Horisontal spreadings
Kondenz Festival of contemporary dance and performance, 23-31 October 2021
Kondenz has grown and developed, despite occasional problems and operating within an environment of social and economic crises. Kodenz’s capacity to be a place of meeting and exchange for the local dance and performance scene has been demonstrated once again with various new programs being offered.
The fourteenth edition of the festival opens with a performance that invites the audience to Come to our dressing room, we will make the roses bloom (DragOn aka Phoenix), and closes with a collective experience of exchanging thoughts and feelings about the chronic state of exhaustion resulting from inadequate working conditions (Depleting or Floating beyond our own borders). This closing offering allows us to lick our wounds together, both our own and each others’, and to catch our breath, at least temporarily, before diving into the marathon race for productivity once again. In between these events, we will guide you from sexuality (Strawberries and Whipped Cream) to shame (Dirty Words), from old to new struggles for a dignified life for all (Dance till the New Dawn), from social forces of immobilization (Precarious Moves) to the space of bodily communion through choreography (DOWL ), from physicality through performance (Daikon, I am still walking, DYTHIRAMBS Dance writing stream) to bodily injuries and transformations (From body to body) and caring for new generations (through the Puzzle program and the performance Kolo). Connecting with the project Feminist Futures, we look at the transformations of the working models in the field of dance and arts in general (presentation of the book Feminist Pornscapes, on feminist dramaturgical thinking in dance and performance practice, performance Tender Fights 2020). We keep working on questions of our dance heritage (video interview with Dalija Aćin Thelander), as well as the issues of getting old in dance (through the project Dance On, Pass On, Dream On), with obligatory and continuous learning (Under the Droplet) and combining introspection (Bad Company) with an external review of the inflamed and healed points of the contemporary dance scene.
This year’s Kondenz program is also a meeting of topics that the associates of Station and actors in the independent dance scene are dealing with in this time of post-pandemic and post-transition. This is being done in an attempt to support various researches of local dance scene actors, but also to at least list, mark and launch those missing systemic processes that are necessary for the local scene to develop further as an artistic, (cultural)political and economic habitus.
We also wish to emphasize the presence of ideas and concepts from the historical Non-Aligned Movement that are contemplated and transposed into the field of dance through our new regional project (Non) Aligned Movements. This project has been developed through the Nomad Dance Academy (NDA) platform and enables a larger and more intensive presence of dance practitioners from the former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria as main drivers of the NDA. The principles of equality and cooperation, solidarity with all current social struggles, anti-colonial attitudes towards oneself and others and (feminist) practices of care and solidarity are the fundamental principles of the original Non-Aligned Movement, which we consciously and actively take over and emphasize as our own principles in local, regional and international contexts.
We want to ask ourselves, as a collective and together with the audience: can we understand mutual empowerment in a new way? Let’s put aside the good old, petrified Power, the vertical, stable force that holds us, but whose compulsion burdens and tires us. Instead, as contemporary feminist currents suggest, in empowerment we seek potentia, that non-central power that strengthens through fluid, horizontal spreading, that acts with care and without shame.
We are opening Kondenz once again for new touching and are asking ourselves: is dance a language of affective closeness and connections, can we use it to create new alliances that resist pessimism, fear and destruction?
Ana Dubljević, Mirjana Dragosavljević, Marijana Cvetković
PROGRAM
dragON aka PHOENIX /// performance
Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva and Darío Barreto Damas aka STEAM ROOM
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
23.10. @19:00, UP “Cvijeta Zuzorić” Mali Kalemegdan 1
Breaking news worldwide, snare drums, trumpets, three loud gongs! The greatest show has finally arrived in town! And that’s not all, we have a statement from the dancers themselves: “Come to our dressing room, we will make the roses bloom!“
There are no secrets in heaven, flames don’t lie. This is the excess of three burning dancing souls. This is the rise of the superstars. You want them higher, stronger, deeper, clever, naughty, bold and kiss forever? They will do what it takes.
dragON aka PHOENIX is a picturesque show where holding back is not an option. Abusing literalness and borrowing musical theatre logics, this work problematises the potential absurdities of choreography and dance.
