Nina Gojić
The autumn bloc of Antisezona programme took place between November 19 and 23 2024 in the format of a large-scale choreographic convention, it was entitled Bodies in Free Fall and brought a great variety of discursive and follow-up programmes, hosted an international advocacy event that dealt with the future of dance in Croatia and the region, opened a first of its kind exhibition on the history of dance in Yugoslavia, as well as presented a number of regional guest performances and Antisezona-produced performances.
Tuesday, November 19
The programme kicked off on Tuesday, November 19 in Tala Ple(j)s with a workshop facilitated by young Croatia-based dance makers and choreographers, Linda Tarnovski and Dora Pocedić. The workshop was organised by Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld within the framework of the Modular School and produced by Nomad Dance Croatia, while the details about this educational platform were shared on Thursday as part of their installation-presentation. The official programme announced the workshop Constellation of Bodies by Teodora Ežovska, but due to her illness, the workshop Co-llaging took place insead, as Tarnovski and Pocedić were also the participants of the Modular School. In the workshop they shared their ongoing interest in translating collages from visual art and pop culture into choreographic principles: by offering strategies of covering and revealing in making spatial decisions and other choreographic tactics based on the idea of composite/fragmented bodies, the group arrived at a collective collage-like group body.
In the evening an official opening of the whole Choreographic Convention took place, with Iva Nerina Sibila, the director of the Convention, Silvia Marchig, one of the producers and Antisezona co-curators, and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vesna Meštrić.
The opening programme adopted one of Antisezona’s ongoing formats, namely Performance Situation Room: Dance Encounters of the Dance Kind which presented the premiere of the film What Would You Send Into the Future of Dance? The film was made specifically for the occasion of the Choreographic Convention, with the aim to present the Croatian dance scene to the international dance community. The film was conceptualised and realised by Nina Gojić and Silvia Marchig, and filmed and edited by Nina Đurđević. It features short, 30-second portraits of more than 40 Croatian dancers, choreographers and pedagogues, as well as dance collectives and ensembles, who were invited to answer the following question in dance and written form: If there was something at your disposal right now, that you would send into the future of dance, what would it be? For very trivial practical reasons, the responses presented in the film don’t encapsulate the entirety of the scene, but demonstrate its multiplicity, polyphony and persistence. The film is permanently available on Antisezona’s web page, both in English and Croatian.
The first performance of the bloc was the premiere HIHI by the young dancer/choreographer and new media artist Ivana Bojanić. It was produced by the organisation Kik Melone and Silvia Marchig, while other members of the authorial team include Margareta Firinger (co-performer), Luka Bosanac (dramaturg), Tin Dožić and Ivona Eterović (sound designers and musicians), Anna Javoran (choreographic advice), Bruna Jakupović (costume designer), Sindri Uču (promo design) and Saša Fistrić (light designer). The performance deals with creeps and shivers not only in relation to fear, but also in relation to pleasure. Scheduling a young dance maker’s performance at the opening of the whole event reflects Antisezona’s mission and purpose not only as a platform dedicated to self-curating, but also as an initiative that continuously aims to support young professionals at the beginnings of their careers by offering them infrastructural support and creative production guidance.
Wednesday, November 20
The following day was dedicated to the Nomad Dance Advocacy event and the opening of the Non-Aligned Movement(s) exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Advocacy event, under the subtitle Transformative Policies for Dance, took place in Zagreb Dance Centre and after a welcome by the organisers and the hosts from the Centre, the participants and audiences of the Advocacy event were invited by Dejan Srhoj (Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia) and Gisela Müller (Tanzfabrik Berlin) for an introductory warm-up. They proposed a set of scores for meeting and greeting each other, offered a sheet where everyone was invited to write down their wishes and expectations for the day, and the warm-up ended with a collective dance in the main hall where the Advocacy started.
The first and longest panel bore the title Activating the Present of Dance and dealt with current cultural policies in the region (and further) focusing on positioning, producing and sustaining contemporary dance, and mapping the urgent challenges and perspectives that the sector is facing. The speakers of the panel were Nevena Tudor Perković from the Directorate for Cultural and Artistic Development in Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Goran Sergej Pristaš from the Working Group for Cultural Strategy and Development of the City of Zagreb, Marijana Cvetković from Station – Service for contemporary dance in Belgrade and Madeline Ritter, a lawyer, curator and arts programmer from Bureau Ritter in Berlin. The panel was moderated by Teja Reba, an independent performance maker, artistic director, and strategic advisor from the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia.
