About Festival

After the highly successful "The Glass Menagerie" in 2015, in the second part of the "Staging a Play" cycle, in which the author confronts with the canonical drama, Matija Ferlin continues to explore the area between physical expression/movement and theatre language conventions. One of the world’s most famous comedies, Molière’s Tartuffe, has been innovatively translated by Ferlin into the language of dance: verbal replicas have been replaced by a physical vocabulary, while the dramatic text is used as a choreographic score, thus creating a complex stage game whereby the body in motion does not try to reach the level of verbal communication, but enables a new dimension of theatre staging and envelopes the spectator into the magical atmosphere of musical and visual stimuli.

Zagreb Dance Company (ZPA) was founded in 1970 by dance artist Lela Gluhak Buneta. Since 2014 it has been run by producer Petra Glad Mažar. Throughout many years of its existence and under the leadership of various artistic directors, ZPA has always insisted on original works and high artistic and technical level of its productions. Regular collaborations with foreign choreographers and various artists from the fields of theatre, visual arts and music have contributed to the Company’s readiness to face the challenges of different artistic approaches and poetics. As such, ZPA has marked the careers of many dancers and dance experts who are working in Croatia and abroad. For its contribution to the development of Croatian theatre, ZPA received the Croatian Association of Dramatic Artists’ awards for best choreography (2004, 2012), best female dancer (2004, 2016), best male dancer (2004, 2006, 2012), best set design (2006), and best dance production (2008, 2012). Zagreb Dance Company continually presents its productions at theatres and festivals in Croatia and abroad, with performances in almost all European countries and in Russia, South Korea, Israel, Egypt, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Director and Choreographer: Matija Ferlin
Performance and choreography: Petra Valentić / Darko Japelj / Andreja Jandrić / Petra Chelfi / Eva Kocić / Marin Lemić / Roberta Milevoj / Domagoj Janković / Sintija Kučić
Dramaturgy: Jasna Žmak
Scene design: Mauricio Ferlin
Music: Luka Prinčič
Costume design: Matija Ferlin, Desanka Janković
Make-up: Sanja Rivić
Light design and technical guidance: Saša Fistrić
Design: Tina Ivezić
Photography: Jelena Janković
Production: Zagreb Dance Company
Partners: Istrian National Theatre Pula, Zagreb Youth Theatre
Supported by: Zagreb City Office for Culture, Croatian Ministry of Culture, The Istrian Region

This program was presented in cooperation with Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc and  Croatian Dance Network.

Presentation is the result of the process of partnering workshop in which participants demonstrate the dancing material based on partnering through a structured improvisation. They will play between fixed and free dance materials, examine contact and risk, creating dance on the spot.

ALIEN EXPress is an alive, always changing performance, or better called, a structured improvisation where structure is adjusted for every situation/performance anew. It is a method where the artists and the performance are growing, learning and trying to reach as high as possible while staying rooted in the ground. The inner condition for a mutual creation is a FRIENDSHIP, because it has started as a friendship and it is staying a friendship. Basic condition of the performance is a duet of friendship, opening the doors for trio. We added the light in places where Borut Bučinel (lights) opened our eyes for different approaches of space and games with dark and light.

There was always something that every spectator perceived equally when the audience commented on the show. When attempting to achieve telepathic communication between us; (ALIEN EXPress) this type of ability is constantly being transmitted to the audience. When trying to reach common spiritual and spiritual expression, we seek inner forms of being human and being together. Of being friends.

Žiga Krajnčan was born in Kranj in 1995. When he was four he began to learn to play the violin. Six years later he decided to switch to trombone, which he played for three years. He was also a member of three different children's choirs. In elementary school he played, sang and danced in two musicals and one film. When he finished elementary school he decided to enroll in a school of contemporary dance. Even though he had little dancing experience, he passed the audition. He has been dancing for four years and he has already been awarded a few times. He has worked with Matija Ferlin, Kaja Lorenci, Gregor Luštek and other distinguished choreographers.

Gašper Kunšek was born in 1997 in Jesenice. At the age of four he started taking soccer and dance lessons. His football career seemed promising, he was the best player in the tournament a few times and his club Triglav made it to the Nike Cup Challenge in Poland, but soon dance took priority over football. Gašper has been dancing for 14 years and has received several awards so far.  He has participated in Ivana Djilas’s  play Pozabaaa and he is a member of Abismo crew, Urban roof, Hidden Slavic DNA and Body Preachers.

