DAS THIRD Research project - CLOSENESS OF TOUCH

DAS Graduate School at Academy of Theatre and Dance, University of Arts, Amsterdam

ABOUT THE PROJECT

This artistic research project was initiated in October 2019 within the DAS THIRD Research program at DAS Graduate School, Academy of Dance and Theatre - University of Arts, Amsterdam. 
It was funded and supported by: Akademie Schloss Solitude & ProduktionsZentrum Stuttgart, DAS Graduate School & AHK Amsterdam; Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, Ministry of Culture Croatia, City Council of Rijeka, City Council of Belgrade, Tarnby Performance Festival Copenhagen, International Fund for Assistance to Organizations in Culture and Education 2021 of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany, Goethe Institute; Life Long Burning & Nomad Dance Academy;
Production: Station Service for contemporary dance Belgrade;  Kabinet Rijeka, Atelje 212 Belgrade and Clinical Centre of Serbia.
The artistic research Closeness of Touch is a series of video works, podcasts, texts and dance performances that arose in the period between 2019-2023 on the topic of positions of vulnerability, care, immunity and depression as socio-political phenomena and forms of criticism and resistance to today's capitalist conditions work and life. These positions carry with them principles, means, methods, ethics that call for new forms of community based on asymmetrical and different social and physical powers and abilities of actors. In this artistic research, they were specifically examined through:​
  • The position of an immunocompromised person during a pandemic crisis;
  • The position of women in the patriarchy and at the moment of the holy pandemic;
  • The position of LGBTQ+ persons in transnational interaction at the time of the global pandemic;
  • The position of artists under the precarious conditions of the art market and during the pandemic;
  • The position of non-institutional dance practices as a space for re-examination of local cultural policies of cultural institutions from the Second World War to today;
The artistic and choreographic practice that arose during the research found its place in the digital domain less out of personal desire and need, and more out of the circumstances that conditioned and dictated the flow and dynamics of its articulation, conceptualization, realization, etc. The use of digital media - as (at one point) the only place for artistic expression - opened an important question for choreographic interests about the above-mentioned discourses of care, immunity and depression/negative feelings as socio-political forms of resistance and togetherness, namely: how today in at the moment of various world crises touch the body that touches the screen (telephone, television, computer, tablet, watch, etc.)? The answer was sought through various forms of physical, social, emotional, biotechnological, medical, economic, environmental and other (mostly invisible) vulnerabilities.

These concepts were explored in detail through various choreographic and somatic principles of physical movement of the collective or individual body within the domain: rave-clubbing and punk dancing, silence, exotic dancing, zoocentric and vegetative ways of movement, gathering, protest, then, through spiral drawing, children's collective games, theater of paintings; then, kinetic processes of rest, breathing, standing, touching, voice expression, guided movement and conscious expression of anatomical, physiological, psychophysical processes and systems within the human body (Body-Mind-Centering technique), landscape and feminist dramaturgical structures, video and audio editing as a form of choreography, through podcasts and social networks as digital spaces for receiving choreographic images and interacting with them, etc.
The works that were created and publicly presented are:

DEPRESSIVE PODCAST (2019)
with Edith Lázár

​A homemade podcast designed at Akademie Schloss Solitude as a collaboration between choreographer Igor Koruga and art theorist Edith Lázár. As a tryout for a choreographic proposal, it is a series of digital audio files that, all together and each particularly, are designed with a choreographic structure and dramaturgy – consisting of landscapes of different layers of sound, voice, articulation, and affects.

​The podcast was launched in January 2021 at Schlosspost digital platform. ​

​CRYSTAL BALL (2021)
with Paolo Venezia de Gile

Author's text and dance performance co-authored and performed by Paolo Venezia de Gil at the Tarnby dance festival in Copenhagen; Crystal Ball is a transnational queer performance in real-time taking place between Belgrade and Copenhagen in both online and physical spaces. It is a communication of art practices between a Sagittarian and an Aquarian. 
The text is available in engl / srp 
It was firstly published in the magazine "Critical hot Bodies" in 2022 edited by Aleksandar Georgiev and Dario Bardam. 

