Residencies

Omer has been visiting Ljubljana to collaborate with Rok Vevar in developing Dance Tales, a collection of long-form interviews with local dance practitioners. During his visits, he also attended CoFestival and led a practice sharing at DUM.Supported by the Erasmus+ Programme (European Union). 

In the context of Choreographic Turn #10, Martina and Mathilde worked at Krater on developing collective practices and sharing them with the public. These practices included artistic walking, listening, conversations, choreographing, and jointly experiencing the space and its many interwoven inhabitants.

David spent two weeks in Ljubljana working within the context of the project Choreographic Turn #10, as part of an exchange with Uferstudios in Berlin. He was invited to a residency at the outdoor space Krater, where he further developed his practice on Ecological Gestures – Dancing Planthroposcenes, evolving through the practices of rest, dance, conversation, sharing, writing, connecting, and interweaving.

During his stay in Ljubljana as part of the project Choreographic Turn #10, Keith led a one-week laboratory for local artists and presented two events. Untitled (in tyranny most words are forbidden) was an improvisational performance and an encounter between the dancer and the sound artist Ida Hiršenfelder. The end of the laboratory was marked by the performance Political Witchcraft for the New Era, organised jointly with Spider Festival.

During his residency in Ljubljana, Imre attended CoFestival and conducted research and rehearsals for Reading the Room, an ongoing improvisational and performative practice that invites the audience to witness a journey of investigating precarious routines for increasing the sensitivity of attention. It aims to braid a multitude of strands of information and possibilities into a single singularity. The term “reading the room” refers to the ability to pick up subtle, nonverbal cues from a group, understanding the mood and atmosphere of a social situation. Additionally, the performance explores how the locality (physical parameters, the genius loci, and the context) informs the performance in relation to where it takes place.

Within the programme of CoFestival, where we presented Arkadi Zaides’s work Necropolis and organised an in-depth discussion on the piece, the artist Zaides and dramaturg Dobričić also used the opportunity to prepare Zaides’s new project, as well as to attend festival performances and curatorial debates with the curatorial team. Igor Dobričić was also hosted in 2022, when, besides a working residency for a new project, he held a talk on Alma Sӧderberg’s performance NOCHE, on which he worked as dramaturg.

Within the workshop Through Performative and Choreographic Practices, held during CoFestival, Thiago Granato invited participants to an artistic immersion in which diverse working situations served as a basis for exploring composition. Through choreography, Granato examined the performing capacities of the body to create, penetrate, melt, merge, move, and transform different contexts. During the workshop, he presented his methodology and proposed several possibilities for discussing how we can recognise, situate, and sustain a performance practice or choreographic project today.

As part of CoFestival, we hosted Serbian artist Miloš Janjić, who researched queer performative practices in the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive, which he later translated into his choreographic work (Muš)kost u grlu, dedicated to exploring the manifestation of masculinity and its related psychopathology in contemporary society. Supported by the (Non)Aligned Movements project (Creative Europe), the Ministry of Public Administration, and in collaboration with CoFestival.

A dancer well known locally through his exceptional performances with the EGK Group, and active in recent years in Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, and Hungary. During his residency at CoFestival, Gyula attended Thiago Granato’s workshop, where a creative dialogue began with dancer and choreographer Bojana Robinson, forming the basis for their 2025 dance performance Seagulls Fly Early, produced by NDAS.

Deborah Hay visited Ljubljana several times between April 2022 and June 2023, presenting her dance practice and sharing her choreographic tools with a group of local dancers. She adapted her 7-minute choreography EXIT in collaboration with the Ljubljana group and held a conversation about her work with French dancer and archivist Laurant Pichaud as part of Choreographic Turn #7: A Meeting with Deborah. During this period, she also began collaborating with the Temporary Dance Collective NDAS, resulting in the performance Inside the Outside, which premiered at the Old Power Station in June 2023.

The residency of the German duo Wilhelm Groener focused on studying the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive and searching for methods of artistic intervention within the archive. This resulted in the performative lecture Performing the Archive @The Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive, a playful hybrid of lecture and performance set inside the archive at MSUM. The presentation reflected their current artistic research Performing the Archive, which expands on their more than 20-year oeuvre and explores ways of connecting the opposing concepts of the archival and performative. The methods, rhythms, and connotations of archives provide structural threads from which visual elements, the body, sound, and space are woven into performative fabric with multiple narratives and lasting transformations. Their research and performance honoured the fifth anniversary of the archive at MSUM.