This is the second work of the project dragON, a choreographic trilogy co-authored by Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva and Darío Barreto Damas (aka STEAM ROOM). The project deals with the protest and celebration body in the dragging scene, exploring their correlation within dance and choreography.
Choreography and dance; Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva & Darío Barreto Damas aka STEAM ROOM
Music: Cvetan Momčilov
Lyrics and vocals: Dragana Zarevska
Stage and costume design: Micaela Dobreva
Graphic design: Gjorgji Despodov
Special thanks to Anna Szigó for dramaturgical support
Strawberries with whipped cream /// performance
Jovana Stojić and Đorđe Živadinov Grgur
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
24.10. @18:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
Strawberries with whipped cream is a dance performance of two friends, collaborators and artists, Jovana Stojić and Đorđe Živadinović Grgur, who subtly objectify their bodies, mostly without contact with each other, and with a consciously chosen and emphasized male-female dichotomy, relying modestly on certain theses of Bataille and Foucault, as well as on hedonism and contact with others as a life and performing practice with a favourite seasonal treat. In the discursive relationship of the natural and the contextually constructed, strawberries and whipped cream symbolize the relationships of sexual prerogatives and the potentials for their exploitation. They make the question of the erotic, the sensual, the first in a series of performances that will explore this and related topics.
Tender Fights 2020 /// video and space installation
Marja Christians, Ana Dubljević, Kasia Kania
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
24.10. @20:00, Ostavinska galerija (Kraljevića Marka 8)
“During a hot summer we meet in the only possible place. Held by the sea, we fight tenderly. This is not a performance. It is not a video. It is not a video of a performance. It is a performance in a video. A performance that has never happened, performed in an online format. It is a ruin of a performance, built in the ruins that are inside and around us now. We meet the audience inside these ruins and invite them to experience flickering realities and their multiplicity of time and spaces. What grows in the ruins? What might come out of these cracks and holes? It takes tenderness to fight for it. We meet you there. Welcome to “Tender Fights 2020”.
Concept & performance: Ana Dubljević, Marja Christians i Kasia Kania
Camera: Ana Dubljević, Marja Christians, Kasia Kania and Liesa Harzer
Editing: Liesa Harzer
Co-production with Station Stanica Service for contemporary dance and Mousonturm Frankfurt.
In cooperation with the Hessian Theatre Academy, supported by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony and by the International Coproduction Fund of Goethe-Institut.
With the support of International Dance Theater Festival Lublin, Liberdance Kamenjak/Zagreb, HKD/Hrvatski kulturni dom Rijeka, JSKD and Zavod Pothos Melara, Ljubljana.
Kolo /// performance
Simonida Žarković, Đorđe Živadinović Grgur, Jana Milenković, Isidora Popović, Jovana Stojić
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
25.10. @20:00, Malo pozorište „Duško Radović“ (Abardareva 1)
In the artistic research and creation of the performance Kolo, we dealt with the re-examination of contemporary manifestations of community, with a focus on the physical aspects of its showing through dance practice. We examined the possibility and impossibility of making contact in a time of change based on digital technologies, using as a catalyst a “new reality” caused by the pandemic. The central element of attention in the wok was the folk dance kolo. Although other dance techniques also use physical contact among dancers, we treated the kolo as an established cultural pattern that shapes the experience of shared moments in collective gatherings. Constant physical contact of the group, simplicity of movement and emphasis on joint activities form the basis on which we have developed our material.
During the process of creation, we made and documented interviews with people of different generations, during which conversations were held about the topics of their experiences of communal events, far and recent memories, the present and imagination.
By deciding to approach this project as co-authors, all group members opened another angle of critical observation of functioning and creation in a community, producing and performing the very topic and the issues they deal with.
The NEUT group was formed during the educational programme Puzzle, organized by Station Service for contemporary dance. It works in the field of contemporary dance and performance.
