The Labour of Panic is a happening set in the open space of Grobničko polje (Grobnik Valley). In this infrastructural space of large proportions, speeds, and charges, we find no point of entry because, even though one can vividly survey this place of contact between a natural environment and technological systems – power lines, an airport, a car racetrack, a motorway – it is an inversion of the humanly proportioned space in which we normally live, drive, and walk. Its identity is a not-there. Just like the identity of the everyday is this infrastructure of power lines, intersections, and networks that support it.

The Labour of Panic is a happening created in suspended time. A time with a quite certain endpoint and a rather uncertain beginning. However, to allow the everyday to be something else, to allow something to end and something new to begin, the infrastructural space itself must allow the possibility of change. That is the terrain where one outlines the contours and excavates the remains of that which cannot come to be and that which may yet occur.

The Labour of Panic is the final part of the trilogy that began with the performance titled Iskop (The Foundation Pit), staged in 2018 at the house of the architect Vjenceslav Richter and continued with rePublika u orkestru (rePublic in the Orchestra Pit), premièred in October 2019 at Ivan pl. Zajc Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka. The trilogy thematises the relations between work, utopia, and confrontation with impossibilities amid the threat of climate catastrophe.

Performance: Nataša Antulov, Ana Marija Brđanović, Ema Crnić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Nikolina Pristaš, Kalliopi Siganou, Aleksandra Stojaković Olenjuk, Evita Tsakalaki

Orchestra: Puhački orkestar KUD-a “Sloga” Ravna Gora

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš in collaboration with Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Evita Tsakalaki, Kalliopi Siganou and Ema Crnić
Dramaturgy: Goran Ferčec, Tomislav Medak, Nataša Antulov
Text: Goran Ferčec
Music: Gordan Tudor
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić, The motives on the men’s clothes are deconstructed imprints derived from Slobodni crtež (A Free Drawing), a 1980 artwork by Vjenceslav Richter
Light design: Goran Petercol
Graphic design and illustration: Siniša Ilić
Collaborator in spatial analysis : Leo Modrčin
Recording and audio processing: Saša Predovan
Technical support: Bruno Butorac
Translation: Žarko Cvejić
Production: Lovro Japundžić
Drone piloting and aerial filming: Goran Skelac i Vatroslav Španiček
Photography: Tanja Kanazir
Dog: Lava
Thank you: Davorka Begović, Vesna Meštrić, Alan Vukelić, Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka and Eurokaz.

Première performences: 10th and 11th July 2020
Lokacija: Grobnik Valley, Rijeka, Croatia

Co-production: BADco. and Drugo More
The production of The Labour of Panic was supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, City of Rijeka – Department for Culture, Zagreb City Council for Culture
Organizer of the program: Drugo More
The program is part of DOPOLAVORO flagship of the RIJEKA 2020 – EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE project
Rijeka - Port of Diversity
The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb.

The work of Drugo More and BADco. is supported by Kultura Nova Foundation.

Cover photo: Siniša Ilić for The Labour of Panic BADco. (markers on paper, 21x29,7cm, 2020)

Exactly ten years after first release and its implementation in the practice of artists and large educational institutions, the software tool WHATEVER DANCE TOOLBOX is available from 2020 as a free web application; with the accompanying and revised Manual in Croatian language. The earlier 2011 version of the Manual in English is still available for download.

Whatever Dance Toolbox is a web application, a software tool that in many respects functions like an interactive mirror. It has been developed during years of workshopping and collaboration with numerous users with different competences and interests, locally and abroad. Thanks to the continuing interest and a rich dialogue between the software programmer Daniel Turing, us and the users, WDT is today available as an open code software and as a free, downloadable web application. WDT was designed with the aim of expanding the field of research of movement and dance, as a practical support for learning about, the production of and the analysis of choreographic material as well as the development of creative thinking and working within an interactive environment.

About the tool:

"The Whatever Dance Toolbox presents a unique teaching and learning opportunity for students of movement, both on screen and off. WDT references the 1970s material explorations of pure movement and the video aesthetics of electronic arts pioneers. This distinctive poetic element is wrapped into a simple, user friendly interface which encourages experimentation and play in making choreographic decisions.”
- Scott deLahunta, researcher and organizer of research projects on choreography and technology at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, Motion Bank and Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Science

"How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think? Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we think, perceive, and make sense"
- from the book Transmission in Motion, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Routledge London, 2016 

The web application and new edition of the Manual have been realized in the framework of the Audience Development program of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

That artists have tried to change the world is not news. Nor that they tried to save it. But what if neither change nor prospects of salvation are certain, when the threatening catastrophe bestows only way out - to do the impossible? Today, when philosophers claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, when utopia has become a derogatory word, and the certainty of catastrophe disarms our imagination, we decide to exercise and practice the impossible.
This production offers the viewers a unique perspective on the theater space by positioning itself into the orchestra pit - the bowels of the theater machine, but also in the place whose future depends directly on the coming climate change and sea level rise.
The production rePUBLIC IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT finalizes a year-long project started in Chicago, continued in Zagreb, and premiered as a whole in the Croatian National Theater "Ivan pl. Zajc" in Rijeka in collaboration with Italian and Croatian Drama and the theater collective BADco. In this three-part production we return to historical attempts at artistic intervention into reality, from the modernist republics led by writers Ernst Toller and Gabriele D'Annunzio, through the trans-lingual and visual interventions in public space (Paolo Scheggi, Vito Acconci), to tarantist attempts at performing impossible choreographies (Goat Island) or impossible music compositions (John Cage).