Authors and performers: Žigan Krajnčan and Gašper Kunšek
Light design: Borut Bučinel
Music: Kristijan Krajnčan
Photography: Borut Bučinel
Mentor: Kaja Lorenci
Producer: Nataša Zavolovšek
Production: Flota, Ljubljana
Coproduction: Plesni teater Ljubljana
Support: Municipality of Ljubljana

Aerowaves is a hub for dance discovery in Europe. Each year it identifies the most promising new work by emerging dance artists and then promotes it through cross-border performances.

Aerowaves Away is a new strand of activity that enables exciting dance performances to reach audiences unfamiliar with dance, and is the first collaboration with Periskop. Find out more at www.aerowaves.org

This programme is presented in collaboration with Aerowaves and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

You cannot really rush intimacy
It is a process, not an event
You cannot really control intimacy
Like the feeling, you can’t hold it or repeat it at your will
We perceive intmacy, we do not make it 

Anne Wilson Schaef

Dance performance YOU, by the authors and performers Aleksandra Mišić and Ognjen Vučinić, is the result of the idea of video staging and performing Enes Kišević's poetry (The Sun, The Wind and You). The stage duet is a very intimate story which questions and communicates human intimacy, closeness, life, and its cycle. Poetry is interpreted by one of our well-known actors Robert Kurbaša, who is in this project the creative advocate of video formatting as the way of poetry being present in everyday life.

Authors and performers:  Aleksandra Mišić and Ognjen Vučinić
Poetry interpretation: Robert Kurbaša
Poetry: Enes Kišević (Sunce, vjetar i ti)
Music: Max Richter
Camera: Darko Drinovac
Video: Ivan Slipčević
Costume design: Ljerka Zmajić
Photography: Krunoslav Marinac / Mladen Božičkov / Tin Jutriša
Sound design: Tomica Kraljić
Light design: Milan Kovačević
Producer: Kristina Jakovac Bangoura
Production: Masa Dance Company
Supporters: Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance and Zagreb Dance Centre as part of residential programme.

In esotericism, number ‘5’ symbolises universal life, human individuality, will, intelligence, inspiration and genius. It also symbolises the vertical evolution, the progressive ascending movement. According to esotericism, number ‘5’  represents the man as the median point between earth and sky and indicates that the ascension towards a superior condition is possible. It contains the synthesis of the five senses, the number of fingers of a hand, it is the basis of decimal mathematics, it is the pentacle number, and the number of the five-pointed star. It is the number of human kind, a number to which people have attributed transcendental meanings since the beginning of time. But today there’s a crisis around it.

Marco Chenevier (1983) is a choreographer, a dancer, a director and an actor. He dances for various companies in Italy and France (Romeo Castellucci - Cindy Van Acker – Cie CFB451 / CCN of Roubaix – Carolyn Carlson, Cie Lolita Espin Anadon...). In 2005 he founded the TiDA Company, his main instrument of production and experimentation in the last twelve years. In 2016 Marco met dancer and choreographer Roberto Castello, and realizing the extent of intellectual affinities they share, the two artists decided to merge their two companies, TiDA and ALDES in 2018. Marco Chenevier is the author of 15 productions which have been presented at festivals in Italy and abroad. At the moment, he is the artistic director of Festival T*Danse in Aosta.

Director, choreographer and performer: Marco Chenevier
Producer: ALDES&TIDA 2013 (with the support of MIBACT, Regione Autonoma Valle d’Aosta)
Photography: Alex Brenner
With the support of: MIBACT/Direzione Generale Spettacolo dal vivo, Regione Toscana/Sistema Regionale dello Spettacolo

Aerowaves is a hub for dance discovery in Europe. Each year it identifies the most promising new work by emerging dance artists and then promotes it through cross-border performances.

Aerowaves Away is a new strand of activity that enables exciting dance performances to reach audiences unfamiliar with dance, and is the first collaboration with Periskop. Find out more at www.aerowaves.org

This programme is presented in collaboration with Aerowaves and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

AZIMUT
Axis

By looking, we connect places where we see bodies and we create new worlds.The body travels and seeks its place, the ideal angle, the perfect side. Bodies collide and therefore the direction requires caution and struggle. She struggles for the ideal angle. They seek an angle in bodies that are not bodies and discover that they are just things. Sometimes, maybe, they become one and head north  together. 

