ROK VEVAR
Rok Vevar graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana.
In the 1990s, he attended the Theater and Puppetry School – Cosmopolitan Art Workshop (GILŠ KODUM) at the former ZKOS. He is a writer on contemporary performing arts, as well as a historian and archivist of contemporary dance. He has published articles and reviews in a number of daily newspapers (Delo, Finance, Večer), in specialized journals (Maska, Frakcija), and in domestic and international occasional publications.
As a dramaturg, he has collaborated with artists in the fields of contemporary dance and theater (Sinja Ožbolt, Jana Menger, Goran Bogdanovski, Andreja Rauch Pozdravnik, Snježana Premuš, Kaja Lorenci, Dejan Srhoj, Oliver Frljić, Ana Vujanović, Saša Asentić). Together with Simona Semenič, he created three original performances: A Handful of Empty Hands (2001), Solo Without a Ticket (2003), and Cartography of Feature-Length Images (2005).
As part of the FIT festival network (Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia) and at international festivals (Bulgaria, Latvia, Croatia), he has taught young critics, dance dramaturgs, and publicists; at the Academy of Dance and AGRFT in Ljubljana, he has taught history, dramaturgy, analysis, contemporary dance theory, and theater criticism. Since 2010, he has been an active member of the Balkan dance network Nomad Dance Academy and its various artistic, educational, and production programs.
As part of the Nomad Dance Institute project, he initiated the archiving and historicization of choreographic practices in this region, publishing the findings of his historical research in two issues of the journal Maska (Shifts in Contemporary Dance II, The Autonomy of Dance). Since 2010, he has been an active member of the Balkan dance network Nomad Dance Academy and its various artistic, educational, and production programs. As part of the Nomad Dance Institute project, he initiated the archiving and historicization of choreographic practices in this region, publishing the findings of his historical research in two issues of the journal Maska (Shifts in Contemporary Dance II, The Autonomy of Dance). In 2012, he established the “Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive” in his apartment and moved it to the Metelkova Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana in April 2018 (he also presented his archive at Harvard University in the United States). He founded the Ukrep dance festival and curated it at the Ljubljana Dance Theater from 2008 to 2010 together with Sinja Ožbolt; since 2012, he has been co-curator of the international contemporary dance festival CoFestival (Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Kino Šiška). He published a selection of his reviews and articles in the book Rok za oddajo (2011); in 2018, he edited the book Dan, noč + človek = Ritem: Antologija slovenske sodobnoplesne publicistike 1918–1960, for which he selected the material and wrote the introductory texts. In 2020, his monograph Ksenija, Xenia: Ksenija Hribar’s London Dance Years 1960–1978 was published. For his work, he received the Ksenija Hribar Award in 2019 and the Vladimir Kralj Award in 2020 for achievements in the field of theater criticism and theater studies for the period 2018–2019.
In 2020, he was a co-curator of the exhibitions *Autography, Enigma, Rebellion: The Photography of Božidar Dolenec* and *AWARENESS! RESISTANCE! REACTION! Performance and Politics in the 1990s in the Post-Yugoslav Context* at the Metelkova Museum of Contemporary Art. During the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/2022, he taught at the Anton Bruckner Private University (Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität) in Linz (Austria), in the Department of Contemporary Dance and Movement Research. He has been a member of several expert committees (Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City Municipality of Maribor) and juries (Borštnikovo srečanje, Gibanica). He is self-employed in the field of culture.