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgs: Nataša Antulov / Tomislav Medak 
Choreographer: Nikolina Pristaš
Choreographic collaborator: Zrinka Užbinec
Set designer: Igor Eškinja
Costume designer: Arhiv BADco. - Silvio Vujičić
Installation and integral reconstruction: Oplà stick: the Passion according to Paolo Scheggi
Music: John Cage, Etudes Boreales
Translation: Marta Schwaiger
Video: Marin Lukanović
Video and film materials used: Goat Island, The Sea And Poison; Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, An Andalusian Dog
Performers: Ivna Bruck / Ana Kreitmeyer / Marta Krešić / Aleksandra Stojaković Olenjuk / Petar Kovačić
Stage manager: Sandra Čarapina
Producer of BADco.: Lovro Japundžić

Co-production: Italian Drama and Croatian Drama of CNT "Ivan pl. Zajc", BADco., Chicago Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

The production is inspired by the works of Edvard Munch, Ernst Toller, Gabriele D' Annunzio, John Cage, Vito Acconci, Paolo Scheggi, Goat Island, Karen Brodine and the native women of the western Amazon.

Special thanks to Cosima and Franca Scheggi for granting the rights to the reconstruction of Paolo Scheggi's Oplà stick: the Passion according to Paolo Scheggi.

Thank you: Lin Hixson, Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, Nicholas Lowe, Sarah Skaggs, John Rich, Jasna Jakšić, Drugo more.

Premiere: 20.10.2019 at Croatian National Theater "Ivan pl. Zajc".
Reprise performances: 28.10. and 31.10.2019 at CNT "Ivan pl. Zajc"

The production of rePUBLIC IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.
The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.
The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb and Chicago Cultural Center.

These [compositions] are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible.
John Cage

Impossible Dances is a performative artwork that was initially created for the exhibition documenting the work of the US postdramatic theatre collective Goat Island and was premiered in May of 2019 at the Chicago Center for Culture. The work draws on the documentation and scores of the "Impossible Dances" sequence from Goat Island's The Sea & Poison and John Cage's notes to his Freeman Etudes.

In Impossible Dances we have explored the new ways of practising the impossible. The impossible emerges from the performative process of translation from choreography to choreography, from recording to movement, from poetry to performance. The impossible is necessary because, as we're hurtling toward hothouse Earth, nothing is more urgent that the encounter of a myriad of impossibilities.

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Tomislav Medak
Choreography and performance: Nikolina Pristaš, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec, Marta Krešić
Video: Goat Island,
Production: Lovro Japundžić

CHICAGO
World Premiere: Friday–Saturday, 24.-25. May 2019, 7pm, and Sunday, 26. May 2019, 2pm
Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North
Note: The 24. May performance is preceded by an artist talk at 7 p.m. with Erin Manning with the performance at 8pm.

ZAGREB
Premiere: 01. June 2019 at 19:00
Hala V (Technical Museum Zagreb) – Part of the Platfroma.hr 20 Festival

The project was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

"Prushevsky could have already foreseen what a work of static mechanics, in the sense of art and purposefulness, could be placed at the center of the world, but he could not perceive ahead of time the structure of soul of the residents-to-be in the all-proletarian home being built now in the midst of that plain and all the more therefore he could not imagine the inhabitants of the future tower in the midst of the universal earth. What kind of body would youth have then, and with what exciting strength would the heart begin to beat and the mind begin to think.”
Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit

This unique project by Zagreb's theater collective BADco. - the performance-exhibition The Foundation Pit at the location of the villa at Vrhovec 38 in Zagreb, today known as the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb - begins from research of utopian premises for the planning of the future of housing, socialization and exchange, but also the immediate interconnection of life expectancy and its realization. In the tension between imagination, labor, youth and death, BADco. and our collaborators from the fields of dance, architecture, design and music explore the contemporary role of artists in relations of production and art practices.

This performative exploration of the legacy of utopian construction of the twentieth century explores the mega-structures of Vjenceslav Richter from the late 1960s (Synthurbanism, Heliopolis), the conceptual meta-structures of American architect Lebbeus Woods, and the dystopian-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit.

Andrei Platonov was one of Russia's greatest and most intriguing writers of the twentieth century. His two most significant works, Chevengur and The Foundation Pit (written between 1926 and 1930) are an immersion into dystopic issues and depict the malformation of the utopian idea in the hands of man (who is ineffective, greedy or weak). The protagonists of The Foundation Pit are building a large tower, a proletarian home, one that will enable a communal life for all members of the working class. This home symbolizes a bright future and a utopian society, but by the end of the novel the workers fail to even pour the foundation of this building.

“But I didn't want to be born myself, I was afraid that my mother would be a bourgeois.”
Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit

The performance-exhibition The Foundation Pit choreographically explores the specific structural principles and gravitational actuality of architectural design and the socrealistic representation of the body. Early Soviet socrealist depictions of accentuated physical strength, revolutionary fervor and the idealized future use precisely the figure of a young girl to represent the society as a whole.

The early works of Platonov often equate the adult woman with pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie - thus victory over sexual relations stands for victory over death, and desire for the female form is supplanted with desire for the future, the new, a communist society (Oxana Timofeeva). That is why the male characters of Platonov seem condemned to either a sentimental memory of the one who had walked by without stopping or the obscenity of a quivering hand in a pocket whilst watching the pioneer girls.

In the ironic turn of the end of the novel, the foundation pit of the never-completed building of a new society, the "uterus for the home of the future life", becomes the grave of the girl Nastya, the embodiment of the emptiness of the promise of future.

We enter The Foundation Pit through a performative reading room, while the whole project will be accompanied by workshops and lectures organized in cooperation with the Urban Design Platform.

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Performance: Antonia Dorbić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Priska Pia Pristaš, Kalliopi Siganou, Evita Tsakalaki
Music and graphic design: Andro Giunio
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić
Space / Reading room: Dinko Peračić i Miranda Veljačić / Platforma 9,81
Translation: Rafaela Božić-Šejić
Technical support: Damir Prizmić i Miljenko Bengez
Production: Lovro Japundžić
Photography: Marko Ercegović
Public relations: Zrinka Šamija

Co-production: BADco. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

Croatian translation of Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit courtesy of Breza Publishing.

