Dance Week Festival

Ksenija Zec graduated from the School for ballet and dance in Zagreb in 1982. Since then she has been active as both choreographer, creating several full-length dance pieces, as well as working as movement consultant in theatre works. She teaches at the Academy for Drama Arts in Zagreb. From 1993 to 1996 she taught at the dislocated department of the Academy of Drama arts in Osijek. Together with her former students in Osijek she founded a new independent Arts Scene Barutana (2000). She also collaborates with the Theatre for the blind and those of failing sight “New Life” where she leads a dance workshop, and she collaborates with the Theatre Exit.  For her creation ”Same” produced by the Zagreb Dnace Ensemble, she received the Croatian Theatre Award in 2005.

The Theatre of the blind and visualy impaired “New Life” by working on classical, theatrical, innovative, contemporary Croatian as well as international plays, offers a different type of energy, breaking down the barriers of prejudice as they perform across the country as well as abroad. Since 1999  the Theatre is the founder of the International Festival for the Blind and those of Failing Sight “BIT”, a unique in the world festival, which brings together theatre artists with specific needs.

The project ‘Nos vamos a ver’ conceptually compresses the performance into a system of steps based on typical dance steps one acquires at ballroom dances  a dominating expression of a typical middle-class societal culture which is not accepting of differences. Using the principles of dance phrases, the piece ironically questions the dominant social norms (wedding, celebrations, receptions).   The starting motive is one of of day-to-day repetiveness: its (dis)continuinty, its duration and (lack) of sense. The so developed motives are then transformed into distorted physical and verbal contexts, through a series of delays, memories, imaginations, even lying about certain events. Dance steps and experiences of a dance school are only triggers for a deeper theatrical meditation about the challenges of differences (blindness as well as other differences), and the challenges that we face daily through our own prejudices, floating through a world of global violence..The displacement of space and time coordinates is the cause of the isolted fragmentations of the peformance itself.

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Croatian Choreographic Platform

author: Ksenija Zec

dramaturgy: Sasa Bozic

performers: Dajana Biondić, Maja Marjančić, Anita Matković, Živko Anočić, Marijo Glibo, Vojin Perić

music: Damir Simunovic

set designer and videographer: Igor Pauska

costume designer: Zdravka Ivandija

light designer: Igor Pauska and Sasa Bozic

This project has been made possible through the support of the Office of Cultural Affairs, City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture, Croatia.