Co-authors and performers: Simonida Žarković, Đorđe Živadinović Grgur, Jana Milenković, Isidora Popović, Jovana Stojić
Collaborators and consultants: Matija Anđelković, Miloš Janjić, Đurđina Samardžić, Filip Otović Višnjić, Ana Dubljević, Olga Potparević, Stana Đokić, Vera Klupić, Ljubina Otović
Yoke: Sound poems and shadow work performed by MM /// performance
Myriam Van Imschoot and Marcus Bergner
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
26.10. @18:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
This 30-minute collection of short pieces spring from a residency StationOne at Magacin over the summer of 2021. Thinking of cinema as a monument to shadows, we allow light to escape from the ‘illegal cinema’ and shine once again but differently in the shadow.
DITHYRAMBS, Dance writing stream /// video
Jelena Vuksanović, Marko Milić, Milisava Petković
26.10. @21:00, online projection
How does a body that writes move? What kind of movements does it perform? A body disciplined by literacy, how does it behave? Is it possible for a narrator to simultaneously indulge in ecstasy and diligently translate it into understandable words?
Three authors will address these questions in a video work, which follows their literary discussion and bodily exploration of writing. Jelena Vuksanović, a dramaturg and performer from Belgrade, in her novel “Martin” follows the hilarious coming-of-age journey of the bodiless hero. Marko Milić, an author in the field of performing arts from Belgrade, explores the capacities of sex in expanding consciousness, with a group of men in an alternative school near Stuttgart. Milisava Petković from Prizren persistently observes and participates in writing events in various cultural and institutional settings, which she translated into her doctoral dissertation “Choreographies of Writing”. An excerpt from her text, which has provided an inspiration and a conceptual frame for our joint work, is quoted below.
DITHYRAMBS are an event, a twilight of literature and a dance score.
“The performances that stage writing as a focal activity truly embody the multi-layered communication. These performances can best be described as “action writing”, a counterpart to “action painting”, staging at least two media/discourses: performative action and production of a text. Various depictions of writing can be traced back to ancient cultures, but when it comes to its ritualization, calligraphy, spiritual psychography and avant-garde artistic experiments are all that we know. It seems that the transient aspect of writing has remained in the shadow of lasting textual documents. Contrary to that, the contemporary performances of writing bring to light living experience of writing – its materiality, kinetics, sensations, etc.”
NAM ChoreoLab /// choreography installation and lecture performance
Curatorial team of the (Non)Aligned Movements: Ana Dubljević, Viktorija Ilioska, Sonja Pregrad in collaboration with Dražen Dragojević
27.10. @18:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
NAM ChoreoLab is a modular research choreography lab with the aim of re-reading the Non-Aligned Movement/s – through the historicity of ‘days of future past’ as well as the urgency of current alignments and antagonisms, in relation to the on-going decolonial and feminist critiques and struggles, and with regard to political and cultural, but also choreographic (self-)governance. NAM ChoreoLab has been conceived and developed by the curatorial choreographers Sonja Pregrad (Zagreb), Viktorija Ilioska (Skopje) and Ana Dubljević (Belgrade), together with independent researcher and performer Dražen Dragojević (Berlin/Ljubljana). The team aligns at the intersection of feminist dramaturgies, contextualised somatic practices, choreographic subjects, speculative and performative theory, decolonial historicism and futurism to reassess – and realign – the Non-Aligned for contemporary audiences and polities through a choreography installation meets lecture performance.
Video interview with Dalija Aćin Thelander /// video with a discussion
+ conversation with the author Milica Ivić
27.10. @20:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
This interview is a continuation of a series of video interviews initiated by the Station as part of its work on archiving the dance scene in Serbia. In the frame of the Balkan Open Digital Dance Archive programme, this time Milica Ivić talked with Dalija Aćin Thelander, one of the founders of Station and the Nomad Dance Academy network, about her work in Belgrade.
The video projection is followed by a conversation with the author Milica Ivić.
Under the droplet /// performance for and with children
Jovana Rakić, Marko Milić, Milica Pisić, Jana Milenković and Milena Todorović
28.10. @14.30, 16.30, 18:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
The performance deals with a girl’s gaze of her inner world and the one that surrounds her. It contains elements of contemporary dance and installation. Under the droplet gives us the opportunity to think about the connection between the world and ourselves, what kind of relationship we are in, how we influence each other, whether we are part of one big entirety, whether we depend on each other or exist separately, each for himself. The biocentric approach is based on equal importance of everything around us, without a hierarchy that gives preference to one language, one person or one artistic direction.