During his a week-long stay in Ljubljana, Mårten Spångberg gave a public lecture titled How Much I Dislike Art That Looks Experimental, presented his book Stories That Tell No Nothing, and mentored young choreographers and writers (Tatiana Kocmur, Anja Mejač, Julija Pečnikar). His residency, co-organized with Maska and Kino Šiška, offered dramaturgical guidance and a critical framework for reflecting on dance and expanded choreographic practices.

A long-term collaborator of NDAS, Céline Larrère visited within the context of the project Choreographic Turn #7: A Meeting With Deborah, where she led a three-day workshop titled Come Together, Right Now, Over Ljublj. The workshop focused on presenting her practice of improvised solos that create a dance community.

The artists’ residency was structured around Choreographic Turn #7: A Meeting with Deborah. They participated in workshops with artists in the programme and followed the formal and informal activities of the event, deepening their theoretical and practical knowledge and becoming acquainted with the working methods of American postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay.

Alexandra Baybutt holds a PhD on festival curatorship and the shaping of alternative generative forms of sociality, creation, and action, taking as her starting point the festivals initiated within the Nomad Dance Academy network. During the residency, Baybutt and Mijačević developed a workshop module intertwining movement-dance techniques with musical ones.

During his residency in Ljubljana, Adam Kinner led a five-day workshop titled The Voice That the Text Can’t Hear, in which he shared elements of his practice that uniquely combines voice and body – how the production of sound with the voice can trigger or stimulate the production of movement. In the context of CoFestival at Kino Šiška, Adam presented a work-in-progress titled Some Ways of Speaking.

The project Grand re Union, developed in 2020–2021, enabled the international dance community to exchange information and, in a spirit of solidarity, reconsider borders, collaborations, and digital/analog possibilities of dance work during the pandemic. It produced more than one hundred genre-diverse units, which were presented to visitors, re-discovered, and activated. Joanna and Peter presented the GRU platform in Ljubljana and co-curated an immersive exhibition that both exhibited Grand re Union and extended the life of the platform. The immersive exhibition was presented within CoFestival.

In October and November 2022, JSKD hosted the three artists from Serbia. The residency aimed to enable the flow of information and development of competences and critical knowledge among creators from the former Yugoslav region. At Kino Šiška (co-producer), artist Marko Milić presented the exhibition/event Love Is Like Life, Only It Lasts Longer, an immersive experience based on images created between 1995 and 2022. During the residency, the team continued researching the artistic process Dithyrambs: Choreographies of Writing and held a 1.5-hour participatory event at Cepetka Hall (JSKD) in which visitors took part in a guided contemplative writing experience followed by a moderated discussion.

In January 2022, we hosted the publicists and critics from the Balkans, who reflected on the possibilities of establishing a digital publishing platform to connect writers, dramaturgs, publicists, and critics from the former Yugoslav region and Bulgaria. Pia Brezavšček and Rok Bozovičar (editors of Maska and the portal Neodvisni) and, from NDAS, Jasmina Založnik and Rok Vevar also joined the five-day meeting. The residency was organised in collaboration with JSKD.

Visiting CoFestival and supporting Yasen Vasilev's project within the framework of LLB (Dance Hub exchange).

Katalin Bitó held an artistic residency at Studio Moj Korak and Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, where she developed her solo dance performance Mondom veled / I’m telling with you (video: Dorottya Szonja Koltay, music: Kurszán Koltay). She collaborated with Zsófia Szász as assistant and outside eye and with Kristóf Frühwirth as lighting technician. The residency concluded with a public work-in-progress presentation at Kino Šiška, followed by a discussion with the creators.

Within the residency, Marion proposed individual “study” meetings with artists in Ljubljana to connect with the local dance community and develop her transdisciplinary project exploring the “fluid” body, the memory of floodplains, and a revolutionary ontology of water. Her work was grounded in morning visits to the Ljubljanica River, afternoon exchanges with artists, and evenings dedicated to writing and attending performances relevant to her research.

In August, part of their creative process was carried out here by Mariola Wilhelm and Gunther Groener (a Berlin-based visual-choreographic duo), with participation by Jasmina Založnik and Rok Vevar. Ida Hiršenfelder introduced the creators to the functioning of the digital archive and its procedures of selection and accessibility. The artists were supposed to return to Ljubljana in November for a two-week intensive residency to develop the project Performing the Archive in collaboration with Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik, which would have been presented at CoFestival in MSUM, home of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive. Unfortunately, the residency was cancelled due to tightened restrictions, and their research work was postponed and carried out in Berlin. The performance was streamed live online.

From 4 to 29 November, the collective Steam Room spent almost a month in residency in Ljubljana. During this time, they presented the performance Moonlight at CoFestival and at the Platform of Contemporary Dance in Maribor, and gave a pre-premiere performance of dragON aka PONY at the Živa Festival.