Coproductions

My colleague and I have been collaborating with the members of the Pokretnica collective for twelve years. Over the years, this collaboration has taken various forms, culminating in 2024 with their invitation to co-create a performance in Novi Sad. We then returned the invitation: let's conceive and create a performance together! And we asked ourselves whether, and in what way, this invitation would change the working and personal relationships between us.

Here the desert takes on multiple meanings: it evokes abandoned dreams and political drought while at the same time retaining the potential for change, caring and regeneration. Inspired by hydro-feminism, speculative fiction and ecological thinking, the piece explores processes of withdrawal, voiding, extraction and emaciation – physically, ecologically and biographically.

The work Cage Open was created in collaboration between the New Music Forum and CoFestival, International Festival of Contemporary Dance. The two festivals have a shared interest in artistic creativity. In the twentieth century, this creativity was driven by the imperative of innovation through avant-garde and modernist artistic aspirations. We decided to join forces for a combined festival day since they take place in the same November slot.

In 2017, Mateja Bučar presented a work titled *Pol-na-črta* (Dashed Line) at Cankarjev dom; in Slovenian, this title can be read phonetically either as a road sign or as a partial plan. This marriage of playful humor and refined choreographic challenges, which Mateja Bučar typically tackles, is her signature style.

Like rhymes with “NON,” this performance-essay explores representations of non-alignment and non-aligned choreography. Ana Dubljević (Serbia), Viktorija Ilioska (Macedonia), Dražen Dragojević (Slovenia), and Sonja Pregrad (Croatia) have been collaborating for the past two years on the modular choreographic-research project NAM ChoreoLab, which addresses the historical and personal legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The artists view the body and its physical transcript as a medium for transmitting information. They are interested in how the body’s perception of data influences the development of movement potentials. Despite their complete physical dedication, they are merely information and concern themselves with nothing other than information itself—not trivial information that can be calculated, but information about form or existence.

In the performance *Blue Moon Spring*, three dancers embark on a personal journey, listening to and moving to jazz music. They approach jazz as a philosophy rather than merely a genre. Dance becomes an ongoing conversation. The performers use agreed-upon frameworks as a springboard for movements, deviations, and wild ideas. They practice opening themselves up to the unique vibrations of each moment and create an improvised dance that we explore together with them.

Mapping is the process of observing the city as a performance. The observer is invited to translate the everyday movements, sounds, conversations, and objects in the city into fiction; the city streets become a stage set, and everyday movements become a choreography. Thus, every observed event becomes a story of a specific point in the city at a precisely measured moment in time. This is a way of appropriating the city, which is always there where you are not.

The depletion of natural resources in our necrocapitalist present coincides with the need to optimize exhausted bodies, which belong to the same paradigm of production. Viktorija Ilioska explores this contradiction through choreographic acts in which the body is simultaneously a natural resource and an object of bodily optimization.

The performance VENUS: Between Captivity and Flight is based on Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, which depicts the moment of her emergence from the sea foam. The Birth of Venus occurs as a cut that separates heaven and earth, thereby creating an intermediate space in which creation is constantly coming into being. For without a cut, there is neither gaze nor creation. Only inertia.

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed numerous revivals, reconstructions, and historical stage studies of repertoires from different phases of contemporary dance. Some were staged by the original authors themselves, others by artists who felt addressed or inspired by the works in various ways.

How does music move us, and by what means can I translate the state of being moved (to move, to be moved) into a specific performative language? Dance, after all, has the ability to reveal what is incomprehensible in music—what “moves” us from somewhere within—while also possessing the advantage of being human and tangible. Music, on the other hand, is what introduces a delay into immediacy—or has the ability to prolong, to stretch a moment into an event.

Physical Manifestations is an exploratory contemporary dance project that the author has been developing with various collaborators since 2012. Using a kinesthetic-dance system (based on the principles of “body-mind centering”), it focuses on the study of choreographic situations, observation, reflection (with various audiences, artists, and experts), and the generating of specific scores and performance formats that best suit each individual segment of the research. Together with her collaborators, she introduces a reflection on corporeality into personal, social, and public spaces.

Choreographer and dance artist Andreja Podrzavnik, recipient of the Ksenija Hribar Award 2021 and the Zupančič Award for choreographic achievements for the years 2019-2021, deals in her choreographies with the ways in which the body and dance confront different aspects of time. Monday at Eight, Lastings – Passings, What Stays, Heritage, Formation, Time Body Trio, Tuesday, Melodies of Beginnings – the very titles of her choreographies are replete with forms or markers of time, which in her works is never the condensed time that classical theatre observes at its dramatic endings, but a landscape time that always moves backwards towards the future, by looking back towards its expansive beginnings.

dragON aka PONY is a choreographic work that presents a stage saturated with numerous dance references from the past and present, drawing from both Western and Eastern Europe to create a space of constant transition, revealing intimacy, and highlighting humble coexistence. Within the framework of contemporary pop culture, the work revives geometric choreography through the prism of classicism and the use of folklore as a ritual form. dragON aka PONY has a touch of Isadora and many elements from MTV or VH1 television programs.

NATURE is an ongoing dance project in which we explore movement in dialogue and the ways of seeing and being seen. NATURE raises questions about the function of art and live performance today, within the social and political environment in which we live, and asks, “Can we view dance as we view nature; can we situate ourselves within the environment of dance as we situate ourselves within nature?”

The creators base the performance on how these media use space, on the material resources of the movements characteristic of them (sound and body), what specific locations in physical space mean to them, and how their complementarity can be conceived. The use of space and the body allows them to first mark the locations of materials using various technologies and then gradually transform them into an artistic object in which choreographic and sound media are no longer distinguishable.

Sixteen years after the premiere of the hit dance production 1:0, a selection of dancers from the original Fičo Ballet cast decided to embark on a dance, soccer, and personal journey of self-reflection to see just how flexible their bodies still are and whether, after all this time, they are still capable of mounting a proper dance-soccer attack.

In 2001, visual artist Mariola Groener and dancer Günther Wilhelm joined forces to form the artistic duo WILHELM GROENER, which is characterized by interdisciplinary exploration and has created a diverse opus of performances and choreography comprising stage productions, site-specific artworks, lectures, and exhibitions. In their practice, Mariola and Günther are primarily interested in the structural difference that characterizes movement, and the interplay between the visible and the invisible, between the known and the unknown, that is, between established knowledge and potentially new knowledge and insight.

Lunch is a research and development project that explores the integration of voice, breath, movement, imagination, and storytelling into the performance act. In collaboration with invited artists, Torvald Silver and Tehvan Ratsanik—who also conceived the project in 2008—are training within it.