Lebbeus Woods quotes © Estate of Lebbeus Woods; translation into Croatian: Ivana Ivković

Thank you: Vesna Meštrić, Božo Dujmović, Leo Modrčin, Lana Pukanić, Aleksandra Wagner, Ante Pejić, Tomislav Medak, Zrinka Užbinec, net.culture club mama

Premiere: 16. November 2018 at the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection

The production of The Foundation Pit was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb, POGON Jedinstvo – Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth and the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection - Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

Urban Design Platform is comprised of independent cultural organizations Art Workshop Lazareti, BADco., Drugo more, KA-MATRIX, Kontejner, Multimedia Institute, Right to the City, Platforma 9,81, and institutions Zlatna vrata Centre for Culture and Lifelong Learning, Multimedia Cultural Centre Split and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.

Time Bombs is a three-part film featuring BADco.'s interventions at three locations characterized by an effort to revitalize disused (industrial) sites with contemporary artistic practice. Under the motto Institutions Need to Be Constructed, throughout 2015 and 2016 BADco. invited a number of contemporary artists and cultural organizers (Slaven Tolj, Nataša Antulov, Platforma 9,81 and others) to do joint one day occupations of Rijeka’s factory Benčić (now Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Zagreb’s Jedinstvo (now POGON - Center for Independent Culture and Youth) and Split's never finished Youth Center. 

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Director of photography: Dinko Rupčić
Film editor: Jelena Modrić
Production: BADco., Kava Film, WHW, Platforma 9.81 and Drugo more

Someone makes the decision,
And someone suffers the consequences of the made decision.
Someone attacks to correct the rhythm,
And someone allows to be attacked correct the rhythm.

- Goran Ferčec: Correcting Rhythm

Correcting Rhythm is a theatre production rooted in the crisis of the cognitive framework of the dramatic situation, the explosion of analysis, observation and presentation in terms of suspended causality. A disrupted rhythm is the precondition for a rerun of analytical obsession. Everything is there, everything in its totality, all proportions in all their respects, and nothing emerges out of anything. The rhythm of the body with the rhythm of the society with the rhythm of the planet - perceived as arrhythmia. Relative events. The explosion happened. The murder happened. How do we show what we encountered here? What can we say what was there before? What happened next? How do we show it? How?

... we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I ‘make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month.’ Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Forty years after Pavao Pavličić wrote his short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb we return to the topic of a man's obsession with the rhythm of a city, the rhythm of its crimes, in Goran Ferčec's text Correcting Rhythm.

The production sets off with an inquiry of the very building of the Croatian National Theatre and the inner organization of a space that becomes an observatory of the square below it, the city, territory and cosmos that surround it. The seldom-used Sound Studio transforms into a cabinet that houses a collection of wondrous apparatuses and evidence of an event the production traces.

The production gathers an exceptional team of collaborators: the writer Goran Ferčec as the author of its text, visual artists Marko Tadić as set designer and Silvio Vujičić as costume designer, Austrian composer Radu Malfatti and Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz as authors of music and sound. The artistic team of the production is also comprised of the director Goran Sergej Pristaš, choreographer Nikolina Pristaš, dramaturgs Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak and Diana Meheik.

Performed by BADco. members Ana Kreitmeyer and Nikolina Pristaš and by members of the Drama of the Croatian National Theatre Livio Badurina, Mislav Čavajda and Duško Gojić, with music performed by member of the orchestra of the Opera of the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Bošnjak.

Correcting Rhythm is the culmination of the year-long project Nothing Inert in the World - the observatory of everyday rhythms, that BADco performance collective developed during 2017 in collaboration with visual artist Marko Tadić, Croatian National Theatre, Dubrovnik Summer Festival, Vladimir Bužančić Gallery, Institute Tomislav Gotovac and Croatian Television.

The project explores rhythmo-analytical research - conducted according to the writing of Henri Lefebvre - in several dispositives of watching: in the theatre, in the gallery, in public space and in the TV studio, and presents insights in formats of the theatre production Correcting Rhythm, the exhibition by BADco. and Marko Tadić Dispositives of Watching, the reconstruction of Tomislav Gotovac’s performance in public space Adapting to objects on Marshal Tito Square – Marshal Tito Square I love you!  on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary and the TV performance Is there life in the TV studio?.

The research and production work on this series of works has been contextualized through the presentations of artists titled How Work Works and the symposium The Turn organized at the Croatian National Theatre and including a number of artists and theoreticians from Croatia and abroad: Ramsay Burt, Bojana Cvejić, Anders Paulin, Una Bauer, Nataša Govedić, Adrian Pezdric, Gregor Kamnikar, Mila Pavićević, Sergiu Matis, Radu Malfatti and a number of young students of dance and dramaturgy who joined us in workshop during the production.

A special thank you to Pavao Pavličić for permission to use his short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb.

Thank you to: Tena and Tadija Tadić, Gallery Vladimir Bužančić and Anita Zlomislić, Lana Šprajcer, Eleonora Magdalena Vrdoljak, Danijela Vukadinović, Maja Ležajić, Nina Gojić, Ivan Penović

Correcting Rhythm and Nothing Inert in the World were supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia; Austrian Cultural Forum.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

Media sponsor of BADco.: Yammat FM

The performance Spores departs from the problem of never ending work of maintenance. We maintain the body, the house, the family and the plants, we maintain friendships, relationships, cleanliness and clothing, we maintain infrastructure, organization, space and technology. Maintenance work is the invisible prerequisite of all work and creation. Maintenance is also a daily obstacle to undisturbed work and creation. It stays in the background, repeated as a routine and with no progression. It is in the never ending work of maintenance that progression, change or transformation hibernate.

The body in dance has been considered free of the inertia of the work of maintenance and the humility of the work of production. Movement in dance is supposedly exempt from social conditioning and left to creative self-determination. BADco. approaches this assumption of the free body in dance by analyzing the phenomenon of the turn, the rotation of the body on its axis without a possibility of progress. The turn as an element of repetition forms the ”infrastructure” of dance movement, setting it apart from every other movement, yet when the turn does not exit from its repetition the dance enters a crisis.