The performance is for children older than 8 years.
Idea, text, choreography and performance: Jovana Rakić, Marko Milić, Milica Pisić/ Jana Milenković and Milena Todorović
Reading by: Nađa Petrović
Sound design: Bojan Palikuća
Stage design: Željka Jakovljević
Production: Stanica Servis za savremeni ples
Number of visitors is limited, please register your child’s participation here: jovanaraki@gmail.com
choosing the time slot, child’s name, surname and age no later than 27/10.
Due to the limited number of places, children will stay at the performance without parents (unless adult accompaniment is necessary).
DOWL /// performance
Sonja Pregrad
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
28.10. @20:00, Gallery Legat Milice Zorić i Rodoljuba Čolakovića (Rodoljuba Čolakovića 2)
DOWL
variants: or dowle \ ˈdau̇(ə)l \
now dialectal, England: feathery or woolly down
: FILAMENT sense a (4)
‘Dance, dance, Otherwise We’re Lost’
(Pleši, pleši, inače smo izgubljeni)
– Pina Bausch
In April 1518, the inhabitants of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) were struck by a sudden and seemingly unbridled urge to dance. The hysteria began when a woman, known as Mrs. Troffea, stepped into the street and began to twist, turn and shake in silence. Where did the waves of collective jerky dance come from in the time of the plague and how can they be meaningful for us today?
Choreographically, the project is written through a group work, using and involving various choreographic and dance forms, from the unison dance as a classicist form of dance, rave, folklore, decoding visual representations of danse macabre, and twisting them into each other, in building complex ecogeometry of composite body choreography.
What and how does the space of (physical) togetherness mean to us in 2021? The choreography itself is conceived as an object of dance constructed by the geometric shaping of the emotional charge between the bodies. This creates an experiential space for affective and cognitive processing of increased intensity within the experience of togetherness that we have witnessed for the last 620 days.
Author: Sonja Pregrad
Music: Nika Pećarina
Performers: Ivana Bojanić, Viktoria Bubalo, Lana Hosni, Anna Javoran, Ana Mrak, Sonja Pregrad
Production: Četveroruka as part of Antisezona 21 (Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb)
Dance till the New Dawn /// presentation of the work-in-progress
Bojan Đorđev, Igor Koruga, Siniša Ilić, Mirjana Dragosavljević, Marijana Cvetković
29.10. @17:30, Ostavinska galerija (Kraljevića Marka 4)
Kondez will present a theoretical and artistic research Dance till the New Dawn as a work in progress.
Through an installation that will be set in the Ostavinska Gallery from October 25 to 31 and a performative presentation that will take place on October 29, the authors deal with topics such as: who has the right to art? to whom does it belong? who needs it?
Focusing on historical moments of dance development and performance that are important in today’s struggle against the commodification of art, they question today’s role and position of dance and historical dance figures as metaphors for a society that continually forms individuals and structures the society.
Bojan Djordjev’s research goes in the direction of studying the relations and friction between the terms “people’s”, “national”, “popular”, “populist”, “folklore” and “avant-garde” on the examples of communist art of the middle of the 20th century, namely American engaged folk songs, New York leftist choreographers and partisan and revolutionary art of Yugoslavia, especially partisan poetry. In this phase of the work, together with the actor Nikola Voštinić, Đorđev explores the performative potentials of three songs: Arthur Rimbaud’s “Sleeper in the Valley” (1870), its partisan version from Sutjeska “Sleeper” (1943) by Radonja Vešović and the “American Beloved Comrade” (1936) by Lewis Allan.
Siniša Ilić’s artistic research relies on interpretations of the historical mosaic of Miloš Gvozdenović created in 1969 in the foyer of the Cultural centre in Novi Pazar, which, through narrative figurative sections, panoramically depicts society – which can be understood as a welfare society. Rhythm, presentation and narrative are choreographed and compositionally balanced – they range from ethnographic depictions of customs, struggle, urbanization and modernization, industrial – textile production, sports, culminating in the scene of dance – culture. The research is realized through a series of artistic and spatial / performative interpretations, with the former based on work with drawing, video and stone texture. This segment of the research is part of Siniša Ilić’s cooperation with the Centre for Cultural Decontamination. Thank you to the Cultural Center of Novi Pazar
In her research, Mirjana Dragosavljević uses a combination of text and image, a format that is adapted to the dominant consumption of content through social networks and pop culture, in order to deal with different practices of dance and movement in the context of the Yugoslav revolution.