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CLOSENESS OF TOUCH (2022)
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​In the context of constant (digital) surveillance of almost all our mobility and vulnerabilities, this work explores how to touch the body that touches the screen. It points to the closeness of touch, which consists of the capability to provide response-ability: not from keeping a distance and staying out of the world, but rather from dealing directly with the world through discourses of care, immunity and negative feelings, applying the specific kinetic and choreographic language extracted from different principles of socio-political co-existence as a form of resistance to today's pervasive capitalist realism. 
The work premiered at the Belgrade Cultural Center in February 2022 as part of the gallery exhibition "Body, Movement, Image" in collaboration with Station Service for Contemporary Dance and the Goethe Institute.
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CONSTITUENTS (2020)
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A series of nine video works created during nine month long treatment of the Covid19 in 2020 and complications it produced in (my) body as an immunocompromised person (with primary immunodeficiency).
This series of video works was publicly presented in February 2022 at Cultural Centre Belgrade within the exhibition "Body. Movement. Image" in collaboration with Station Service for contemporary dance and Goethe Institute Belgrade. 
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​HOW TO EXPLAIN PICTURES TO A MAN (2021) with Ana Mandić, Dimitrije Kokanov

A work of performing art parctice that uses dramatic, choreographic, and conceptual art elements to explore a position of women in patriarchy and capitalism through means of body, gaze, and technology. 
The work was presented publicly in December 2021 in Gallery of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. 
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WHY NOT (?) (2022)
with Ivana Kalc

d​The work searches for the embodiment and definition of today's (hopeless, isolated, scared, over-identified) body of the individual and the affective space of care between (at least) two people/entities, as a practice that can be further developed with the collective (audience). In such a framework, the authors specifically investigated the technique of unison - both as a performing means of dance and as a cultural-artistic practice - to study the space for creating glitches through which differences on the affective, cognitive, physical level and will articulate multiple identity transformations as spaces of different social and physical powers and abilities, and thus also as a basis for political, engaged and critical association and co-existence today.
The work was publicly presented in October 2022 in Rijeka and Belgrade, through collaboration with Stanica Station Service for contemporary dance, Croatian cultural centre in Sušak, Rijeka, and Atelje 212. 
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MY CORONA (2020)


​Artistic text written as part of the project Lonely Planet produced by theatre Atelje 212 in Belgrade. This text addresses discourses on immunity, community, vulnerability, depression, and care set within the utopian queer interaction. 
The text is available was firstly published in Croatian magazine "Movements" in 2021 edited by Nina Gojić - avialble in ​engl / srp
The first public performance of this text happenned in July of 2020 at the Theatre Atelje 212 in Belgrade

ONE, TWO, THREE, COMRADE COME,
DANCE WITH ME (2021) 

​TikTok choreographic lecture focusing on mechanisms of institutionalising conservative discourses and practices on modern and contemporary dance in between two World wars, present to this day within the dominant local policies of state cultural institutions. The work explores forms of artistic and cultural-political resistances to the dominant ideological matrice
The work was publicly presented at the Kondenz dance festival in Belgrade, in October 2021 within project DANCE UNTIL THE NEW DAWN conducted by Bojan Djordjev, Mirjana Dragosavljevic, Sinisa Ilic, Igor Koruga, and Mariana Cvetkovic.

CHILDREN (2022)
with Irena Popović, Dimitrije Kokanov

A post-opera in 17 songs produced by the National Theatre in Belgrade based on the novel by play-writer Milena Marković and composed by Irena Popović Dragović, is constructed on specific choreographic language made of different physical landscapes, affects, dramatic relationships, voices, sound and words - which altogether embody the collective in the individual and the individual in the collective. Placed at the same time in the structure between other bodily collectives on the stage - the orchestra and the children's choir - as well as in front of the collective of the audience of the public space (theatre), the protagonists of this stage event create and embody a 'ritual excess' of exchanging vulnerabilities, care, and feelings as strong emphasis of collective politicality. Almost all somatic and physical principles and methods from the artistic research project within THIRD were applied in construction of this work. 
The work was presented publicly in October 2022 in Belgrade. 