The initial inspiration for this performance comes from the poem What Is “Not Writing”? by American poet Anne Boyer, in which she dissects layer by layer her own experience of life as an artist, woman, mother, teacher, partner, activist, friend, unearthing the rhythms of her own daily life and their immobilizing effects.

BADco. authors:

Ivana Ivković (dramaturgy), Ana Kreitmeyer (performance), Tomislav Medak (dramaturgy), Nikolina Pristaš (choreography), Zrinka Užbinec (choreographic assistance).

BADco. is joined by:
Lana Hosni / Emilie Gregersen and Ivana Pavlović / Rebecka Olivia Berchold (performance), Helge Hinteregger and Martin Koller (music), Igor Pauška (space), Silvio Vujičić (costume), Jasmin Dasović (sound),Sara Bundalo (light), with the participation of students of the Danish National School of Performing Arts during the production process.

Production: Danijel Popović

Photographs: Damir Žižić

Thank you: Anne Boyer, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Anna Lea Ourø Jensen, Amalia Kasakove, June Kathrine Lysjø, Karin Bergman, Lydia Margareta Elisabeth Östberg Diakité, Culture Center Novi Zagreb

Premiere: 27. October 2016 at Cinema SC, Student Centre Zagreb

Staff of the Student Centre of the University of Zagreb – Culture of Change: Jelena Erceg (stage manager), Krunoslav Dolenec (technical realization), Miljenko Bengez and Mario Vnučec  (light technicians), Danijel Škrbo and Barbara Šimunović (sound technicians), Stipo Katavić (stage master), Dubravko Dolenec (stagehand)

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb and the Student Centre of the University of Zagreb – Culture of Change.

Institutions Need to be Constructed is a hybrid format of a film set, performance and temporary residence placed inside deserted factories or unfinished public buildings - spaces that used to be sites of industrial production and these days may become cultural centers, spaces that through culture celebrated the industrial age in utopistic ways. By reconstructing scenes from three of BADco.'s performances Institutions Need to be Constructed examine the tension between labor and art in our recent history, symptomatically evident in the incomplete state of the three buildings. The first part of the trilogy was realized in September 2015 in former factory Rikard Benčić in Rijeka, the second on 27. February 2016 at the Youth Center in Split in collaboration with Platforma 9,81 and the third installment at POGON – Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth, the former factory Jedinstvo, on 04. March 2016.

The events include discussions on the social and economic aspects of artistic labor, the task of productivity, and valorization of artistic work through non-aesthetic spheres of social production. The discussions include the participation of artists and cultural workers, cultural studies researchers and analysts who reflect on the position of culture in the social system, on new institutional models and problems of institutionalization of contemporary art practices.

During BADco.’s 15 years of work productions that were already shown often found themselves in unusual and radicalized concurrence with real political circumstances, even though in the works themselves BADco. never strove for political representation. Our performances have never emerged as stagings of “real events”, but events constitute them as “real.”

The production The eyes melted is an attempt to scrutinize at its very source the ready performative assemblage that reality has brought into proximity with the fact of mass deaths on the beaches of the Mediterranean and the terrorist attacks in Europe: excess of clarity, transparency, visibility. The extreme transparency of the images of dead bodies suffused with the sun of the Mediterranean becomes the everyday of its beaches. The beach that was once the topos of extreme visions of war in films, paintings and performances about the atomic tests, today becomes a place of the nameless dead, the unnamed multitude that comes down to its social fact – the Arab. Recently there were beaches of Palestine, today it is the beaches of Libya, Tunisia, Greece…

The eyes melted, developed as a “view in progress,” is a continuation of the research that is constantly in the background of the work of the collective – responsibility for things seen – and is produced in collaboration with Goran Ferčec (dramaturg), Siniša Ilić (production design), Petar Milat (philosopher) Alen and Nenad Sinkauz (musicians), Jasmin Dasović (sound designer), Alen Vukelić (light designer) and Silvio Vujičić (costume designer).

The project was realized in co-production with the Festival Perforations by Domino.

a solo procession

“It’s night. You’re asleep, peacefully dreaming. Suddenly the ground begins to tremble. Slowly, the shaking escalates until you are thrown off balance, clinging desperately to any fixture to stay standing. The vibration moves up through your body, constricting your internal organs until it hits your chest and throat, making it impossible to breathe. At exactly the point of suffocation, the floor rips open beneath you, yawning into a gaping dark abyss. Screaming silently, you stumble and fall, skydiving into what looks like a bottomless pit. Then, without warning, your descent is curtailed by a hard surface. At the painful moment of impact, as if in anticipation, you awaken. But there is no relief, because at that precise split second, you experience an intense sound that shocks you to your very core. You look around but see no damage. Jumping out of bed, you run outside. Again you see no damage. What happened? The only thing that is clear is that you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you are still resonating with the encounter.”

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

You go and you arrive somewhere. Or not. You watch and you see something. Or not. The place at which you arrive will not exist for long, the things you see seem like a threat. But what connects the concrete place, its time and its duration, is rhythm; a rhythm which constitutes dance, which constitutes fear, a rhythm which constitutes pleasure. In this new performance by BADco. rhythm forms time which carries the dread, a time which ticks away, a time which hammers in. If the contemporary danse macabre is no longer a procession of dead men or a procession of social classes but rather a chain of vibrations, electromagnetic waves and sonic affects, how else would one choreograph it if not as a solo performance?