Dance Studio Axis was opened in 2016 under the guidance of dancer, dance pedagogue and choreographer Martina Rukavina. The studio offers various activities for children and for adults, including contemporary dance. In 2017, the advanced contemporary dance group participated in Okretač-Inside out Project under the guidance of Anne-Laure Dogot and performed at various events (EPK 27 susjedstva, Dani plesa u Opatiji, Varijete Prostora Plus, Retro Opatija, etc.).

Concept and choreography: performers in cooperation with Anika Cetina and Renata Mavrić
Performers: Marija Maksimović, Tihana Naglić, Sanja Prodan, Sandra Turkalj
Photography: Renata Mavrić

THE ECHO OF THE INFINITE A.K.A. LOOP 

E.-M. Vrdoljak, H.Klemenčić, S. Kučić

The idea of this work is based on the study of loops within the visual and auditory sphere. In the research we want to reach key loop parameters; a three-dimensional shape which is the result of the curve that bends around and intercepts itself. Considering the loop as a structure or process that constantly flows and continuously repeats itself, we want to show what really stands inside the relationship of the beginning and the end, what are the relations between them, so that we could at least qualify something as the beginning or the end. We are interested in what we can observe and consider as one segment. Is the segment within the loop defined by independent mechanisms and what is the interaction between the two segments? The issue of this work lies in the precondition for coincidences that are, if they are, imposed upon the individual. We are curious to know how is it possible to see and recognize patterns from the unnecessary and vanishing nature of things, which, despite the transience of the moment, makes the continuum in which the whole comes a priori.

Authors of the concept: Hrvoje Klemenčić, Sintija Kučić, Eleonora-Magdalena Vrdoljak
Performers: Eleonora-Magdalena Vrdoljak, Sintija Kučić
Music: Hrvoje Klemenčić, Roko Crnić
Photography: Ante Delač

If you don’t think you are the best actor, stop acting. If you don’t think you are making the best show, don’t make it. If you don’t think you can be selected for the programme, don’t apply. Hero 2.0 talks exactly about this, it’s not a question of faith but complete and blind conviction, that Hero 2.0 IS the Show of all Shows.

Hero 2.0’s main theme is ambition. We talk about it through problematising theatre. How we make it, how we perceive it, how we perform it. Its metatheatricality is honest and inclusive. The two performers do everything by themselves. Their genuine and humorous modus operandi becomes their theatrical modus vivendi. Two naked actors, stripped of everything but their desire to make the Show of all shows.

Uroš Kaurin and Vito Weis are among the main representatives of the young generation of theatre authors in Slovenia. As actors, movers, performers, authors they are versatile and many times awarded artists, who collaborated with most of Slovenia’s main institutional and non-governmental theatre organisations. As authors or performers they toured Slovenia and the world. Both are laureates of the Borštnik award for young actors.

Authors and performers: Uroš Kaurin, Vito Weis
Dramaturgy: Katarina Stegnar
Video: Boris Bezić
Photography: Nada Žgank
Production: Moment
Co-production:  EN-KNAP Productions

The guest performance was realised with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

In the context of the contemporary moment, we are witnessing the omnipresence and manifoldness of the body in all its meanings and appearances. The underlying motive of InTrans is to find out what the body is and how body transformation takes place in time and space. By the dynamics of the individual movement, by immersing in the inexhaustible source of body metamorphosis, in a multitude of differences we stand in front of appearances and doubts: Body as protection, shell, armour, shield; body as packaging or content? Body as art, essence, role, commodity, preciousness, item on a shelf? Body now, body once, body tomorrow? Questions without the answers. We become, we change and we disappear. We exist by playing roles, by playing roles we are born and  we die, lost and found, in the eternal quest.

