Ján Ďurovčík

In his line of work, Ján Ďurovčík belongs among the most experienced Slovak artists. Ján studied choreography at the University of Performing Arts in Bratislava and at the Institute of Dance in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1991, Ján won a Czech and Slovak choreography contest; in 1994, he went through to the finals of the Prix Volinine Paris contest, and was awarded with several special prizes from the Slovak Fund for Literature and Drama.

Ján Ďurovčík was engaged as a soloist at Dansetheatre Amsterdam and he taught modern dance at the International Dance Stage in Belgium. As early as at the age of twenty-two, he founded “Balet Torzo”, a twelve-member professional ensemble of modern dance. In 1991, Ján presented his first full-length work entitled Responsio Mortifera in which he engaged this very ensemble. At twenty-four, he began his cooperation with the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. In the course of several theatrical seasons, he staged, among other projects, the choreography for the full-length ballets From Fairy Tale to Fairy Tale, Celebrating the Spring, Rasputin, and Spartacus. In 1997, he co-founded and became the artistic director of BDT and, for this very troupe, he created the following performances: Marriages, The Firebird, the musical for children Janko Hraško and a multimedia project Romeo and Juliet. In 1999, as a screenwriter, choreographer and stage director, he presented a production entitled The Tree, together with the SĽUK troupe that earned him the Crystal Wing award in the category of Drama and Film. In 2000, Ján Ďurovčík founded the theatrical-and-dance ensemble JAN and created an authorship programme for it entitled …Your Graves. He toured the whole of Slovakia with this performance, which – too – was presented at the World Financial Center in New York. In 2000–2002, Ján cooperated as choreographer on the musicals Some Like It Hot, Hamlet, A Ballad about a Horse Thief or Gipsies go to Heaven, and Fools Cage, for the Nová scéna theatre in Bratislava. He also produced choreography for the musical Zorbas the Greek for Divadlo A. Bagára theatre in Nitra.

Ján Ďurovčík has also prepared dozens of ballet, opera and musical choreographies and stage directions for the SĽUK ensemble, the East-Slovak National Theatre in Košice, the National Theatre in Brno, the Prague State Opera, the Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, and Šalda Theatre in Liberec, where, too, he produced the extremely successful musicals Painted on Glass and the Czech version of The Full Monty. He has also authored the choreography and direction of the Prague version of the musical Grease (produced by Goja Musichall) that had two hundred repetitions. For the Slovak Dance Theatre, founded by him, he prepared a dramatic-dance project named Bolero in 2005. Ján often cooperates with both Slovak and Czech Televisions. The most visible turning point in Ján Ďurovčík’s professional career was the first night of his authorship project The Firebird staged at the Tokyo National Theatre in January 2004.