Our everyday life unfolds according to different temporal cycles like the calendar, daily and lunar cycles, and basic life cycles – somatic or mechanical. Rhythm is the phenomenon that connects place and time and provides a sort of infrastructure for time. Tempo, a momentary choice, duration, frequencies, sequences and rhythm are all mutually conditioning structures of time and every dance performance, which is a limited temporal image of spatial modifications, benefits precisely from the ways it deploys these structures. The work on this performance is thus grounded in our interest in the so-called rhythmanalysis and focused greatly on the experimentation with a set of varied relations which occur between rhythmic patterning, vibrations and frequencies, as well as different ways of measuring time. A dance performance, whether it be artistic, recreational, religious or social is, on the other hand, only one among many tactics of drowning the body into sonic spaces that produce matching affective states – pleasure, irritation or fear. Furthermore, one of the mythological topoi of the discourse on dance is precisely the body’s attempt to reach a state when it is fully immersed in the act of dancing. This concept of a body that is being danced away proposes that we think about the body in dance as a specific type of object in continuity with other material objects, as a particular condensation of matter within a general continuity of movement.

Choreography in this performance is an attempt to neglect the romanticist concept of the body as a generator of movement and focus instead on the body’s ability to mediate but also to resist different series of movements, gazes and vibrations which chain both living and nonliving mediators together by way of conformation, translation, composition etc. And for this reason we needed to focus our attention on the “underground fluxes” of a dance performance; the infrastructure of dance, background rhythms, the rhythm of elementary corporeal functions and their visceral effects.
BADco.

The performance is jointly choreographed by Nikolina Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec and it is performed by Zrinka Užbinec.
Dramaturgy and set up: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Music and suggestions about sound: Alen and Nenad Sinkauz
Idea and costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Company manager: Lovro Rumiha
Production assistant: Vanja Zubović

The performance uses sound fragments from the movie Come and See by Elem Klimov, the poem Four Quarters by T.S.Eliot and a song Needles and Pins by The Searchers.
” In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
T.S. Eliot from Four Quartets

“Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must form one’s mediators. It’s a series: If you don’t belong to a series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case.”
Gilles Deleuze

Premiere: 16., 17. and 18. 10. 2014 @ Kino SC, Savska 25, Zagreb, Croatia

New dates: 27. i 28. 1. 2015 , 9:00 pm@ Kino SC, Savska 25, Zagreb, Croatia

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

Inspired by the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus

Departing from the problem of the absence of (com)passion and expected emotional reactions, the STRANGER project, using Camus’s antihero Meursault, provides a view of the social and systemic hypocrisies that are hidden behind relationships based on transparency. This stage reading of THE STRANGER focuses on three dominant images borrowed from the novel: the situation of confession, prison, and the moment of the murder itself as the point where all of the novel’s forces accumulate. Shedding light on a narrative and discourse as an attempt to explain what happened generates the level of confession, the law of transparency. Constructing a transparent choreographic score examines, in terms of mise-en-scène, the performative potency of the situations and atmospheres inscribed in the novel. Finally, with light literally shed upon it, the murder, as the central point in the narrative, is presented as a tableau of a continual threat and a stage image that constantly remains incomplete in the spectator’s eye, in its poetic character, always incomplete in waiting for a visual release, unclear because too clear.

Goran Sergej Pristaš –  directing

Goran Ferčec – dramaturgy and text

Nikolina Pristaš – choreography and performance

Zrinka Užbinec – choreography and performance

Ana Kreitmeyer – choreography and performance

Petar Milat – textual contribution and performance

Alen Sinkauz – music and performance

Nenad Sinkauz – music and performance

Siniša Ilić – drawings and stage design

Silvio Vujičić – costume design

Alan Vukelić – light design

Jasmin Dasović – sound design

Iva Dežmar – mask

Lovro Rumiha – production

Special thanks – Maria Tsitroudi, Anders Paulin

They always came for one at dawn; that much I knew. So, really, all my nights were spent in waiting for that dawn. I have never liked being taken by surprise. When something happens to me I want to be ready for it. That’s why I got into the habit of sleeping off and on in the daytime and watching through the night for the first hint of daybreak in the dark dome above. The worst period of the night was that vague hour when, I knew, they usually come; once it was after midnight I waited, listening intently. Never before had my ears perceived so many noises, such tiny sounds. Still, I must say I was lucky in one respect; never during any of those periods did I hear footsteps. Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her. Because I might just as well have heard footsteps, and felt my heart shattered into bits. Even though the faintest rustle sent me hurrying to the door and, pressing an ear to the rough, cold wood, I listened so intently that I could hear my breathing, quick and hoarse like a dog’s panting—even so there was an end; my heart hadn’t split, and I knew I had another twenty-four hours’ respite.
Albert Camus: Stranger

In 1951 the abstract painter Willem de Kooning commented on the radical visuality unleashed by the atomic bomb. The advent of atomic light signaled, for de Kooning, the absolute transformation of visual representation: “Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everybody was the same color. It made angels out of everybody.”
An atomic visuality, forged in the spectacular visuality of the atomic or A-bomb, an A-visuality. De Kooning’s reflection on the atomic detonation and its effect on visual representation is marked by religious excitement and confusion. The sadistic metaphysics of his account, the cruel suggestion of redemptive ecstasy in the monochromatic annihilation, conveys de Kooning’s uneasiness in front of the atomic spectacle.
His language charts the limits of figuration before the visual event that may have changed “the concept of painting once and for all.” “The eyes that actually saw the light,” those who witnessed and understood (or were converted), also lost their vision; in the sacrificial logic of de Kooning’s passage, the witnesses exchanged their eyesight for a sublime visuality: the eyes of those witnesses “who saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy.” Ecstatic, outside, blinded. The last form of light, perhaps, that anyone needed to see. The last light of history, according to de Kooning, or the light at the end of history. (…)
The atomic blast that melted the eyes of angels brought forth a spectacle of invisibility, a scene that vanishes at the instant of its appearance only to linger forever in the visual world as an irreducible trace of avisuality.
Akira Mizuta Lippit: Atomic Light

Excerpts from the following texts were used in the performance:
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers
Mahmoud Darwish: Identity Card

Books we refer to in the performance:
Akira Mizuta Lippit: Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).
Georges Didi-Huberman: Survivance des lucioles
Alexander Garcia-Düttmann: Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood

The film Juke box (1966) by Ante Verzotti is screened during the performance.