The first speaker was Nevena Tudor Perković who presented current strategies of support for contemporary dance in Croatia. She pointed out that, in line with the National Strategy for Culture Development, the Ministry was dedicated to supporting artistic production and distribution, but since they realised it was not enough for dance, the Ministry launched a new call in 2022 for artistic research in the field of dance and choreography. Besides that, Tudor Perković emphasised other calls where dance artists can apply with their projects: international cooperation, educational activities, support for touring in schools around Croatia, etc. However, it was said that the two main calls dedicated primarily to dance – production and choreographic research – are funded by merely 0,57% of the entire budget for culture. When asked by the moderator about the reasons for such a disproportionate allocation compared to other art forms, Tudor Perković stated that the fragmentation of the scene and the fact that a platform for development of dance was missing at a national level are responsible for this. When Reba pointed out that small budgets contribute to fragmentation, Tudor Perković agreed that open calls are just tools which don’t take into account all the needs of the scene. She recognised that an institution at a national level would contribute to that, and singled out a positive example of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre which is responsible for the production of film on the national level. A similar initiative now exists in the field of book publishing and Tudor Perković, when asked about this from the audience, stated that the dance scene is also ready for a complementary initiative. The details of such an endeavor however remained unspecified, but it is a milestone in the conversation about the founding of a national dance research centre.
Goran Sergej Pristaš continued the conversation by presenting how the new city government renders culture and what it does for dance specifically. Beside inheriting the city in a nearly bankrupt state, Pristaš singled out other obstacles for cultural development: a very slow bureaucratic apparatus that remained from the previous administration, an increased isolation of Zagreb (cancellation of train lines and airlines), and the incapacity of the National Strategy for Culture Development to respond to the actual needs of the scene. Speaking of dance, Pristaš said that, despite the financial obstacles, dance was the only art form which received an increase in the first year of the new administration’s mandate, precisely because it was disproportionately financed in relation to other artforms. He presented a chart which clearly demonstrated a significant growth of budgets for the independent scene – to which the dance scene entirely belongs since it has no institution of its own. The chart showed that the overall budget has doubled over the past three years, making it possible to support a bigger number of dance projects with increased budgets. Pristaš contextualised these finances in relation to institutional culture and theatres that absorb a large part of the budget for culture, but despite that, the new city plan for culture introduced and plans to continue introducing new measures such as: new open calls for young artists, institutional support for independent organisations, upcoming calls for experimental practices, residencies and curators. Beside that, Pristaš introduced long-term plans which include the opening of new spaces for independent culture where dance artists will also be able to work in, since a lack of spatial infrastructure has been a problem for the scene since its beginnings. Moreover, he pointed out that the problem of the Zagreb Dance Centre, which is still a part of Zagreb Youth Theatre, is planned to be solved through the new hybrid institution called New Cultural Spaces. This institution is expected to enable the opening of new performance spaces for the independent scene, with funding through local budgets and EU funds.
The next to speak was Marijana Cvetković, Belgrade-based producer from Stanica who started her exposition by asking how to even speak about art and culture in the current Serbian context marked by serious political protests, followed by governmental repression, arrests, police violence and the destroying of places that are connected to the oppositional forces in the country.
In this context, which she described as nationalist, market-oriented and autocratic, Cvetković asserted that there was no coherent cultural policy in Serbia on the national level and no transparent funding strategy. There are public calls for independent culture, but those are regularly misused and manipulated by the elites, while last year there was no open call at all. As far as dance art is concerned, the budgets are scarce and distributed in non-transparent ways, and the representatives in the Ministry of Culture and City Council don’t demonstrate an interest in dance, which is made clear in the fact that only one representative has visited any of the previously held choreographic conventions. Cvetković warned about the fact that many people who worked in opposition to these policies have been silenced, while many others left the country. However, she also mentioned a parallel initiative that is organised in Belgrade, in which a number of allies have gathered to create an alternative strategy for cultural development to be ready when the political change happens: next year there will be a series of public forums and a public document will be released as a result. Cvetković posited that survival of the dance (and wider cultural) scene is only possible because different actors from the civil society as well as international collaborators stick together in solidarity, combine the knowledge that has been accumulated and this way they have been creating implicit cultural policies which actively make a difference and contribute to nurturing hope for a different future in Serbia.