Ivona Medić is a final year student of contemporary dance at Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy who lives and works in Budapest. Before she moved there, she worked with foreign choreographers Mehdi Farajpour (Oriantheatre), Thiery Smiths (cie. Thor), Clipa Theatre (ISR). Upon going away for studies, she has worked with internationally renowned choreographers and performers (Tamás Bako, Marko Torrice, Joe Alegado, Mate Meszaros, Hódo Adrienn, Lawrence Tony, Tony Vezich and Francisco Cordova) under the mentorship of Vass Imra. Since 2016 she has created several of her own performances (Self Manual, Venusian, FOTRE) and presented them internationally. She is currently working on several new productions and collaborations in Budapest, holding contemporary dance workshops and is professionally engaged as a Melting Pot (Marco Torrice-BE) performer in Brussels.

Toni Flego was born in 1996 in Rijeka. After completing the dance school in Rijeka where he learned contemporary dance, at the age of fourteen he passed the audition for Accademia di Danza Nazionale di Roma and continued his dance education in Italy. He has received various awards and scholarships such as MAB from Milan and World Dance Movement from New York. At age of seventeen he signed his first choreography, performed it himself and won the 2nd place at the International Dance Competition in Italy. Now, at the age of twenty two, his professional engagements include having worked with Weltschmerz (Trafik), Igowegoyou (Thierry Smits) i Summer collection (Oriantheatre Dance Company), Travelogue (Žak Valenta) Trittico d'autore (Sharon Friedman,Valerio Longo,Paolo Mohovid ) Halab (Sol Pico).

Performers: Toni Flego, Ivona Medić
Photgraphy: Renato Buić

The show Shake it off reveals itself to us gradually and in constant charge of bodily vibrations, tremors and shivers, creating an atmosphere within which bodies interpenetrate each other and share the reality in the unexpected change. The intention is to never stop reshaping the movement, group dynamics as well as all the meanings that are broken by vibration and that position the body on the mere border of the world around us and the world within us.

Tireless vibration brings the performers to the edge of their endurance, to the line which becomes both the cause and the consequence of physicall presence and its ever wavering intensity. The intensity that engrosses us, overcomes us, physically and emotionally. Like an earthquake, a shot, an orgasm, a cold shower, a look or a kiss, scream, a plunge, music, everything that vibrates, synchronises with something within us, creates a rush of adrenaline and takes us into the unknown.

Mia Zalukar is a dance artist and choreographer from Zagreb. After graduation from High school of Contemporary Dance Ana Maletić she continued her professional education in SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) and finished BA study of cultural management in Croatia.  In 2015, together with her colleagues, she received the Croatian Dancers Association Award for the best performing company for a piece Variations on a sensitive by choreographer Marjana Krajač. In 2016 she was nominated for the Croatian Theatre Award in the category of he best female act in Bruno Isaković’s shows Nečastive (Denuded) and Raskrinkavanje (Disclosures). In 2016 she continued to work with Bruno Isaković as co-author on the project Odjednom odasvuda with which they toured Croatia and other countries, and the next year they together founded Malo sutra, an art organisation. She is also working as a full time teacher at the Art high school teaching stage performance, contemporary dance and rhytmics.

Bruno Isaković, a dance artist, graduated  at Amsterdam School of the Arts in 2009. Since 2012, as a member of the Contemporary Dance Studio, he has made 5 plays and he is present as author in the fields of dance, performance and activism. Bruno regularly teaches dance and research workshops in Croatia and abroad. As a guest lecturer, he has conducted workshops at Bilgi University of Performing Arts in Istanbul and Academy of Dramatic Art, Contemporary Dance Department in Zagreb, TSEKH School in Moscow, Instituto de Artes Mauricio Kagel in Buenos Aires, Dance Center Dance Ireland in Dublin. He is art director of Sounded Bodies Festival and program leader of dance residences within the Perforation Festival.

Authors: Bruno Isaković, Mia Zalukar
Assistant:  Ana Mrak
Performers: Josipa Bubaš, Silvija Dogan, Stipe Gugić, Mirel Huskić, Maja Jakuš-Mejarec, Mateja Miković, Liber Pazameta, Tanja Puklek, Pavle Vrkljan, Mia Zalukar
Light design: Saša Fistrić
Sound design: Alen and Nenad Sinkauz
Production: Malo Sutra, Domino, Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (within the Contemporary Dance Week)
Partner: Zagreb Dance Studio
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Graphic design: Bruno Isaković 

This programme is presented in co-operation and with the support of Domino Association and the Performing Arts Network

