people with special needs, as well as training courses for the dance ensemble of the Dance Studio. He has taught at the Art School in Brezno, the Lavuta Art School, led courses of the Dance Studio, and worked as a dance pedagogue at the Private Primary School Fantázia. He was a lecturer at the summer theatre camps in Banská Štiavnica, at the Počúvadlo Lake. At present, he teaches courses for adults at the Dance Studio and still cooperates with the Fantázia school. He extended his education by studying dance pedagogy at the Private Conservatory in Liptovský Hrádok.

Trulik’s stable, interpretationally and creatively intensive work for the Dance Studio Theatre very naturally led him to start his own, devised work. Co-directing with Zuzana Ďuricová Hájková, he created productions with children, for children: Knots (2006), About the Sister Abducted by a Dragon (2008), Trees (2011, renewed premiere 2014), The Shepherdess of Wolves (2017), Neverending Dance (2017), and Pure Joy (2019). He also created the choreography for a music video by the band Longital (2011). Trulik’s solo project Repulsive Home (2012) was presented at the festival of contemporary dance Four (+1) Days of Dance for You (2012) and the Arteterapia festival (2012).

Trulik’s first feature choreography was the dance production The Tower of Babel (2013), for which he was awarded the Slovak Literary Fund Prize. In 2015, he staged the successful male duet entitled Androgen – a response to the then intricate political situation affected by nationalist political tendencies in the Banská Bystrica region. His other devised projects include the outdoor production Neverending Dance (2017) and the title Predominantly Good (2017), co-authored with Zuzana Ďuricová Hájková. The production The Right Angle (2018) was created as part of the 3x20 Men project. It was followed by the dance production Elizabeth’s Touch (2022) as an homage to Alžbeta Gwerková Göllnerová.

Trulik is a laureate of the Dance Personality of the Season Award – TAOS (2009).

Already the title of the production The Tower of Babel (2013) alludes to the Old Testament and the myth about a tower built by people to be like their creator. In the production, the dancer and choreographer Tibor Trulik’s movement expressivity and approach communicates such issues as language confusion, the feeling of unbridled freedom that makes anything possible, the fast-paced and violent communication that only touches the surface and essential issues are put aside. The production was aimed at young people who are about to leave high school – an audience for whom the motifs of freedom, anarchy, and punk rock are very relevant because they not only identify with their own uncompromising natures, dynamic personalities, desire for independence, but they also understand the language of movement and dance.

The Tower of Babel created a world on stage that was filled with dynamism, explosiveness, rebellious stubbornness, and eruptive energy bursting to the surface. It was a blunt statement about a generation of people who are unable to compromise, who keep fighting, who attack instead of talking and trying to understand each other. These feelings were further accentuated by the punk music of the band Kvety Nikotínu (The Flowers of Nicotine). The concept of the production was quite clear: the rampant aggressiveness results in destruction, hiding the traits of humility which is not yet visible, but can be sensed.

The dance and movement action was dynamically timed to go along the individual songs, which immediately evoked feelings of revolt, frustration, and the open and direct desire to change the world, or, at least, the people around us. Trulik derived the step and partner variations from the punk pogo dance, and included elements of physical theatre, acrobatics, improvisation, and visual art performance. The dancers create a group, alternate the leaders of initiative, rhythm control, and the dynamics of action. A brick is used as a visual element throughout the production: the dancers carry it, throw it, use it to build a memorial, an object left behind as a relic of the present, of their existence, a things that keeps standing also for the future. By means of building an ever taller monument, they push boundaries, broaden the possibilities, and expand the tolerance between one another into stronger extremes. Trulik and his dancers worked with the motif of being singled out, accepting something foreign, while building relationships that might not always remain intact, but suffer from betrayal and get lost in individualism and the inclination to show off. Gabriela Paschová’s set looked like a desolate industrial warehouse, with bricks all around, tracks of wheels of heavy machinery, graffiti on the walls. It felt industrial, raw, but was ready for theatrical action, conveying the rough feelings. The monument built from bricks – the tower of Babel – was placed in the middle of the empty space to make the impression of mystery and mysticism. As costumes, the dancers wore trainers and clothes featuring punk rock motifs.

The music by Kvety Nikotínu was soaked with nostalgic feelings for punk rock music and became an integral part of the production. The dancers formally fixated this feeling using movement phrases that were coordinated with the tempo and beat of the music. Sounds of the dance action (manipulation with the bricks, falls, jumps) exactly fitted into rhythm of the music.

The Tower of Babel is a production about the flow of energy that can burst out of a person at a moment in time, or at a stage of their life. This energy has no restrictions, makes no compromises. The production by the Dance Studio Theatre was primarily intended for high school students, a generation which has little or no experience with contemporary dance and movement theatre.

Tibor Trulik was a dancer and choreographer in the dance project The Right Angle (2018). In the production, he is the angle seen “only” from above, inspiring the audience to look beyond the regular perspective, encouraging insight without superficial trivialities. Tibor Trulik, using music by Adam Mičinec, reveals the small and ordinary slips into simplistic ordinariness. Trulik’s creative detachment fills the stage and in a dynamic dance opens the door to the secret room, the memory reservoirs containing our failures of opinion, which should have remained forever closed and silenced. In short dance images, the performers reveal seemingly innocuous lapses of judgement, rejecting a lethargic attitude or an inability to raise one’s head and summon a better future by confronting the past.

The physical dance action offers different perspectives on the couple, on the differences and similarities of behaviour and reactions in groups of men and women, including the angles from which the groups view each other. The transformation of the angle subordinated to these changing situations is made clear in the choreography by means of humorous hyperbolization. Trulik uses movement to work with angular forms that appear in individual phrases, in the articulation of space, or even in the creation of a trajectory of movement on stage.

The Dance Studio Theatre also premiered a dance production directed and choreographed by Tibor Trulik entitled Elizabeth’s Touch, followed by the projection of director Anna Grusková’s documentary film Woman of the New Age. These artistic projects share two common elements. The first is the theme that both works deal with, namely, the personality of Alžbeta Göllnerová-Gwerková, a prominent Slovak literary historian, writer and translator of Hungarian fiction. In addition, the work and life story of Alžbeta Gwerková and her partner, the painter Edmund Gwerk, are a testament to a courageous, emancipated and timeless woman with deeply democratic attitudes in a time of growing totalitarianism. Alžbeta took part in the anti-fascist resistance, for which she was executed by the Gestapo.

The other element that connects the two works is the contribution of the dance ensemble of the Dance Studio Theatre to Anna Grusková’s documentary film Woman of the New Age. The dance production Elizabeth’s Touch consists of poetic images capturing fragments of the life of Alžbeta Gwerková and Edmund Gwerk. This helps put on stage the essence of a life story that has yet been only very little known, let alone spoken and written about.

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Tibur Trulik
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