Moving away from the Balkan region, Madeline Ritter from Berlin spoke through her experiences as a producer and programmer in the arts. She emphasised the importance of self-organisation in dance and posited it as one of its distinctive features by giving the example when in 2005 she herself was active in creating the dance plan for Germany and learned that in many other countries similar national dance plans were created at the same time, with no counterparts in other art forms. Speaking of Germany, in the past 20 years dance received around 80 million euros, but dance is still at the lowest level of funding with only 1-3 % of the total budget for culture. Ritter shared her experiences in building policies for dance by introducing the system of impact funding: looking for what is necessary to support in order for it to create an impact. She distinguished structural funding for dance from institutional funding, as a way of looking at all the elements that constitute the ecosystem of dance in which artists define what they need: the scene is looked at as a unified entity and there is a regular evaluation of the funding system so communication is maintained at all levels all the time in order to be able to respond to the needs of the scene constantly. Finally, Ritter introduced the Übermorgen for arts institutions, a model of policy-building that connects the different actors from the scene, recognising that all arts are always fragile because they depend on wider social events, so this model invited existing institutions to become part of the co-learning process and engage in a two year process of developing ideas on how to make arts more resilient.
In the discussion that followed and included the audience, more was said about the role of institutions and the position of dance as an underfunded art. Institutions’ main function should be a responsibility for the totality of its field and the plan in Zagreb is to make existing institutions more open for the employees to affect what is being done, as well as ensure better evaluation systems. It was pointed out that dance is a highly feminised field of work which might explain why there is no gender pay gap, because the budgets are anyway too little and the dance scene is a highly interconnected one, based on caring for each other. Coming back to the topic of a possible new national institution for dance, Pristaš remarked that the scene was ready already 20 years ago and that the then National strategy for Culture included a plan to open such an institution, but it never happened. Teja Reba concluded the panel with an encouragement for this initiative in Croatia based on the Slovene experience with a similar initiative for instituting dance: the working group was comprised of members from administration and the scene so the preparation of the document was in constant dialogue with the actual needs and this is what made it realistic.
The second panel was called Futuring: Dance Research as the Foundation of a New Dance Institution, moderated by Alexandra Baybutt and featuring people who actively participate in producing and developing dance research: Marjana Krajač, Franz Anton Cramer, Bojana Cvejić and Rok Vevar. After an introductory welcome by the moderator who presented this panel as a contribution to imagining and establishing a new dance institution in Croatia, in the context where dance still needs to prove itself as a credible art form, the individual presentations ensued.
The first presentation was carried out by Marjana Krajač, entitled Research as Resistance: as Methodology, Inquiry, and Political Practice. In it she advocated for an apprehension of performance and theory as resistance, and dance research as capable of challenging power relations. She approached this from three angles: research methods as resistance, critical theory in dance, and the political history of socialist Yugoslavia. She offered an expanded understanding of dance not merely as a set of activities, practices, or expressive outcomes but as a method of resistance and a form of political and social practice. For Krajač, dance is a critical, embodied practice able to challenge dominant narratives by generating counterhegemonic ways of knowing, which aligns it with feminist and decolonial methodologies.
Franz Anton Cramer spoke about an increase in creating discourse from experience and research and, as a contribution to the topic of a new institute for dance, asked how dance-specific knowledge can be translated into an institutional context. Speaking as an experienced dance archivist, Cramer holds that dance research always needs to be historic, however he locates a new epistemic shift at the moment characterised by the ideas of embodiment (doing rather than just perceiving), non-archival research, issues of decolonising approaches and the increase of the digital realm, which means multiple translations of dance to different media. He brought two examples from his archival work: Border-Dancing Across Time which deals with the legacy of the choreographer and dancer Nyota Inyoka. During this process, he and his collaborators realised they needed methodologies of embodiment and artistic research, in order to combine archival research and embodied learning. The second example was about the launching of the BA programme in Berlin’s HZT school in 2006, when Cramer and others proposed the title of the programme to be contemporary dance, knowledge, choreography, but the bureaucratic system didn’t render the term “knowledge” acceptable in the context of art education because knowledge belonged to the realm of science. These two examples served as symptoms for the changing paradigm of dance research today.