Igor Koruga focuses his research on the artistic and pedagogical practices of the founders of modern dance, Mage Magazinović and Lujo Davičo during the period between 1930 and 1945 in Serbia and their socio-cultural and political positioning between the nationalist, fascist and socialist ideologies of the time. Artistic research will be shaped through the dramatization of concepts and information from the life and work of Davičo and Magazinović in a short format of TikTok videos, as a current form of digital and online distribution of knowledge.
Through a rehearsal of the women’s senior choir whose performance is choreographed by Dušan Murić, Marijana Cvetković offers a magnifying picture of the work of Lujo Davičo, a pre-war choreographer and anti-fascist, author of choreographies of illegal performances by workers’ choirs in the pre-war Belgrade. After his heroic death during the Second World War, this engaged work was erased from the memory of the dance scene and the general public, even though the first and only Belgrade ballet high school bears his name.
The project is part of the programme Creative Crossroads in the frame of a large project Life Long Burning, and is supported by the Nomad Dance Academy network, Kik Melone from Zagreb, Brain Store Project from Sofia and Lokomotiva Centre for new initiatives in arts and culture from Skopje (the project is part of Lokomotiva’s Art, Politics, Institution, Body program and implemented within the European network Life Long Burning, supported by Creative Europe, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia and the City of Skopje).
Bad Company /// performance
Vito Weis
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
29.10. @20:30, UK Vuk (Bul. Kralja Aleksandra 77)
Vito Weis, an actor widely hailed for his stage presence and uncompromising delivery, strikes again with his first original solo piece. Early on, its development process was cut short by the pandemic, which shattered the initial ideas and premises, along with the authors creative calm (or restlessness). While the pandemic shook the very principles of human activity, including artistic creativity, to their foundations it also opened up new, uncharted horizons and an opportunity for new considerations. With the need to isolate came a strong sense of psychological insecurity and…new company. We were suddenly left on our own – alone with ourselves.
Bad Company is a result of this – a distillate of the spirit of the age in desperate need of an audience. A distillate stripped of words and nearly all stage illusions that is nevertheless a full-blooded theatre experience. A distillate that refuses to be intrusive, instead offering a „multicoloured“ juxtaposition of stage images. In them, the author tackles many pressing issues of the day and age that we live in, while accompanied by music from another era – the time of different epidemic.
Direction consultant: Žiga Divjak
Movement consultant:: Nina Pertot Weis
Music and sound design consultant: Tomaž Grom
Dramaturgy consultants and concept development assistants: Žiga Divjak, Nina Pertot Weis, Tomaž Grom
Lighting design: Vito Weis, Igor Remeta
Set and costume design: Vito Weis
Technical manager: Igor Remeta
Producers: Tina Drobnik (Nova pošta), Nika Bezeljak (Moment)
To whom does shame belong? /// workshop for teenage girls
Jasna Jasna Žmak
30.10. 10:00 – 14:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
Although sometimes it doesn’t seem that way – shame is an integral part of our lives, and all people are sometimes ashamed – of things they did and things they didn’t, of their appearance, their decisions, their mistakes … And while some things we are ashamed of we can hide from others, our bodies are constantly exposed – and very often, especially in our culture, covered with a thick layer of shame. In this workshop, through simple tasks, we will have the opportunity to get to know together our own shame related to our bodies, to see how it affects our behaviour and try to understand it better in order to, perhaps, reduce it at least a little.
Who is this workshop for?
The workshop is for the girls between 13 and 19 years old, who want to get to know better themselves, their body and their shame in a safe environment. Goodwill and confidentiality are the basic conditions for working together – which means that we know how to respect our own and other people’s borders, that we never force anybody to what they don’t want and that everything we say remains between us. We will work in a small group, up to 6 people.
Where and when?
The workshop will be held on Saturday, October 30 from 11.00 to 14.00 in Magacin.
How to apply?
