Dance Week Festival

The artistic trio k.o. works in the field of contemporary dance and innovative theatre in Zagreb, Croatia. Founders of the group are dramaturg and director: Saša Božić and two choreographers & dance performers: Željka Sančanin, Barbara Matijević.

The first works of the group were conceptually founded on the confrontation of different cultural and ideological legacies that the members brought with them and linked with the problem of the status of an artist in the politically unstable time and space. Later on, their work was directed more towards dance and intensive choreographic research, and the interest for the “political” bodies from the initial phase was transferred to researching the pure physicality and phenomenology of movement within the new modes of performativity.

‘Vertigo’ insists on the seemingly easy, „pedestrian” movement which paradoxically demands a different kind of effort invested in the preciseness of the dance gesture.

The body is fluctuating between the manifestation and the non-manifestation of its presence and the action that it is producing. It explores the space in which the spectator’s desire for the semantic possession of the visual is confronted with the sliding away from the seen to the unseen and from recognition to the sophisticatedly organized confusion of signs. The performer returns her gaze back to the audience, drawing them from their safe anonymity. ‘Vertigo’ plays around the idea that the range of experiences we need to maintain a genuine feeling of control is never fully contained in what we define as the denotable.

‘Bloom’ is a choreographic pseudo-festivity taking as its subject any kind of movement as well as its oppressive need to produce any kind of meaning…

Inability to identify, potentiality and multi-personality become a posture, a possibility to transform an ever-fleeting meaning through movement and avoid the representational restrictions. The choreographic procedure is marked by the simultaneous multiplication and exhaustion of gestures, the result of which points to the nondescript quality of the very form of the choreography.

The performer indulges in the elegy of her own defeat, affirming a sort of new type of exaggeration. A feeling of melancholic relief without consequences is produced through the object-like treatment of music, seemingly offering us a possibility of interiorization.

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Croatian Choreographic Platform

Vertigo

choreography and performance: Barbara Matijević
Bloom

choreography and performance: Željka Sančanin
dramaturgy: Saša Božić

set and costume design: k-o

light design: Saša Božić

music selected by: Damir Šimunović

coproduction: kombinirane operacije/Tijana Gojić, Berlin Kunstlerprogramm Das DAAD, ASSO Theorem

The project was supported by the Zagreb City Council for Culture, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and realized within the Work Platform of the EkS-scene and the Student Centre program Culture of Change.