Next, Bojana Cvejić mapped the evolution of the very term “dance research”, dating it back around twenty years ago when the term was popularised in the context of artistic research. In a time when budgets were bigger and daily life was more affordable, research was an integral part of performance-making, enabling longer production periods and artistic experimentation. Following the educational turn in the arts, budgets from art relocated into academia, resulting in a proliferation of degrees, a professionalisation of arts and as a consequence academia offered a refuge for what was no longer desirable: experimentation. Moreover, Cvejić distinguished research through dance, which engages with topics of broader significance explored by means of dance, functioning as both an epistemological and political strategy. To give an example, Cvejić singled out two recent research projects she is currently participating in: a collaboration with Jonathan Burrows in which they investigate new findings in the neuroscience of movement, and in dialogue with dance practitioners try to challenge the binary between improvised and set movement. She gave more examples from her practice, about research carried out together with Ana Vujanović, where they use choreography as an instrument to look past art into society, and a recent project on choreographing antifascism in the context of rising extreme right-wing politics, marking her shift in an interest from dance-specific knowledge to social choreography that brings different social fields closer.
The final panelist, Rok Vevar, was not at the panel in person so the moderator read his contribution which reiterated the need for a national institution, and he provided extra context for the exhibition that would open a few hours later. Vevar asserted how Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia has been active in developments of archiving and historicising dance in Slovenia, which eventually led to the Temporary Slovene Dance Archive being established in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. A regional dance archive in the form of a digital database will be launched soon, and Vevar made it a point that Nomad Dance Academy has a strategic plan to found dance archives in material form in all the republics of the partners involved: Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, which is another argument for the establishing of a dance institution. Finally, he proposed a list of needs that the future institution should accommodate: an archive department for dance with proper historiographic expertises, research programmes in the fields of history of dance and theory, research for development of cultural policies in the field of dance, research for development of different inter-sectoral programmes and competences in the field of the applied dance studies for development of different sustainability programmes, different artistic research programmes and possibilities for residencies, as well as scientific and artistic transdisciplinary research that would provide insights into the relation between neurology and dance kinetics.
The final panel of the day, New Structures for a New Future – call for action, took a significantly different shape. The moderators, Dragana Alfirević and Igor Dobričić, proposed to engage in a collective dreaming session, putting all pragmatism aside for an hour. The invited speakers were Anna Efraimsson, Matija Ferlin, Nina Gojić, Elena Novakovits and Iva Nerina Sibila. The moderators invited the speakers to offer their dreams to the participants of the Convention, and this was done in a dark room where people could choose to lie on the floor, close their eyes, or even fall asleep if they needed to. After the presenters shared their dreams, other participants could then continue dreaming, interpret what was dreamt by someone else or simply repeat something that resonated. The session lasted a little over an hour and evolved into a shared dream wherein many of the guests of the Convention contributed with their wishes and desires for the future of dance and institutions for dance.
The programme continued in the Museum of Contemporary Art with the opening of the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – aspects of dance as a cultural, political and art work in Yugoslavia and after. It was opened by the director of the Museum, Vesna Meštrić, the Museum’s producer Branko Kostelnik, as well as the two main curators of the exhibition, Biljana Tanurovska Kjulavkovski and Rok Vevar. Other members of the curatorial team include Slavčo Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci and Jasmina Založnik, the exhibition was designed by Siniša Ilić, visual materials were made by Andrej Dolinka, the producer is Marijana Cvetković, and Ana Letunić collaborated as the local executive producer. At the opening it was pointed out that this is the first exhibition to offer such an extensive insight into the dance history of former Yugoslavia, a precedent of its kind. The exhibition also marks the end of a four-year long research project Non-Aligned Movement(s) which was dedicated to exploring the shared legacies of dance histories and cultural connections in former Yugoslavia, and this also involved building an online archive that will be launched by the time the exhibition closes. In that sense, the exhibition is the first manifestation to share the team’s archiving endeavor publicly, while a more detailed info on the exhibition itself follows in the description of the guided tour that happened the next day.
In line with the topic of archiving dance, the exhibition opening was complemented with the performance Desire to Make a Solid History Will End in Failure. Both the choreographer, Igor Koruga, and the dramaturg, Milica Ivić, were members of the archiving research team responsible for the exhibition, so the performance itself functions as a performative contribution to the topic, in the format of a live archive. The performance featured six senior-age dancers from Belgrade who performed their relationship to their own histories in dance and the political struggles that formed them, just as they shaped the cultural context they participated in. They are Nela Antonović, Anđelija Todorović, Jelena Jović, Tatjana Pajović, Boris Čakširan, and Sanja Krsmanović Tasić. The performance was produced by Marijana Cvetković of Stanica Service for contemporary dance, in partnership with the Dance On, Pass On, Dream On project, the Creative Europe program and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, as well as Cultural Center Magacin and Bitef Theater in Belgrade.