By October 28 send a few sentences about yourself (what you do, what are your hobbies …) and one photo, drawing or song that illustrate shame for you to this address: stanica.info@gmail.com
Feminist Landscapes /// promotion of the books by Ana Dubljević and Jasna Jasna Žmak
30.10. @17:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
Choreographer Ana Dubljević and playwright Jasna Jasna Žmak will present their new books – Ana’s “Feminist pornscapes, on feminist dramaturgical thinking in dance and performance practice” and Jasna’s “Dirty words – Essays on female sexuality”. Although the books deal with different fields of interest, they both have a strong feminist connecting line.
“Feminist Pornscapes, On feminist dramaturgical thinking in dance and performance practice “
“The book of Ana Dubljević explores the notion of feminist dramaturgy and the ways in which dramaturgy can be experienced as a feminist practice. This is a rich and challenging book from a practitioner, artist and writer, who articulates her thinking on dramaturgy through practical collective performance work. Her writing about dramaturgy is situated within the collaborative practice of performance making, which at the same time opens many relative issues in relation to general questions about dramaturgy and its role in performance work. Even if dramaturgy as a working practice quite often belongs to women, there is a lack of discourse on feminist dramaturgy. Ana Dubljević shows, how with the feminist framing of the procedures of work the collective processes and working methods can get a sharper and more profiled focus, where the politics and ethics of performance practice becomes tightly entwined with the embodied materiality of performance work.” – Bojana Kunst, excerpt from the book’s preface.
This book is a part of the project Feminist Futures by apap network www.apapnet.eu
“Dirty Words – Essays on female sexuality”
In this collection of essays Jasna Jasna Žmak explicitly and directly tackles topics such as gender and sexual orientation, menstruation and masturbation, innocence and sex, thinness and obesity, breast and gynecology. Bypassing completely the shocking approach, but without censorship and restraint, Žmak writes about these topics openly and gently at the same time, combining personal experiences with quotations from contemporary sexological literature, with the inevitable feminist stamp.
Precarious Moves /// performance
Michael Turinsky
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
30.10. @20:00, Centre for cultural decontamination (Birčaninova 29)
How does a body set itself in motion where the relation between the body and what surrounds it appears as a fundamentally precarious, vulnerable relation? In Precarious Moves Michael Turinsky continues his investigation of resistant choreographic positionings through designing political aesthetics. At the centre of the solo, which is as much biographical as conceptual, lies the questioning of both his very own personal as well as urgent collective needs and necessities with regard to mobility and mobilization, pertinent as they are especially within the tension between movement and environment, between gesture and milieu. Oscillating between the organic and the organized, Precarious Moves unfolds as an ironic as well as engaged of the strange loop that connects the body with the sensual world through which it moves; as a searching movement in which the deviating gesture discovers its choreographic milieu, and at the same time opens our sensitivity beyond the same.
Performance, choreography, text and verse: Michael Turinsky
Music, lyrics: Tian Rotteveel
Stage / costume: Jenny Schleif
Photo / video: Michael Loizenbauer
Dramaturgical advice: Gabrielle Cram
Production: Anna Gräsel // groundworks.at
A production by Michael Turinsky Verein für philosophische Praxis
Coproductions: Tanzquartier Wien, HAU Hebbel am Ufer
Program Dance On, Pass On, Dream On
Daikon, an essay in movement about a dancer’s body /// performance
Sanja Krsmanović Tasić
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
31.10. @17:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
The essay in movement “Daikon” by Sanja Krsmanović Tasić deals with the body of a dancer as the basic means and instrument of expression. Through the self-ironic process of inventory and bodily archiving of layers of conscious and unconscious movements, from the stage and from private life, the author will tell the story of a body that moves motionless, of a body that is a dilapidated shell in which the spirit still plays passionately, of the delusions of the dancer’s body. A story about the constant search for true movement, and the path of dancers on the sidelines.
“Essay in movement” is a stage form that the author has been developing for a decade. Like any essay, an essay in movement contains footnotes that are displayed at the end, during, or at the very beginning of the essay-performance. The audience always has the opportunity to choose the order in which the footnotes will be revealed / displayed in space, through text, video work, stage, intervention in space, interaction or in some other unexpected way. This form is educational and artistic and contributes to the energy flow and interaction between the audience and the performers.
