Workshop with Dragana Alfirević and Dejan Srhoj (Serbia/Slovenia)

Dragana Alfirević and Dejan Srhoj are proposing a three day workshop, four hours each day, with the topic of Nature. After centuries of dance being beautiful and technically perfect, and after decades of contemporary performing arts serving to making society better, to further the political thought, being critical and creating distance, they have another kind of proposal:

“Let’s think of watching dance as we would watch nature – nature is indifferent to us watching it, and yet, we can instantly find our place in the woods, under the tree or at the city square and small street corner. We are interested if and how we can use this thought to reversely inform us about the way to dance. Through researching the relation between dancing and watching dance we wish to activate the potentialities of a gaze and observe the power gaze has over dancers.”

Dragana Alfirević and Dejan Srhoj are coming with a set of proposals and tools coming from improvisation, instant composition, feedback formats, somatic work and observational scores.

“ If we get a bit more ambitious we could think as well about the possible new functions of dance, of the very basic situation of dancer(s) being watched.”

The invitation for participation is addressed to everyone with experience in dance, choreography, but also to visual artists, dramaturgs, theoreticians, anyone with interest in this topic. The interest is central for the workshop.

Dragana Alfirević (1976) is a cultural worker in the field of contemporary performing arts. She teaches, makes performances, writes, curates festivals, and produces art events in the space between dance practice, theory, and activism. In her artistic work, Dragana works on the development of her own artistic practice, based on research of process and continuity in search for new models of production, as opposed to project-oriented work. 

Dejan Srhoj (1978) is an independent performer working in contemporary dance. He is currently developing the long term project Composing Differences in which, through improvisations, the sharing of practices, and education he explores choreographic principles that deal with community.

Without Distance Platform is part of the project „Life Long Burning (LLB) – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe”, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union and National Culture Fund, in partnership with the Tempus Fugit project, organized by the Goethe-Institut Bulgarien and the French Institute of Bulgaria, on an idea of Metheor, in the frame of the French-German Cultural Fund.