How Work Works

Sergiu Matis & Mila Pavićević

16.09.2017 at 13:00 @ Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb

How Work Works is a series of events in the framework of the joint project Nothing Inert in the World of BADco. and the Croatian National Theatre that presents the work of artists close to us.

We met in a video-game, cruising through artificial slums ruins in search for zombified artefacts in order to reanimate them towards techonologised life forms and to expose them in common places where their dance could happen. We developed navigation tools and organised communication systems that helped us pass through different levels, mostly with no other goal than fun, getting lost into very personal grooves, or just for the sake of viruosity.

We kept exchanging pixelised matter, reorganising organic material and contaminating each other with theory and practice to develop and complexify the visible thinking body.

Recently Sergiu Matis can often be heard saying: “I looooove dancing!”, trying to avoid any nuances of irony. He found this enthusiasm in the last three or four years when he managed to trick himself back into dancing again through a method or a way of thinking in motion that he calls “the visible thinking body”. His body was contaminated with ballet technique at the national ballet school in post-communist Romania. Without thinking too much he fell inlove with discipline, precision and virtuosity. All these and prety much everything related to ballet were later on so easy to despise and to go against.

Sergiu is often asking himself about what kind of dance would he make if he would have stayed in Romania, not move to Germany when he was 18, or if he had accepted the scholarship at the Kiev Ballet Academy when he was 10...

However, now he is looking for a new virtuosity, learning from the machines, shuffeling fragments of history, skipping and swiping through archives - personal or belonging to Western dance history. He likes playing with the English language in form of performative texts, choreographing meaning, flirting with poetry and theory with a pinch of visceral filth and groovy noises. The voice is dancing as much as the body in a Matis show.

Mila Pavićević is a dramaturg, writer and a failed poet, currently residing somewhere between Berlin, Zagreb and Dubrovnik. As a dramaturge she works in the field in different constellations, mostly in the independent dance scene context. She tries to write regularly and her works have been published and translated all over the globe; from Albania and Macedonia to Japan and Latin America. Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe in the idea of the writer as a solo act, she prefers to work interdisciplinary in collaboration with other artists. Her field of interest includes theatre of Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, architecture and non-places, pseudo-documentarism, the punk movement, superhero action movies, writing travelogues and diaries, and soothing tones of Croatian popular music.