LANDSCAPE OF DESIRE (2023)
with Dimitrije Kokanov, Jelena Ilić, Marta Bjelica
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​Landscape of Desire problematises the materialisation of female desire in patriarchy. How and is it possible to present or perform female desire in contexts that are always limited and shaped by male visions? What does it mean to carry out a desire in speech, and what does it mean physically to carry out in space and time? Dimitrije Kokanov and Igor Koruga continue to develop choreographic-dramaturgical cooperation in the field of researching the performing relationship text-body within the representational practices of acting art (previous project How to explain the body to a man, 2021). Collaborators on this project are actresses Marta Bjelica and Jelena Ilić. An integral part of the critical reflection of "desire" in this performance is the circumstance that the authors of the project both identify as men. The idea that the inert male gaze, language, and supremacy are consciously criticized in the hope of being rejected, was especially methodologically explored during the creative process and work through the establishment of negotiation positions between the author and female collaborators. The negotiation of the meaning of the individual elements of the play between the four artists resulted in a conscious departure from the usual principles of narrative construction and arrangement of elements in traditional dramaturgical frameworks. The freedom of choice to move away from telling the story in the traditional way, and to move away from the classical way of observing the performance - were just some of the training grounds for reducing the "male gaze" and self-satisfied erotic totalitarianism.

"Darling, I'll show you hysteria! I will show you an out of control, crazy, perverted, over the top, sensitive, premenstrual, irrational woman who has resolutely rejected control, because no one controls my body! I control my desire and consciously indulge in pleasures."

paraphrase of Karen Finley's "It's My Body" from the album From a Certain Level of Denial

The work was premiered in February 2023 at Belgrade Cultural centre

DESIRE TO MAKE SOLID HISTORY WILL END UP IN FAILURE (2023)
​with Nela Antonović, Anđelija Todorović, Tatjana Pajović, Sanja Krsmanović Tasić, Boris Čakširan, Jelena Jović

​Six choreographers/dancers/artists of the Serbian local independent dance scene together, are performers of the "archive in motion" - embodying insufficiently recorded records of movements, experiences, memories, oral histories from their artistic works - at a time when there is no official institutional framework for archiving the local dance scene. Through the trans-generational (self) questioning of physical, social, emotional, economic, ideological and other (mostly invisible) vulnerabilities behind their cultural and artistic work and practice, the tactics, principles, (re)positioning and contradictions of their self-sustainability as a form of resistance are also reexamined , criticism and community in the turbulent socio-political circumstances of work and life during the last forty years. What do they have to say about it today? What do their bodies carry and hide? In what ways is the impermanence of archiving a time and history reflected through the impermanence of the artistic performance itself (performance)? How does dance art (independent scenes) survive as a relevant social, cultural and political tool for re- and re-shaping the social body? The desire to make solid history is sure to end in failure. The only question is, for whom?

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The work premiered in April 2023 at Bitef theatre.










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T H A N K  Y O U: 

Bojana Mladenović, Ana Dubljević,  Milica Ivić, Dimitrije Kokanov, Edit Lazar, Paolo Venecia de Gile, Ivana Kalc, Luka Major, Maja Mirković, Dalibor Fugošić, Olga Dimitrijević, Maja Pelević, Tanja Šljivar, Ana Mandić, Marijana Cvetković, Bojan Djordjev, Sinisa Ilić, Mirjana Dragosavljević, Aleksandar Georgiev, Emilie Gallier, Andrea Božić, Catalina Insignaries, Aron Birtalan, Cecilia Sevalejos, Amanda Pina, Nikita Maheshvari, Sher Doruff, Ksenija Đurović, Jovana Tomić, Milica Ivić, Nikola Pavlović, and all the acting ensembles  and dancers I have worked with in recent years at the local scenes.