Thursday, November 21
On Thursday, November 21, the programme was back at Tala Ple(j)s with an open lab facilitated by Naama Shoshana Fogiel Lewin and organised by Nomad Dance Academy Croatia. Intersecting interests for movement as a physical and political practice, Fogiel Lewin shared several approaches to body work which revolve around exploring compassion, consent and care in the context of somatic work and dance. After the presentation of the Modular School (see next paragraph), she presented a short performance in which she performs a farewell letter to her country of origin, Israel, wherein she situates herself in opposition to its militaristic, occupational and genocidal politics.
After the workshop, an interactive installation was displayed as a result of the educational pilot-programme Modular School, run by Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld and Nomad Dance Academy Croatia. The presentation featured works of young dance artists from Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia: Viktoria Bubalo, Boris Barukčić, Silvija Dogan, Jovana Zelenović, Dora Pocedić, Linda Tarnovski, Sara Trbara, Nika Špekuljuk, Ela Đimoti and Teodora Ežovska, while the latter two performed a short excerpt from their work-in-progress, based on the residency which was the last one to take place in this iteration of the programme. Afterwards, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld gave the context of the school and the format: it is a two-year temporary platform dedicated to young dance professionals who were invited to apply with their projects at any stage of development, while NDA Croatia provided mentors for their projects (Roberta Milevoj, Jasna Žmak, Nikolina Pristaš, among others) and micro-residencies in Struga (Macedonia), Belgrade (Serbia) and Ljubljana (Slovenia). The project has now been finalised, while the participants’ project unfolded in different formats, not only as performances but also artistic research, workshops, videos etc. The Modular School offered support for these works to gain adequate time and additional resources for their development.
In the afternoon at the Museum of Contemporary Art there was a curatorial guide through the aforementioned exhibition: Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – aspects of dance as a cultural, political and art work in Yugoslavia and after. This was an opportunity to gain more insight into specific curatorial decisions on how the works have been chosen and put on display, while the curators once again underlined that this exhibition is just one station of a longer research project, pointing out that some parts of former Yugoslavia were still missing (Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo). With the contributions of over a hundred individuals and collectives, the exhibition includes archives in the media of video, photography, costumes, props, publications such as catalogues, practice-based written research, articles and graphic and promotional materials. These exhibits are arranged into three main complementary wholes, each communicating with its wider social context while at the same time offering an understanding of dance-specific knowledges and aesthetics. The thematic segments are (proto)feminist and (proto)queer practices, dance as (part of) resistance, and formations that nurture self-organisation and knowledge production. As pointed in the introductory text, the aim is to affirm dance and choreography as not only aesthetic but also social practice capable of provoking and contributing to social change, precisely because of dance’s ability to understand organisations of bodies in space and time as an inherently political activity.
After the guide, the performance Inside the Outside took place, choreographed by Deborah Hay as part of her longer collaboration with Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia. Co-created by Dragana Alfirević, DISCOllective, Jana Jevtović, Beno Novak, Jan Rozman and Dejan Srhoj, this performance is based on openness and asserts the idea of choreography as a set of principles and unfolding of forms, by working with the performers’ attention, responsibilities and learning by dancing. It was produced by Dragana Alfirević and Jasmina Založnik of Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, supported by Ljubljana municipality – Cultural Department, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, Dance On Pass On Dream On project within Creative Europe, and hosted by Bunker, Kino Šiška and DUM – Društvo umetnikov (Ljubljana).
The last event of the day was three-hour long experiential workshop facilitated by selma banich and Group for New Folk Practices called Voices: a Lullaby for Bodies in Free Fall. The practice is part of an ongoing research that banich has been developing over the past years, while this event was organised in collaboration with the Somatic Laboratory for Voice Matters. The workshop gathered participants from the local Zagreb scene as well as the Convention’s international guests. As stated in the call for participation, the practice is based on looking critically at the concepts of resilience and sustainability used to normalise human and non-human suffering under capitalism, so the Voices speak of individual and collective experiences of trauma, fragility as an experience of radical resistance, and healing as a tool for social change and liberation. In a three-hour session, the participants got to experience the methodology proposed by selma banich, which draws proposals from her long activist experience as well as her more recent education in art therapy. During the session, the group worked with notions taken from therapeutic practices, such as empowerment, (self-)care, self-doubt and by the end of the gathering engaged in the practice of a collective soothing lullaby.
