As I look back on the Drugajanje Festival and the critic’s residency, I take inspiration from the title of the larger project Beyond Front@; Bridging Peripheries. I ponder what it actually means to create connections between peripheral places, geographically and artistically. In this context, my role is the one of the critic, but since I am also an artist myself, as well as a curator, there are multiple layers to the ways in which I observe. A recurring question for me is how much emphasis should be put on the specificity of the context in which works are created or shown. What are the invisible borders to how or what a work communicates? Can they be broken or challenged? How much do spectators need to challenge their own situatedness and be aware of how it influences their perception, and on the other hand, what are the contextual responsibilities of an artist, if any?
Upon entering Slovenia, I was struck by a similar feeling to entering my hometown, Bergen in Norway: From my seat in the moving train, the towering mountains make me feel small and insignificant, but at the same time produce a notion of safety and eternity. I find it intriguing how a completely unknown place can induce a feeling of familiarity. Perhaps it can be compared to looking through a frosty or fogged-up train window. You think you recognize something, but deep down you know you don’t have enough background information and therefore, what you see are just glimpses of your own reflection, memories, predispositions, learned ways of perceiving…
I encountered this notion of situatedness a few times during the festival and it opened my eyes to some curatorial perspectives to consider both locally and globally. How much can an artwork communicate beyond its local realm? Bridging subjectivities may not be a goal in and of itself, but it’s a dramaturgical consideration that can open up possibilities for works to “travel”, both figuratively - in the minds of an audience- and geographically, opening up a potential for a work to place itself in different contexts and locations.
Among the writers present in the critic’s residency, I was the only person coming from a Western country. Growing up in Norway in the 1980s and living my whole life in Scandinavia has shaped my view on everything from politics to contemporary dance. When attempting to analyze performances and writing critique, I’m aware that there is no such thing as true objectivity. We can never escape our own subjective experience of the world, and that might be one of the main things that makes us human. But the question is how to deal with the gaps in communication that happen when translation (or lack of) comes into the picture. Dance is often said to be a universal language, but I’m not sure that I agree. Wordlessness is in theory a bridging agent, but since most of us are tied to our cultures and history in intricate ways, it’s more complex than that. Our bodies carry memories, but memories can deceive us.
To mention an example, when I arrived in Slovenia, in Celje to be more specific, the moment the soles of my Dr Martens touched the uneven cobblestones, it transported me to my childhood in Bergen. Despite my physical sensation, I’m fully aware that these streets carry very different memories. Each of our bodies carries its own set of embodied traces, and we are constantly in flux. Although everyone is constantly unfolding their own history. In the fields of creating, curating, or critiquing art, there is an ongoing battle with one’s own subjectivity, as no one lives in a vacuum, and whether one agrees with them or not, there are tendencies among artists and curators depending on their location.
In Swedish, the verb “att rota” means both to take root and to search through something. If I were to name some common denominators at the Drugajanje Festival, it would be a search for roots, both individual and artistic, as well as a craving for a reviving or renewal of the retro. And there was one decade that crystallized itself through the program: The 1960s.
Milan Tomášik, alongside the composer Piotr Peszat, interpreted Treatise, a score written by Cornelius Cardew in 1963–67, while Matea Bilosnič bridged the eras of early usage of tape loops (1960’s) to our current technological developments in her Cata Strophe, while Rok Kravanja’s interactive relation to the audience is rooted in avant garde performance art which started - you guessed it- in the 1960s. In other words, from several of the works presented in the festival, there was a notion of relating back to the beginning of something. Interestingly, it was in the 1960s that performative art practices were exploding in former Yugoslavia. In her 2024 book Claiming of Space, published in Slovene by Maska, Jasmina Založnik focuses on how artistic practices during the tumultuous period between 1965 and 1987 made a real turn and brought the idea of the body to the forefront.
In Celje, in the small multi-purpose space Glavni trg 8, the festival presented two performances. Created and performed by Lia Ujčič and András Engelmann, Some things touch is a duet in which a wordless conversation plays out between two young people seemingly existing in an in-between place. The only piece of scenography, an unplugged fridge, created a symbol of rootlessness or perhaps an unfulfilled wish for settlement. The performers’ simple clothing, jeans, T-shirts, white Converse, reminded me of late 1990s trends in contemporary performance and suggested gender equality, in stark contrast to the highly sexualised commercials adorning the shop windows just outside the gallery space, on the Celje streets. Some things touch is a work made to fit into very different spaces, and in the case of Glavni trg 8, the two skilled movers adapted their movements intelligently to the long, narrow, corridor-like gallery. Their strong physical connection and thorough craft as dancers were beautiful to watch, yet one element seemed to perpetually stand in the way - the fridge. It was as if the object’s fixedness (as its inanimate state keeps it in despite being moved) interfered with the possibility of developing deeper relational concepts through movement language. Still, the subtle details of touch and the feeling of urgency which presented itself, at times individually, at times entwined, as well as the search for physical equilibrium stay in my mind as strong nodes to be investigated further.
