Productions

The dancers and choreographer Jana Jevtović explore the tradition of the Pan-Slavic Sokol movement and its associated events, known as slets – physical movement practices performed at mass gatherings – as an aesthetic practice. Were these events merely a means of consolidating ideology and power, or were they also shaped by specific artistic trends?

In 2022, Dejan Srhoj created An Evening of Dance Solos, a dance puzzle composed of three collaborations and research processes with artists from different media, poetics, and aesthetics. Three years later, An Evening of Dance Solos II comes before the audience. The form, as well as the paradoxes of collaboration, remain similar, yet in the meantime the world has caught fire and humanity has split apart. At the same time – sometimes at insane speed, other times with unbearable slowness – the deepest plunges into the abyss of monstrosity and the most wondrous quantum leaps are taking place. We are all, at this moment, tightrope walkers balanced on the line between an ending and a new beginning.

Seagulls Fly Early is a choreographic performance by dancer and choreographer Bojana Robinson and dancer and choreographer Gyula Cserepes, who explore how migration reshapes the body and identity. United by their personal experiences of growing up during the breakup of Yugoslavia and moving to new environments, the authors use movement and story to evoke memories of transitions between countries, languages, and communities.

An encounter between a dancer and a sound artist who have never met in person. Trusting improvisation, juxtaposition, curiosity, and magic we will explore and nurture the worlds where imagination defeats tyranny.

The artists embark us on their vessel and take us on a journey through a landscape of the visible, the audible, and the sensory, where the experience of watching dance transfers to the viewer’s entire body. Time opens itself in its certainty, and through the dancers’ movement we enter the realm of kairos – a time that exceeds the present moment, that invites surrender and opens our inner images, perceptions, and relationships.

With the proposal OPEN STUDIO, we wanted to draw attention to this problem while also offering colleagues an actual physical space for work in the upper lobby of Kino Šiška, so that during Cofestival they could use it however they needed to: for rehearsals, work-in-progress showings, presentations, conversations… Everyone responded very quickly, and the studio, based on an online sign-up calendar, filled up fast.

The multi-year project MAGIC aims to explore kinesthetic empathy in the field of dance and choreography. The author is interested in what is invisible in dance and inaudible in sound, how we can affirm synaesthesia (the cooperation of all senses) in dance work, and how dance work and theory can actively cooperate. What is dance beyond strictly optical information, what is it that dances within the dancer, and which parts of the spectator watch the dance? The author found a reference point for her work in Susan Foster's book "Choreographing Empathy", and the project is developing in various new directions, ensuring interdisciplinary cooperation with various collaborators.

In June 2022, Deborah Hay initiated a process of exchange and experiential learning with dance artists gathered around the Nimad Dance Academy Slovenia. The process culminated in a performance that premiered in 2023 at the Old Power Station - Elektro Ljubljana.

Three performances, research processes and co-authorial journeys are revealed behind a name that evokes a performance form almost doomed to the past. Their common denominator and common thread is the choreographer and dancer Dejan Srhoj, who has invited artists to collaborate with him who – each from their own medium, poetics and aesthetics – open up new aspects of their own work through their joint research.

The inspiration for the series of diverse events titled Feminist Dance Paths was found in a statement by Franco Berardi Bifo, who says that social solidarity is impossible between bodies existing in a fragmented space and time, in a digitalised and automated space. We wondered how we can build a connection between society and (our) dance work, and which part of our knowledge from the studio and dance theory can be useful for society beyond the stage. Somatic practices, knowledge of the common and of groups, non-verbal communication, the affirmation of process-based work, and sharing resources are all strategies we would like to unfold and look at more closely.

Silver Gold is a project, a process, a space, where several dance generations meet. We share knowledge, experiences, memories and at the same time create shared memories. We deal with questions of time and passing, with what is left, the spectacular in the everyday and the multiplicity of relationships. In April 2021, we started to discuss and plan Silver Gold, and in mid-June we started to meet, first in Tivoli Park, then in the studio. We always organised the rehearsals as guided and open meetings, where everyone could suggest a score, but often we also just let the dance emerge from the meeting itself, from the space itself. On December 13th and 14th, 2021, we held two performances entitled Silver Gold in cooperation with Nova Pošta. Although we were pleased to have completed the first phase of the project with a "tangible" result, we also felt that our work needed different spaces, different organisation of work and different formats for meeting the public. Therefore, we agreed that from January 2022 we would work exclusively in such a way that we do our rehearsals by inviting between one and 15 guests who, if they wish, can get involved in what we create in different ways, so that the boundary between audience and dancers is not always clear and our work draws its inspiration from this fact. The following letters were used as an artist statement for the exhibition of Djordje Balmazović's drawings at Cofestival 2022.

The future is always a projection and therefore speaks more of the present than of the actual future. How to think and imagine the future of dance and choreography and their positioning in the coming socio-political situations? Darko Dragičević and Jasmina Založnik, in an interdisciplinary approach (to the choreography of the body, music and sound, narrative and light), take the viewer for a stroll into a futuristic imaginary landscape, mapping it in three time periods and folding it into three performance strands. In doing so, they play with the idea of possible mutations and morphologies of the Anthropocene, raise the question of ecology, changes in socio-political relations, the conditions and causes for the rise in the value of dance-choreographic currency, etc.

Telescoping is long-term research initiated in early 2018 by Jana Jevtović and Engin Can, and which takes the form of a practice and performance. Telescoping inquires about what is being transmitted when we dance and what is being transmitted in the processes that accompany all our dancing: personal life, social circumstances, modes of production, organization, marketing, lobbying, administration. Telescoping considers the dancer’s body as a live and living archive which continually sediments movements, associations, connotations, and in so doing keeps the sediments moving.

The author bestows the robot with a contemporary form of a romantic identity, thus repeating the first such gesture made in the history of the fantasy literary genre by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, though perhaps with only a slightly ironic and humorous twist this time. Srhoj is interested exactly in the hypothetical twist in which technophobia becomes profane and the robot acquires a human subjectivity, including all the bizarreness that it is usually accused of.

In 2007, Gregor told Marjeta, who was short on opportunities to move, that she might begin dancing. And really, Marjeta rolled up her sleeves and started dancing. Many variations of this leap into dance have arisen – meetings, performances, installations, letters... Since then, together with others who have become part of the game, and consequently the family, Marjeta has immersed herself in “moments becoming events by finding/inventing their documentation in any medium.”*

This project is a trial for a textual and performative riot against blind hermeneutics, against the dirty kitchens of performance semiotics. It seeks to make use of the recognizable discourse and language which is applied to the world of performance, and rather than arriving at only another critique of a very specific socioprofessional habitus it aims to tamper with the quiet mechanisms of specific value and signification systems. On our little divan we are busy making a micro psychoanalysis of performing arts - seeking to scratch the unquestioned fixity of its discourse and language, to shift the meaning of its signifiers, to unpack les mots-valises.

The term "mapping" has become a broad term used for a variety of purposes, including as a form of artistic training/practice. B-mapping approaches the notion of mapping from a slightly different perspective. It does not tend towards drawn maps of places, which are decisively shaped by the viewer's perception, but takes the body and its positioning and the way it is situated in space as a starting point.