Friday, November 22
The last two days of the Choreographic Convention were marked by performances and practices by dance and new media artists primarily based in Croatia. On Friday, November 22 the audience had an opportunity to experience group talks with the dance artist Lana Hosni, a practice she has been developing over the past three years. Entitled Conversations about assumptions, beliefs, conditionings, prejudices, habits, unwritten rules, tendencies… that revolve in the space of dance and more or less obviously affect the way we experience it, it is a practice that started as one-on-one series of conversations about doing dance and being part of the dance scene, while the conversations evolved into a group format as well. By using associative card decks, Hosni engages participants in a method of reflecting on one’s position toward dance, as well as locating the common threads among members of the dance scene. On this occasion, a group of five international guests met with Hosni, each bringing their own responses and current preoccupations, such as the relationship to abstraction in dance, hierarchies, authorities and inequalities in structures supporting dance, the pressures of self-care seen as a distraction from structural causes of individual hardships.
The performative part of the programme began with a rerun of the performance Blink of Silence by Tamara Bračun, a member of the inclusive dance company Magija from Rijeka. The performance premiered in 2022 as a joint production of two oldest Croatian inclusive dance collectives: DIVERT Collective (ex-IMRC) and Magija Dance Collective. It is performed by the author Tamara Bračun and Marina Bura, who was replaced by Anita Rumac for this occasion. Thematically, the interest of the performance lies in the emotional consequences of lockdown-related isolation and a lack of physical touch, especially for those at higher risk of Covid. This is Bračun’s first feature length performance, and the first ever dance performance in Croatia authored by a dancer who is a wheelchair user.
The evening was closed by a rerun of Silvia Marchig’s Sol, her first and so far only solo performance which was made in 2020 and serves as another performative example of live (self-)archiving. Similar to Blink of Silence, Sol was done in relation to the insecurities around the pandemic, as it was produced in the midst of the lockdown. In absence of other performers, Sol invites and hosts ghosts of previous collaborations that occurred within the framework of Kik Melone, Marchig’s organisation through which she has been producing collaborative works for the past 16 years. Collaborators off-stage include Tea Kantoci (support, costume and installation design), Josip Maršić (sound design), Saša Fistrić (light design).
Saturday, November 23
The final evening brought Antisezona’s format of Hangover sessions, a series of informal gatherings between members of authorial teams of performances and events that are programmed within the programme. This way participants of the Convention got the chance to learn more about the processes of performance-making and to revisit some of the topics that needed more clarification and context. Luka Bosanac presented the interests and procedures behind the opening performance HIHI, Marko Gutić Mižimakov gave the context for the making of the film Dragon Hunt, Nina Gojić spoke about the film which opened the Convention, Tea Kantoci shared her experience on curating the exhibition, Silvia Marchig gave a behind-the-scenes for her Sol. Besides that, the international guests asked about some of the topics that were addressed in the Advocacy programme and received clarification specific to the context of Zagreb, Croatia and the wider ex-Yugoslav region.
The final performance of the Convention was O by Antisezona co-curator Sonja Pregrad and her collaborators comprising a collective of young dance and new media artists: Ivana Bojanić, Viktoria Bubalo, Lana Hosni, Anna Javoran, Nika Pećarina, Eva Priečková. The performance draws its choreographic principles from the behaviour of plants, their geometry, growth cycles and ecosystems formed by them, enabling a formation of a collective body beyond an anthropocentric worldview. The performance premiered in 2023 as Pregrad’s organisations’ Object of Dance production and as part of Antisezona programme.
Finally, the programme was closed with the screening of the award-winning experimental film Dragon Hunt by Marko Gutić Mižimakov, starring a crew of artists who have all been participating in some way in the Choreographic Convention: DISCollective, Lana Hosni, Sonja Pregrad, Nika Pećarina. The film was produced by queerAnarchive from Split and shot in the Dalmatian Hinterland, while it is loosely based on Samuel Delany’s novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.Finally, it is important to note that the Choreographic Convention was the first of its kind held in Zagreb, and represents the most intense and eventful week for dance since the Keep Dance Autonomous movement in 2017 and 2018. With this organisational effort Antisezona, an initiative that formed as a continuation of that movement, has positioned Zagreb on the regional map of cities with one of the most vibrant and resilient dance scenes. Owing in most part to the advocacy program and the archival exhibition, the Zagreb dance scene has shown that it needs and is capable of much more than it currently has, while new perspectives have opened up for the development of dance toward its potential institutionalization. In the coming period, it remains to be seen how many of the proposed constructive moves will actually be realized.