A few days later, a solo by Matea Bilosnic: Cata Strophe, was offered in the same space. This time the room was transformed into a virtual echo-chamber, where Bilosnič’s movements and words, through a meticulously choreographed string of actions, interacted with herself, the room and the audience through overlapping, layering and repetition. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a simple, yet elegant shirt, her blonde hair slicked back in a ponytail; I found that in a subtle way, her appearance, although empowered, resembled an avatar. The performer’s open, direct gaze paired with the slightly robotic movement patterns at times added to an eerie sensation of observing a simulation. The choreographed loops of movement and sound were juxtaposed by Bilosnič asking herself and/or the audience questions about what to do next. One part, in which she records her voice and layers the repetitions, a dense blanket of sound brought to mind Alvin Lucier’s 1969 work I’m sitting in a Room, but in this context containing the contemporary twist of referring to, as expressed by Bilosnič herself, the information overload of our time. In the program notes, the choreographer describes a wish to expose the struggle of making a choice. To me, the work opens up for an existential feeling in relation to AI vs human capacity. Where does it leave us as humans if questions are answered the very moment we ask them?
In Maribor, in the beautiful and fully equipped theatre of the Second Gymnasium, Milan Tomášik’s group work Teatrise was performed by five dancers from Krakow Dance Theatre. The work is inspired by the eponymous 193-page graphic score by Cornelius Cardew, written in 1963–67. The music, composed by Piotr Peszat, echoed the avant-garde heritage of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen (who Cardew interestingly championed and later denounced) and Peszat’s interpretation felt like a balancing act between contemporary edge and 1960s referencing.
The dancers, at first deceptively similar to members of an orchestra, in crisp, white shirts and black trousers, started out taping the floor of the stage as a visual representation of parts of the graphic score. During the work, the ensemble morphed into soloists, each with their own strengths, characteristics and physical abilities. The work was well composed and executed, and the clarity of each part came across much like a visual representation of a musical composition bordering on academic precision. I often feel that a work is never truly activated until the performers take the work into their own hands, and although there were some strong moments of that happening, especially from Agnieszka Bednarz-Tyran, an overall sense of movement - execution rather than - exploration struck me. Perhaps my critique is also influenced by Cardew’s writing from October 1963 in his Treatise Handbook:
– The conflicts in the composition arise from the non-homogeneity of the list of elements; (From this also arises the intuitive 'content' of the piece. Every day we have to create order in a non-homogeneous host of circumstances.) This gives me a certain satisfaction-that the difficulties that I experience in writing the piece are of the same kind as those I experience in the flow of eg, my emotional life.
Cardew (who often denounced his own compositions, including Treatise) described the score as “a creative catalyst for the compositional and improvisational imaginations of its performers.” Open-ended suggestions or guidelines in scores like Cardew’s bring some interesting considerations when it comes to interpretation, translation, and (re)creating. Where the version by Tomášik and Peszat seems to reference the origin in terms of sound aesthetics and composition, Cardew’s suggestions in the direction of integrating intuition, improvisation, and emotionality were left largely unexplored.
Celje City Theatre was the venue for the last performance of the festival, and here I have to mention what a great performance space the stage is when the audience gets to be on it, and the “guts” of the theatre are not hidden; the ladders and cables, the internal systems of the theatre machinery became part of the scenography and brought us as audience right into the situation. I can imagine versions of all three above mentioned performances doing well in this space. It seems like a perfect venue for contemporary dance due to its raw, yet neutral setting which fits a multitude of expressions and bridges the gap between performers and audience.
Unfortunately, there was no dance performance presented here. Perhaps there isn’t enough audience in Celje who are interested in dance? For the future, I would encourage the organisers to challenge that theory.
Still, the performance presented in Celje City Theatre might not be what a more traditionally minded theatre-audience would have expected. Coming from the performing arts- project Via Negativa, Rok Kravanja’s Slovenian Mountain Trail took the audience on a strenuous journey, laboring through a constant body of spoken text (generously translated for us foreigners by Tamara Bracic Vidmar, one of the producers of the festival) while dragging his backpack through invisible hurdles. The text, which was mocking the patriarchal attitudes of Slovenian (mountain hiking) culture, seemed well received by the Slovenian crowd, as far as I could tell. But here we have an example of a work that is so bound to local references that it’s not able to travel. The cultural differences between Slovenian and Norwegian gender roles in mountain hiking made me acutely aware that there is more progress to be made in terms of gender equality in Slovenia, and that this work, even if translated, would seem out of place and time in Scandinavia despite our shared presence of mountains.
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Ingeborg Zackariassen is a dance writer based in Gothenburg, Sweden. In November 2024 she participated in the Critic's Residency organized by Bunker in Celje, in the frame of the international project Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery and the 23rd Drugajanje Festival. The article was produced as a part of the Critic's Residency program.
Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery is a Creative Europe project (2023-2026) created by Central Europe Dance Theatre – CEDT (Hungary), Bunker (Slovenia), Hrvatski institut za pokret i ples - HIPP (Croatia), Krakow Dance Theatre (Poland), M Studio (Romania) and Vitlycke – CPA (Sweden) to foster local development of the contemporary dance fields. The project is co-funded by the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