Music and video: Jugoslav Hadžić
Scene: Anastasia Tasić
Kostim: Suzana Anović
Production: Station Service for contemporary dance
Support: Programme Body until then (telodotada.wordpress.com) in the frame of the project Dance On, Pass On, Dream On, Creative Europe programme of the European Union
Program Dance On, Pass On, Dream On
I am still walking /// performance
Jelena Jović
+ after-talk with the authors and Miloš Janjić
In the general attitude that everything should be calmed down in order for life to be saved, keeping walking has become a kind of resistance. Thus, it ceases to be only a physical action, but also a reflexive process in which we recall previous life experiences, memories, and meet various people and landscapes. From the foggy path this solo started from, two paths separated (almost imperceptibly), one of apparent carelessness and glamour and the other of poverty and exhaustion. These paths intersected, as if in a crossword. The question remains – can a third one be opened?
31.10. @18:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
Ideja, koreografija i izvođenje: Jelena Jović
Saradnja: Marko Milić i Marko Pejović
Kostim i video: Jelena Jović
Video montaža: Nataša Pavlović
Support: Programme Body until then (telodotada.wordpress.com) in the frame of the project Dance On, Pass On, Dream On, Creative Europe programme of the European Union
Depleting or Floating beyond our own limits /// performance and guided talk with the audience
Marko Pejović
!!! CANCELLED due to illness /// 31.10. @20:00, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
As if there had never been a standstill. It was as if we were always running, non-stop, sometimes without mercy. How many days on vacation does it take for a vacation to really start? At the same time, it shouldn’t last long, so that we don’t get lazy. It’s as if we were always afraid of what would happen if we stopped. That awful moment of silence and stillness. Like a death. That’s why we have to run, to prove that we are alive. That others see us, that they do not erase us from their memories.
The project “Depleting …” tries to focus on the sources that lead us to a state of willinglessness. At the same time, it points out ways to renew our strength, as well as how the effects of these efforts can be strengthened through joint action.
The performance of the created dance materials, made in the process with three dancers, will be an invitation for the audience to stop for a moment, think aloud and get involved in the dance community.
Process leader: Marko Pejović
Performers and co-authors of the dance materials: Ana Obradović, Isidora Poledica i Miloš Janjić
From body to body /// video installation
Aleks Zain
29-31.10, Magacin (Kraljevića Marka 4)
From body to body is an interactive installation intended for the general public, but also for us who deal with contemporary dance as our professional practice. The installation shows the two currents of interest – we examine how dance and dance practices can help communities and people who are not professional dancers, i.e. how dancing can be beneficial to everyone; but also there is a story made up of the personal experiences of contemporary dance artists, with a focus on injuries, health issues and other obstacles that are less popular topics to discuss. The artist believes that when we want to talk about healing we should start from the problem, from what is behind a certain psychological practice, reflecting on why the dancer gets into a situation of injury or a bad mental state, what our paths really look like, etc. If we share with others, it may be easier for us.
The video consists of several short interviews that audience can listen to, but also, following the central part of the video installation, test a few exercises from different dance practices.
The installation will be open for public from October 29 to October 31 in Magacin (Illegal Cinema). A part of From body to body project is a poll to be concluded at October 28 (available here, Naš language only) trough which we intend to survey how the broader dance community relates towards the issues of openness for communication, where and how to ask for help when we need it, and how we see the development of this community in the future.
Production: Station Service for contemporary dance
14th Kondenz Festival of contemporary dance and performance, 23-31 October 2021
Curators: Ana Dubljević, Mirjana Dragosavljević, Marijana Cvetković
Production and organization: Olivera Kecojević
Organization: Filip Perić
Financial management: Ana Ranković
General management: Marijana Cvetković
Vizuelni identitet: Anna Ehrlemark
Layout: Marija Konjikušić
PR Monika Husar / KomunikArt
Social networks: Aleksandra Đonin i Magdalena Zrnjević
Photo and video support: Photo team of Magacin and Vladimir Opsenica
Web: Vladimir Jerić Vlidi
English proofreading: Paul Murray