Tjaša Platovšek - Lady magazine 13.9.2023

With the new children's fairy tale, you help shelters and abandoned animals. Where did this idea to cooperate and help animals come from?
It's true, the new dancing fairy tale "Think about us!" is related to animals, just like our previous dance fairy tales, except that this time we donate the proceeds from the sold tickets to the Shelter for abandoned small animals in Ljubljana. A few weeks before the premiere, which we had on 5/23/2023, in the Postojna Cultural Center, we visited them and they took us around the premises of the shelter, which are very nice and clean, and explained to us what they do. They take their work very seriously and convinced us that we decided to buy dog and cat food and deliver it to them after each performance of this fairy tale. The idea actually came spontaneously, Albert gave it to me and I thought it was great, so we started working very quickly - he looked for suitable music, I wrote the text and composed the choreography and we started rehearsals with the dancers. We are proud that this year we will go to Brussels with this dance fairy tale and perform it first at the Slovenian embassy, and then at EEB1 - a European school where Slovenian children are also educated.
You are a big animal lover yourself or what do they mean to you?
Yes, animals have a special place in my heart, we always had dogs at home. Animals seem to me to be very special creatures that respect nature and each other more than humans. I admire them and sometimes joke that in my next life I will be a bee or a tree - well, in the previous fairy tale the dancer Sara Brčvak was a bee, but I may still be a tree, in the previous fairy tale I was an ant, in this new fairy tale I am a rabbit.
Precisely because of the respect and admiration for animals, we want to remind people, especially children, about what is important in life - friendship, cooperation, help, compassion, relationship with nature in dance fairy tales... In the new dance fairy tale, we talk about the fact that animals they are afraid of firecrackers and that people should not use them. It seems to us that we can teach children many things with the help of stories and animal characters. Children are also the ones who believe, accept, understand and hopefully influence the prevention of actions that harm animals. In the previous fairy tale Hug the Tree, it almost always happened to us that they participated with their comments during the action (Oh, but the hedgehog died...) and we know that children love fairy tales and animals - at the end some of them come on stage also take pictures with the animals they like.
What kind of animal keeps you company at home? Or have you ever adopted a puppy or kitten or perhaps thought about it?
At home, our dog Neva, who is already an older dog lady (soon to be fourteen), is currently wandering around the lakes with us, where we are looking for shade. She is an extremely friendly dog that we all adore, so it will be hard for us to say goodbye. I probably have the most photos of her on my phone. I was also thinking about adoption, but there are few puppies like ours - jack russel - but maybe sometime in the future such an opportunity will come. It would be nice if all those puppies and kittens in the shelters would get a warm and friendly home, so people should visit the shelters sometime when they have an open house or look at the photos and descriptions of the abandoned animals on their websites pages. Even animals are sentient beings!
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