Premiere: June 27th and 28th 2015 @ Zagreb Dance Center, Ilica 10, Zagreb, Croatia

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, Zagreb Dance Centre.

Project is a coproduced by Perforations Festival (Domino)

The Drawer is situated in an atelier scattered with objects that have a limited function. Amongst these objects and together with them the performers dedicate their dancing to an encounter with a reflection, to an endeavor to resist being dependent upon one’s own image, its history and its exhibition value.

“Despite the fact that the spectator never leaves her seat or “participates” in the performance in any way her position is manifoldly problematized. The process of gaze circulation is not activated by the usual mechanics of gaze exchange whereby performers activate the spectators by watching them thus mobilizing their sense of presence and self-awareness, quite the contrary, our spectatorial position is intensified without them ever laying an eye on us.”
Una Bauer, Kulturpunkt

The Drawer is developed as a series of encounters of BADco. with the visual artist Siniša Ilić, writer and dramaturge Goran Ferčec and students of dance from The Danish National School of Performing Arts who are spending their internship with BADco. After two months of collaboration and sharing of the process, the artists involved will go each separate ways; BADco. will continue to perform their version and the students their own version(s) of the performance, making it thus only partially possible to predict similarities and differences in the performances’ afterlife.

In this open atelier you will be able to meet the following artists:

…those who are involved at the moment:

Pravdan Devlahović (performance)

Goran Ferčec (dramaturgy)

Fuji Hoffmann (performance)

Siniša Ilić (drawings and stage design)

Ana Kreitmeyer (performance)

David Kummer (performance)

Goran Sergej Pristaš (directing)

Nikolina Pristaš (choreography)

Olivia Riviere (performance)

Zrinka Užbinec (performance)

those who left:

Ingvild Bertelsen (performance)

Meleat Fredriksson (performance)

Sandra Liaklev Andersen (performance)

Nanna Stigsdatter Mathiassen (performance)

Karis Zidore Christensen (performance)

Software: Daniel Turing

Additional development: Anton Koch

“When a man begins to consecrate himself before intercourse with his wife with a sacred intention, a holy spirit is aroused above him, composed of both male and female.
And the Holy One, blessed be He, directs an emissary who is in charge of human embryos, and assigns to him this particular spirit, and indicates to him the place to which it should be entrusted.
This is the meaning of ” The night said, a man-child has been conceived.” ( Job 3:3 ).
“The night said” to this particular emissary, ” a man-child has been conceived ” by so-and-so.
And the Holy One, blessed be He, then gives this spirit all the commands that He wishes to give, and they have already explained this.
Then the spirit descends together with the image (tselem ), the one in whose likeness [ diyokna ] [ the spirit] existed above.
With this image man grows; with this image he moves through the world.
This is the meaning of “Surely man walks with an image” ( Psalms 39:7 ).
While this image is with him, man survives in the world…. A man’s days exist through the image, and are dependent on it.”
Zohar

"Night had fallen very quickly; all of a sudden, it seemed, the sky went black above the skylight. The keeper switched on the lamps, and we were almost blinded by the blaze of light. We asked him if he couldn’t turn off one of the lamps. The glare off the white walls was making our eyes smart. “Nothing doing,” he said. They’d arranged the lights like that; either one had them all on or none at all. After having had our eyes closed, we had a feeling that the light had grown even stronger than before. There wasn’t a trace of shadow anywhere, and every object, each curve or angle, seemed to score its outline on one’s eyes."
Albert Camus: The Stranger

Production: Lovro Rumiha

Premiere: 22., 23. and 24.1. 2015 @ Kino SC, Savska 25, Zagreb, Croatia

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

Each collective process in theater begins with an encounter, and so every circuit of relations between the authors, institutions and the public has the character of an outcome of an encounter – it could have not occurred, and yet it did. The principle of conditioning of an encounter is a permanent state of incompleteness, incompleteness not as state of un-done, but as a state of creation through disruption – that of a premiere, interpretive disruption, economic disruption… This principle does not start from the principle of necessity, the principle that elements of the theatrical process arise out of necessity, but become necessity themselves. All encounters, and their outcomes, are subject to chance thus their conditioning can only be determined by reverse engineering.

The relatively fast pace of production of performances, the focus of the artists primarily on future life and distribution of new works, and the subsequent chronic lack of time for consideration of past work and public traces of the work, all provoke the need for a look back, a slowing down, an interruption as an artistic gesture which, in turn, allows for a creation of conditions for new beginnings. This installation is one such pulling of a brake with a desire to: Re-think things. See how it works. Hear the sound interruption.

The performative installation Broken Performances is a writing “on the margin” of our primary artistic production and is named after his own formation process – it was necessary to tear apart the performance into a series of notes, impressions, experiences, perceptions, so that we would be able to look at it again not through an interpretation of meaning it produces, but through the way it produces, the encounters that could have happened, its weak power to determine something.

The choreography that we have subjected to this analytical process is Fleshdance (2004), a work conceived as a problematic study of the triptych paintings by Francis Bacon.

The installation results from a collaboration of performance collective BADco. with cinematographer Ivan Slipčević – Slipke, editor Bojan Perić and visual artist Igor Pauška. Texts resulting from analysis by Goran Sergej Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec, with textual fragments by Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett and J. G. Ballard. Music, costumes and video used in the instalation are part of the original choreography.

The installation uses ALVES – Algorithmic Live Video Editing System software by Daniel Turing. Video scripting (ALVES): Tomislav Medak. Technical associate: Anton Koch.

Authors’ team of Fleshdance are Nikolina Pristaš (choreography and performance), Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec (performance), Ivana Ivković and Goran Sergej Pristaš (dramaturgy), Silvio Vujičić (costumes), Helge Hinteregger (music), Oliver Imfeld (video).