Six women of six age, six stories. The youngest is nine, the oldest eighty years old, a whole life in between. What have they experienced and what is still awaiting them? Are they all one family? Are they one and the same person experiencing a moment of a “back to the future” sequence? What would my 9-year-old-me like to ask my 40-year-old-me? What story would I like to hear from me as an old woman? Tiger Lilies are wild and delicate at the same time. Young and old. Unmissable. They are looking for that special, barefooted, soft, rebellious, strong, weak, emotional, powerful, easy, funny, serious, intuitive, wild girl which is hiding somewhere in all women. Tiger Lilies meet each other on stage and contemplate together on ageing, solidarity, empowerment, surviving and staying forever young.

Concept, direction, choreography: Sanja Frühwald
Assistant: Jasmin Steffl
Dramaturgy: Till Frühwald
Performers: Emma Wiederhold (9), Milena Leeb(13), Gat Goodovich (28), Adriana Cubides(42), Giordana Pascucci(57), Maria Farcher(80)
Music: Imre Lichtenberger Bozoki
Light design: Mirza Kebo
Costume design and scenography: Zdravka Ivandija Kirigin
Text: Sanja Frühwald
Photography: Franzi Kreis, Dejan Košćak
Video (promo): Moritz Wallmüller
Producers: Dejan Košćak (VRUM), Fariba Mosleh (DSCHUNGEL WIEN)
Production: VRUM , Dschungel Wien
Coproduction: KLIKER Festival
Support: ImPulsTanz festival Vienna

This program is presented in cooperation with KLIKER Platform and with the support of ACI d.d. and NP Krka

THE SOUND AND THE BODY

Dora Popić, Mišo Komenda

The idea is to treat basic elements of a stage performance- the movement of the body and the sound as of equal importance on the stage. The research is based on how different ways of creating sound and different principles of body movement affect each other. Two persons embody The Body and The Sound, a musician and an acrobat. They attribute them their characteristics, through performance they describe their relationship and transfer emotions created in the moment of their interaction. The movement of the acrobatic body in the aerial hoop discipline and live music performances are intertwined elements, closely connected and affecting each other, creating and ceasing each other’s existence.

The sound is the driving force effecting the body. The work is trying to research the relation of the sound and the body by creating a specific movement that is sometimes dictated by the sound producer and sometimes by the producer of the movement-the body, while at other times that line is erased and the domination game stops and the whole narrative turns into a cooperation, coexistence in which neither the sound nor the object exist without each other.

Dora Popić was born in Split in 1989. She spent a lot of her time in a gym, as a competitor, trainer and judge in artistic gymnastics. In 2015 she graduated in architecture and in the same year discovered the circus in associations Kam Hram and Room where she started to develop and research into different disciplines, mostly focusing on aerial silks, aerial hoops and handstands. Since that crucial moment in life circus has started to permeate both private and professional life through various projects, alongside with work in architecture.

Mišo Komenda was born in Split in 1982. He graduated in visual communication design at the Arts Academy, University of Split in 2010. Since 2011 he has been profesionally engaged in visual communications design in cooperation with Karlo Kazinoti. He has many awards from the field of graphic design and electronic media design. Since 1999 he has been actively engaged in music, he played or is still playing in some of the most renowned instrumental bands from Split, such as Lažni brkovi, Leut Magnetik, Discopath, Studio Frendo, ROLO with whom he has successful performances in Croatia and abroad. He has also worked on multimedia projects such as live compostions for silent films La jetée and Silent sonata, live improvisations for a few different experimental films etc.

Idea and performance: Mišo Komenda and Dora Popić
Choreography: Dora Popić
Music: Mišo Komenda
Photography: Darko Škrobonja 
Logistic support: Kam Hram, Room 100 

FENG SHUI

Tanja Puklek, Filip Borelli 

Literally translated, Feng means wind and Shui means water and in Chinese culture they are associated with health and well-being. The more-than-three-thousand-years-old Chinese philosophy, art and science Feng Shui inspires us to research our bodies, people, but also things in space. This movement/dance and sound/music experiment is based on its principles.

