2nd block | IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO THIS GROUND WHETHER WE FALL OR RISE

Much like time is indifferent to whether we are within or without it and light is indifferent to whether it’s refracting on an object or not, so too is the ground indifferent to whether we are falling, getting up, or even remaining lying down – peacefully, restlessly, effortful, or surrendering.

The second block of this year’s ANTISEZONA spans from the 17th of June to the 13th of July, across five spaces, with an international programme and ten performance-discursive events.

The solo Object of Dance opens the performance programme, in which Sonja Pregrad uses mirror-multiplied reflections of the audience and herself in drag to posit the question “what even is dance and what more could it be?” Ivana Bojanić’s and Viktoria Bubalo’s We Were Not Here was created out of the “unexplained fascination with the image of the body and the presence that diverges from itself and the space”, while Silvia Marchig’s Exit Eurydice is this year’s premiere that is developing around the themes of doubt, death and perseverance.

The international programme begins in Park Ribnjak with an event called Dog Café, in which Swedish artist Stina Nyberg is inviting dogs and their owners to hang out and exchange life experiences from two perspectives – the human and the canine. Dog Café is a preparatory part of the guest performance this artist will have in this year’s September block of ANTISEZONA.

The international programme continues in Pogon Jedinstvo with the performance The Ruin Is a Tale by young artist Sancha Meca Castro, following the “interest in ruins as a locus of transformation […] expanded in a tension between the idea of transforming gestures into fossils and rupturing those images”. Michael Turinsky, choreographer, performer and theoretician from Vienna, is one of the most influential artists of today engaging with the specific phenomenology that comes with a body marked as a “body with a disability”. On the big stage of the Zagreb Youth Theatre, he will perform the solo Precarious Moves, which “continues his investigation of resistant choreographic gestures through designing choreo-political aesthetics”.

ANTISEZONA’S recurring programmes, the improvisational performance Gorgona Is Burning, Bitter, Proud and Crimson!, in which artists from the block Sonja Pregrad, Ivana Bojanić, Sancha Meca Castro and Silvia Marchig will be meeting, the moderated discussion programme Hangover Sessions and the reading-and-watch club The 11 Foxes Society, round off this summer block.

The instabilities of the performing body, the displacements of perceptual vantage points and the poetics of vanishing of this block invite us into liminal experiences, ontological in-between states and impossible relations. The exits remain ever open, with a ground that there’s to meet us with its indifferent, immutable steadfastness.