The installation includes units of live performance every hour on the hour throughout the duration of the exhibition.

The installation opens Wednesday 04.12.2013. at 20:00 at Gallery Nova (Teslina 7, Zagreb), and stays open until Saturday 07.12.2013. 12:00-20:00.

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

The installation opening will take part in the Salon Exploded Views of Performance – Frontiers of Analysis, Frontiers of Poetics, a public event of LABO21 – European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, a partner project of BADco. (Zagreb), Random Dance (London), Troubleyn (Antwerp) and International Choreographic Arts Centre (Amsterdam). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Thanks to WHW – What, How and for Whom and Gallery Nova.

“I believe cinema allows us to withdraw as we sit in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people, but when we sit down to watch television with the family … that’s when things get tense.”
– Rainer Werner Fassbinder

While discussing the disintegration of the Soviet Union in a televised interview, Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge return to Brecht’s sentence “Petroleum resists five acts”. That sentence sums up the problem that faces epic theater. How can dramatic material depict historical processes with all their inner contradictions, progressions and setbacks that transcend characters and their relationships? The same question – what dramatic material is an adequate means of representation of the organizing principles of today’s reality – is the speculative problem of A Pound of Hysteria, Acceleration… BADco.’s new performance attempts to find the answer in the historical dialogue of two artists, the playwright Heiner Müller and the film director Alexander Kluge. At the end of the eighties two artists speculate about politics and social upheaval, yet today that speculation resounds as a document of our own present.

Oil remains a problem of epic representation, but from today’s perspective it is also as an invisible substrate of the circulation of energy and matter in modern society. The basis for permanent expansion of production and consumption for the purposes of accumulation of capital that threatens to bring the planet to an anthropogenic boiling point. A viscous fluid that incombustibly fetters us to the preservation of our current lifestyle.

Grabbing for the emergency brake of the locomotive of world history is Benjamin’s metaphor of revolutionary rupture in the unbearable progress of modernity. The methodological question of a catapult for metaphors, a formal register that enables dramatic representation of historic processes, is the foundation of a conversation between Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge. Staging complexities of political turmoils and social relations, of circulation of matter and affect, is not a matter of documentary representation of reality through theatre but a Brechtian question of the functional transformation of means we use to represent that reality. If we were to argue with a certain tendency in contemporary theater, Müller’s intuition against the documentary material into criticism: the political stake of theatre is not to present a different social reality, but rather to stage the existing, melodramatic social reality under different terms.

A Pound of Hysteria, Acceleration… is set in an alternative television environment, in a different cycle of circulation of images and social commentary of reality. If the television was a companion to the golden age of welfare state, the post-television age of new screen technologies is a companion to its dismantling. And that post-television age is marked by a new agony of the so-called middle class, a new melodramatic condition dominated by a generalized feeling of discontent with what seems to be a completely blocked social reality that screams for change – although what change that may be remains completely intransparent from the everyday experience of that reality. This performance reconstructs and deconstructs the affective charge of that agonized confusion and ideology of helplessness by performatively pushing its intensity to its needed point of interruption: “When all that mass of things does not circulate ever faster and faster, existing things turn into ghosts of time.”

Choreography and performance: Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer / Darija Doždor, Nikolina Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec

Concept and dramaturgy: Tomislav Medak

Recasting of dramatic material: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković

Production: Lovro Rumiha

Software for algorithmic video editing ALVES: Daniel Turing

Costume design: Silvio Vujičić

Light design: Alan Vukelić

Sound design: Jasmin Dasović

Set design: Miljenko Sekulić Sarma

Props: Ana Ogrizović

Music: Alban Berg, Wozzeck

Translation: Tomislav Medak

Photography and video: Dinko Rupčić

Production assistant: Marta Klepo

Public relations: Ana Kovačević

Graphic design: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta

The production includes a conversation between Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller titled The Poet as a Catapult for Metaphors. We thank Alexander Kluge for the permission to use it. The production is inspired by the works of Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pina Bausch, Michael Heinrich, Timothy Mitchell, Nanni Balestrini and the Midnight Notes collective.

The production was rehearsed at the artist-run platform SKOGEN in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Culture Center Novi Zagreb, City Center for Culture Maksimir and POGON – Center for Independent Culture and Youth.

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

The production is a part of TIMeSCAPES – Images and performances of time in late capitalism – a partner project of BADco. (Zagreb), Maska (Ljubljana), Science Communications Research (Vienna), Walking Theory (Belgrade) and Film-protufilm (Zagreb). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Thanks to: AVC Zagreb

Artistic-ecological camping at Jakuševac in Zagreb from 14.09.2013 at 10:00 until 15.09.2013. at 12:00.

We are used to thinking of nature as something "out there", elsewhere from us, removed from culture, unmanaged by man, where every change has a negative connotation. Yet, in the wilderness of man and animal, of capital, and of culture, of economic interests, and of political (self)will, the elsewhere of nature no longer exists, just like a place of man's exclusive domination no longer exists. Between the flea market and the communal waste landfill we often see just one step in the process of wast accumulation. We invite you to join us in temporarily inhabiting the space of that one step and in posing questions about alternative methods of waste management and alternative views of nature.

BADco. invites you to 24-hour camping on the field between the Sava embankment and the river itself, not far from Zagreb's communal waste landfill Prudinec/Jakuševac and the Hrelić flea market.

For a period of 24 hours let's inhabit one of Zagreb's ecologically problematic zones with artists, activists and experts who will jointly carry out a program of performances, exhibit work and open discussion on ecology and the city, waste and its management.

Join the camp with your tent, camper or sleeping bag. Join the discussions, follow the performances and spend the night on location of the artistic-ecological camp.

