»Dancer, choreographer, curator, and activist Teja Reba started to create her hybrid performative choreographies during a period of financial crisis in the Republic of Slovenia. In contrast with the previous generations of choreographers who would mostly engage with (modern) dance composition or experimental approaches to dance in the relatively stable or developing circumstances, Reba’s generation confronted unstable working conditions in the eroding cultural system. The dance labour turned into a problematic ideological matter and a committed topic to work with. Her uninhibited and energized engagement with problems of gender trainings connected to the different social constraints, female stereotypes and myths, ideological abuse and penetrations into private life from the perspective of labour are elaborated in the work Made with Love (Delo iz ljubezni) in which she brings onto the stage different performative means and strategies along with her own family. In Made with Love Reba, on the basis of a precise score, arranges the gradual deterioration of composed orders and symbolic structures and set scenes into the ‘performative destabilization’ and ‘affective power.’ Reba’s work has developed as a to challenge social roles and ideological mechanisms controlling the visible and invisible female labour with the currency of love and passion and had no inhibitions in declaring it as feminist.«
From Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik (ed.), Bodies ofm Dance, Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Belgrade, 2024)