Tanja Puklek - although she has been interested in dance and movement since early on, it is only after she had finished her MA in Mathematical Statistics at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb that she became engaged in contemporary dance, circus and sewing. Until now she has participated in several dance and circus plays and performances at various festivals and events in Crroatia., as author, co-author, performer and costume designer. In 2017 she was one of fifteen performance artists representing Croatia in the biggest African carnival which holds place in Calabar in Nigeria.

Filip Borelli is a Croatian author who is engaged in exploring the interaction of light, sound, movement and music. He is a student of New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb where he also graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Business. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals in Croatia and abroad, including the Touch Me Festival 2017 under the auspices of CERN.

Filip Borelli je hrvatski autor koji se bavi istraživanjem interakcije između svjetlosti, zvuka, pokreta i glazbe. Student je Novih medija na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu gdje je također završio Ekonomski fakultet. Sudjelovao je na brojnim izložbama i festivalima u hrvatskoj i inozemstvu među kojima se izdvaja Touch Me festival 2017. pod pokroviteljstvom instituta CERN.

Authors: Tanja Puklek, Filip Borelli 
Coreography and costume design: Tanja Puklek
Music: Filip Borelli
Photography: Filip Borelli

PUSHING BO(UN)D(AR)IES

Lea Ovčarić and Petra Kožljan

After the performers had mastered the skill of stilt walking, they were curious to find out what else they could do on them besides standard walking. Already in the first attempts, they liked strange images and shapes that were created by the various formations of their bodies in combination with the stilts, but there was also frustration due to the limited nature of movements and usual, ordinary moves which, in the given circumstances, became very demanding or impossible. It was precisely the combination of the above mentioned factors which motivated them to explore floor and air usage of stilts as circus props, challenging the already adopted circus skills within the newly created body boundaries and the desire to break through them.

Some time ago, Lea Ovčarić and Petra Kožljan, aerial acrobats under the name PetroLeja Štulić, started to spread the spectrum of their artistic circus expression to stilts. After many years of participating in various circus projects, performances and shows, they decided on a joint research of the new prop, by giving it new purposes.

Performers: Petra Kožljan, Lea Ovčarić
Production: Petra Kožljan, Lea Ovčarić, Jadranka Žinić-Mijatović
Photo: Ivan Marenić

A series of photographs created as a documentation of the Labis Group's work present a retrospective of the choreographic production of the Labis dance group from the period between 1988 and 1995. Through Labis Dance Ensemble’s choreographies we trace the beginnings of the establishment of contemporary dance in Kvarner region. We trace them since 1987 when the group was formed after Senka Baruša returned from her contemporary dance studies at Lewisham College in London, brought together fellow dancers and created the foundations of contemporary dance in Rijeka, Lovran and the surrounding area. Later on, through the internationally awarded choreographies of Labis, as well as with collaborative performance projects with music artists and writers, we follow Labis's production until 1995 when the activity of the group ceased and Labis members continue to act as individuals in different media of artistic expression.

Members of the ballet study of Jože Komljenović were among the first members of the group; Ljiljana Musić, Gordana Svetopetrić, Silvia Marchig, Marina Poklepovic, Andreja Smokvina.  Later Ronald Savković, Filip Filipović, Žak Valenta, Sanja Josipović, Edvin Liverić and Dražen Šivak joined in. Musicians of the band GRČ, Bobo Gruičić (drummer), Damir Stojnić (painter and saxophonist), writers Igor Večerina and Laura Marchig, painter Melita Sorola Staničić and many other foreign artists were Labis' associates on a series of different dance projects. Today they are all educated and renowned artists from Rijeka, according to critic Aldo Milohnić.

Exhibition concept: Senka Baruška, Nadežda Elezović, Melita Sorola Staničić
Text author: Nadežda Elezović
Photo: Documentary Photography of the Choreography Plankton taken in 1990 at the Biennial of Young Artists from Mediterranean Europe in Marseille
Financial support: City of Rijeka, Municipality of Lovran

This program was presented in collaboration with UO Dance Art Laboratory

Through various exercises and games, the students work on awareness of our body as the body of the other, learn to deal with the weight and the weight of their partners. They practise how to take responsibility for someone else’s body. This concept of partnering is dealing with risk, confidence, instinct, self-protection, protection of someone else, speed, fragility, softness and tension. By working with the body of other we get to know our own. The workshop is offering a the rich repertoire of these two dancers, and also a possibility to develop your own ideas and opportunities in partnering.

