More info related to “0” paragraph under section “presentation”.

•Video presentation of performance “My private bio-politcs” and discussion / Aug 9th, 12:00
•“BalCan-Can Susie Dance?” presentation of the project and discussion
•Video interviews related to project “Tiger’s leap into the history” will be online (with English subtitles) by the end of October

Description of three segments of INDIGO DANCE research-artistic dance project:

Central question of Indigo Dance project is: how to understand influential choreographers instead of copying or imitating them?

Explanation of the title: During my residence in CND Paris I realized that the word "indigo" (carbon copy) has a different connotation in the French language! While in Serbian the word "indigo" has connotation of copying/ duplicating in French, however, the title "indigo dance" would stand for an abstract dance, and not in any case would there be a connection with copying! In English, French, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish and Dutch "indigo" is just a blue color! Whereas in Croatian, Macedonian, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian "indigo" has the same connotation like in the Serbian language!

“My private bio-politics” – performance

Author and performer: Sasa Asentic
Assistant: Olivera Kovacevic-Crnjanski
Theoretical support and dramaturgy: Ana Vujanovic

Touring (up-coming months):
Moving in November Festival / Helsinki, 1st – 2nd November
Centre National de la Danse / Paris, 21th – 24th November

Starting concept:
This work tries to deal with its own macro and micro conditions in which it appears… For the beginning, to make them visible because of specification of mechanisms and procedures of the production of dance on domestic stage. Then, to intervene. However, this led to a series of questions which were left without uniform answers. Finally, these questions, in their complexity, became the main intervention which this work is going to try to carry out.

The questions spring from the problem of positioning within relations of global and local bio-powers and bio-politics of dance in Serbia today. How to locate “one’s own (private and public) specificum”? And what is to be done with it bearing in mind the tensions between local ideologies and global expectations (from these ideologies): evacuate it from the work in order to achieve successful communication (or coquetting) with the global, that is western, trends, in which this specificum is not included; or to base the work on it even at the cost of failure, i.e. exclusion from conceptual-programmatic map of the international stage? Furthermore, is the first strategy something that gives us “a right to discourse” or this is decided at a completely different place and by means of completely different procedures?

Which ”bodies” are imprinted in the body that is dancing today on the domestic stage? For example, which bodies are projected, through expectations of a hypothetical “western programmator, and by this a spectator as well, almost as a genetically determined feature/difference from the other, who is coming from this specific context? Where the particularity of that context is, in its contemporariness, very gloomy – that context is not a part of the First World, it is not EU, it is still called the East (even though the West is not called “west” any more), it is post-socialistic in the capitalistic world, and it is terribly transitional, without a single bit of “flexibility and nomadism” which would make it exotic… Which are the bodies that hover dancing in the air here, over an “indigo paper” (carbon copy), without being “grounded” in such a context, and which are moved by a wish to be contemporary, maybe even resistant, on the domestic stage? And then again, which are the other bodies that would carry the local specificity, for which, in fact, neither we ourselves want to know? Nevertheless, if we construct and show them, although we would rather not… which bio-politics are we executing? Isn’t it not already a contribution to some other bio-power? Local? Or…? Where, in this (inter)space are this work and the politics of the body that will perform it in a public space, which we share and in which we continue to live?

Conceptual frame of the performance in 2008 and 2009 - MORE INFO SOON!

“Tiger’s leap into the history ( evacuated genealogy )” – video installation

Reconstruction of the dance scene in Serbia (and former Yugoslavia) considering the period from 1920’s until 2000’s.

Interviews with:
Katalin Ladik – poet, actress and performer,
Svenka Savic -professor of psycholinguistic at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, Dubravka Maletic – choreographer,
Sonja Vukicevic – choreographer and dancer,
Nela Antonovic – choreo-director,
Ana Vujanovic ( self-interview) – theoretician of performing arts,
Jovan Cirilov – theatrologist and art director of Bitef,
Vladimir Kopicl – writer and culture critic and
Boris Kovac – composer and multimedia artist

Authors: Ana Vujanovic and Sasa Asentic
Video realisation: Dragana B. Stevanovic, Marta Popivoda, Natasa Murge Savic and Sasa Asentic

MORE INFO SOON!!!

„BalCan-Can Sussie Dance” – installation

Concept: Sasa Asentic
Realization: Ana Vujanovic, Marta Popivoda and Saša Asentic

The idea for the "BalCan-Can Susie Dance?" project emerged during the “Little Front of New Performance and Dance“ in Zagreb in 2003, and it was “refreshed“ during the “Balkan Dance Platform 2005“ in Skopje, as well as at the "Balkan Express Network" meeting.

The central idea has been that I lead the project in two directions on the same theme-relation:
1) to find a female bear (Susie) that I take to dance at fairly important dance centres in European Union, and that
2) from European Union (zoological gardens) I bring hyenas to performances in the cities of Eastern Europe, more exactly, in the region of ex-Yu and the Balkans.

From the very start I supposed that it could be imposible to realize such a project, first of all due to great financial and security demands!

After considering what form would be appropriate (or at least be possible) after all, I decided to gather all the necessary licences, prices, means of transportation, veterinary checks and certificates, instructions on how to treat an animal, and all the other things necessary for realization of such an action, which could at the same time keep the action from taking place, that is point to its complexity.
Such a package/presentation of a feasible project would be actually the project itself, which would refer to the problems of the East – West relation: scenes, producers, programmers, donors and so on.

I intended to post all that as an offer on the Internet: with photos and a video recording of a dancing female bear, locations in Europe where hyenas live (in the zoos), video presentations of hyenas “visiting“ bears and other animals in the nature, their fightings, all of the necessary documentation, technical list and prices, list of performances / artists from the Balkan countries (that are offered to the market) that would have a première in the following season, etc.

The text "Performing the Other Body“ by Bojana Kunst (TkH Journal No. 4, Belgrade, 2002) was helpful to me from the very beginning.

Later on, I found out that there was the ARKA rehabilitation centre for female bears in Banshore – a rehabilitation centre as a new residence for Susie, as a residence centre for new dance.
What is the position of the female bears, former dancers (of what dance/movement?) and what is the new movement/dance that they will perform during new meetings with visitors?
Also, it has openned the new possibilities to re-think the residence programs / centers!

(fragement from correspondance between Ana Vujanovic and Sasa Asentic during the research phase of the project)