Ivana Ivković - A Step into the Void: Cracks in Choreography

We are used to looking at the dancer’s body in performance as a body that is continuously in motion, a masterful body productive in its movement, a non-interrupted kinetic spectacle. However, if we stop that body in passage and take a step forward, toward the idea of dance as an act that also includes periods without movement, cracks or “negative spaces” of dance, we open up to the potential for a structural use of the void and stillness in contemporary choreography. Stepping and walking, stillness and silence, jumping and falling – these are some of the notions that I will be using to describe the work of Leja Jurišič, Selma Banich and Željka Sančanin, referencing canonical authors Trish Brown and Steve Paxton.

Ivana Ivković (1975) studies at the Department of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Drama Arts in Zagreb. She is the editor-in-chief of Frakcija Journal for Performing Arts and collaborates with several other publications, the Center for Drama Art and has worked as the general coordinator of Zagreb – Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000, a project jointly organized by Zagreb’s eight independent cultural organizations from the fields of performing arts, new media, visual arts, architecture and theory. She has collaborated in the past with Zagreb based independent theater company oour (dance productions: orangecut [2004], To be Confirmed [2005]) and is a member of collaborative artistic company BADco. (Deleted Messages, Fleshdance in 2004, research project in 2005, memories are made of this…, Protest and Negotiation in 2006, 1 poor and one 0 in 2008, The League of Time in 2009). She is the co-editor of the textual and pictorial reader DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora with Davide Grassi (Aksioma and Maska, 2006).