Presentation is the result of the process of partnering workshop in which participants demonstrate the dancing material based on partnering through a structured improvisation. They will play between fixed and free dance materials, examine contact and risk, creating dance on the spot.

Aleksandra Mišić

She is the artistic director and co-founder of MASA DANCE COMPANY. She works as dance pedagogue (contemporary dance, partnering and improvisation) and she is also the head of dance education programs in D / E / P, which is educational department of Masa dance company. As a dancer she has many years of rich experience in numerous performances dancing with Zagreb Dance Company and in collaboration with local artists and institutions. She is the winner of the Croatian Association of Dramatic Artists award 2014 for the best dance performance in the play Hermaphrodites of the Souls by the author Žak Valenta, and as a choreographer, she won numerous prestigious awards and accolades from Croatia and abroad. Her academic education continues on Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, contemporary dance.
She lives and works in Zagreb.

Ognjen Vučinić

He started dancing at the age of four in Zaro Dance Studio in Pula, where he attended ballet classes. In 2000, he moved to Zagreb and became a member of Zagreb Dance Company, and participated in all dance projects until 2015. In 2009, with Aleksandra Mišić, he founded the Masa Dance Company. He received Croatian Association of Dramatic Artists Award for Best Male Role in Contemporary Dance 2006, 2010, and 2012. Throughout his career he has worked as a dance instructor, working with amateurs and professionals.

This workshop of dance improvisation and finding your own movement language is for all generations and this time it is open only for female participants (no previous dance experience needed)!

Through numerous physical contact techniques we use improvisation as a model for something that will happen unexpectedly, and the unknown primarily depends on cooperation with others. The goal is to open up our perception. Our approach to all the participants is the same, regardless of their age (6-106). From working on the personal physical material, we look at situations from the compositional point of view, by creating new situations and numerous possibilities for communication to open up.

We are inspired by the stories and experiences of workshop participants that they bring from their everyday life and our by experiences from VRUM’s working process on The Tiger Lillies Project. It is by introducing our everyday experiences, tested and lived through that the participants create a safe starting point for further creation and improvisation. By using that well-known network of quotes, a relaxed atmosphere is created, in which individuals open up to perception more easily and gradually prepare to cooperate with others and to unexpectedly rediscover the child in each of us.

The program was realised in cooperation with KLIKER Platform and with the support of ACI d.d. and NP Krka

This workshop is intended for potential dance critics and existing ascending authors who will be more closely acquainted with the features of dance art and dance contexts and develop their analytical approach to watching performances and critical writing skills. 

The workshop will cover both theoretical and practical aspects, both in terms of dance and dance criticism. Participants will gain insight into topics important for anyone who is confronted with writing about dance - how to interpret the scene and movement, how the body produces meaning in a particular context, how to read the body that alternates with possibilities and / or looks with the usual conceptions of dance and the dancer, how to consider dance quotes and the relationship between recent productions with dance classics and other arts etc. We will talk about different types of critical writing, the possibilities of criticism regarding electronic media, the importance of critical thinking today, the necessary elements of a critical text, the necessity and the importance of arguing the critical attitude. We will try to master practical tasks - focusing on a particular segment of the play while watching a performance, setting up a framework for interpretation, connecting different elements that appear during the analysis, and supporting the thesis by what we have seen. Participants are expected to actively participate in analysing the performances that they will watch during the festival and to write at least one critical text after the festival which will be then published on the workshop’s blog.

The workshop will be led by dance critic and theoretic Ivana Slunjski, one of the editors of the Kretanja (ENG Movements), magazine for dance art.

Workshop How and why to write about dance is intended for children and young people with the affinity to writing and performing arts. It is conceived as a two-day encounter during which they would become acquainted with dance art and with the basics of writing a criticism and analysing a play.

After the introductory part, the idea is to watch a play together and then talk to the performers and authors in which the participants ask question and learn more about the art processes and everything else they are interested about the play. Parts of the conversation can be used to create smaller interviews, coverages and photo editions. In the final part of the workshop the participants will try to write reviews or criticism of the play.

The workshop will be led by dance critic and theoretic Ivana Slunjski, one of the editors of the Kretanja (ENG Movements), magazine for dance art.

This program was made with the support of ACI d.d. and NP Krka