The project Nature needs to be constructed is dedicated to the recently departed Željko Zorica Šiš, whose performance 12 Chairs will be realized in the camp according to his instructions. The whole event will be framed by a 24-hour performance of BADco.'s production Is There Life on Stage?, and will include artistic interventions and works by media artists Ana Hušman and Davor Sanvinčenti, musicians Alen and Nenad Sinkauz and visual artist Slaven Tolj. Tomislav Tomašević from Green Action, Saša Avirović from the Čakovec communal waste company ČAKOM and Svjetlana Lugar on behalf of the project Mamutica for a clean environment will speak about waste management. On Sunday morning Parkticipacija association for urban agriculture will hold two short workshops on the topic of Food, not waste: Composting at home and planting into recycled pots. The project is supported by 7 sun beds from the eco-artistic project Reciplaya, authors: Darko Fritz, Sanda Hančević, Valerija Jurjević, 2008-11.

The camp is located on the field between the Sava embankment and river Sava, across the road from the Hrelić free market and with a view of Zagreb's communal waste landfill Prudinec/Jakuševac, starting 14. September 10:00 and ending 15. September 12:00.

Organization: BADco. aided by Green Action.

Products can be attacked only with counterproducts. Television criticism must set out from the historical corpus of the medium, namely, television as an industrial enterprise. What is more, any self-determination of the viewers, as the foundation of a possible emancipatory development of television, must measure itself against this industrial dimension: that is, by what cannot automatically be detected within an individual broadcast. Television can be transformed not on the level of the individual program, but of its entire history, which determines that program.

– Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge: Public Sphere and Experience

Television is a public medium that has seen its golden era come and go. TV was a companion to the post-war trente gloriueses of democratic welfare states. Now it is again a companion to their dismantling. Throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and well into the 80s it was a generator of shared experience, a mitigator of a bourgeois public sphere, an ideological apparatus reinforcing political hegemony. But since that period the commodification has slowly shifted TV’s social function from a public service to a marketing machine, replacing information with entertainment, expertise and education with opinionated and partisan commentary, public interest with attention-value. At the same time the proliferation of channels and programming has fragmented the collective experience, a development that has culminated in the rise of other screen technologies that make it easy for everyone to select a programme to suit their own taste and schedule, or even to create and broadcast information of their own. However, as internet is rapidly commodifying, creating an audience-commodity of its own, internet still won’t replace the television. TV will stay with us, this public medium that has seen its golden era come and go.

In April 2013 at SKOGEN, Gothenburg BADco. created a counterproposal to the television as we know it – a small-scale short-circuit television environment, fusing together in one location both the production side and the reception side of the TV medium, transforming SKOGEN into a very different kind of TV environment.

To run this TV environment we’ve installed our algorithmic live video system (ALVES) that was initially developed as a commission for the Croatian presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale. The custom-developed network with 6 computers and 6 cameras allows us to capture live action, to store it in a video data-base, to edit it together algorithmically, based on criteria we can set in advance, and perform various transformations during playback.

Using the system BADco. presented a short feedback loop between the act of production and the act of reception. This short and closed video circuit was then opened up to performative situations, joint TV viewing and interaction with the visitors.

In this project BADco. took the inspiration from the works of early television artists. In the early days of television, before TV became a colossal commercial closed circuit, these artists tried to construct a different circuit of television production and consumption, an open one. Thus, retracing some of the critical propositions in the work of these artists in their interactive environment, we reflect on the current state of television, create experimental setups and draw alternate futures for this late medium. TVolution will not be televised, its alternate evolution might however get performed.

TVolution will not be televised is run using the algorithmic live video system (ALVES) that was developed in collaboration with the German human-machine interface developer Daniel Turing. The performative installation presented in Gothenburg in April 2013 was a work in progress for BADco.’s theatre performance A Pound of Hysteria, Acceleration… – melodrama premiered in October 2013.

Coproduction: BADco. and SKOGEN

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia.

BADco. for Croatian Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial :: Intangible from Lovro Rumiha on Vimeo.

Is There Life on Stage? – Exercises in Terraforming is an artistic exploration of two connected sets of problems: establishing the minimal conditions for life and the facticity in the theater. Our starting point is the question “What are the consequences of theater’s fictionalization of a reality such as the global environmental crisis?” Therefore our reference horizon spans artistic and media sources ranging from documentary footage of our conquests of outer space, through science-fiction prose and eco-art.

The performance-series starts out from the idea of terraforming, a hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of planet, moon or other body to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by terrestrial organisms. Conceived as serial, made up of individual episodes, the production’s primary interest is to approach and exhaust the topic of establishing new conditions for life and work on stage, networks of relations, ecosystems, forms of life, communities etc. On the one hand we wish to reflect on a heightened sense of urgency to relate the global environmental crisis, on the other hand our aim is to reflect on the status of the real in theater. While theater’s social and political argumentation increasingly exhibits a passion for reality, for the documentary, for the “real people” on stage, theater always inevitably fictionalizes relations between people and things, facts and illusions. And yet, theater always is a collective act of sorts, always a temporary community with its own set of sociopoetic consequences.

The performance has a serial structure whose segments will be changing from occasion to occasion, from venue to venue. The production has  been presented twice as a work-in-progress, while the Rijeka performance in October 2012 opened a cycle of public showings in theaters. The initial project propositions were developed through a number of workshops and collaborations with artists and experts outside of the collective. The performance will remain after its premiere open through continuous workshops with the audience and yet other creators, resulting in yet other segments that will be added to the serial and permutable structure of the performance. It is adaptable to performance and gallery venues, but also other open-air of enclosed public spaces.

Inspired by works and thoughts of Timothy Morton, John W. Campbell, Yona Friedman, Vlado Martek, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Long Distance Hotel and others.

Authors: Pravdan Devlahović (performance), Ivana Ivković (dramaturgy), Ana Kreitmeyer (performance), Tomislav Medak (dramaturgy), Goran Sergej Pristaš (directing), Nikolina Pristaš (performance and choreography), Zrinka Užbinec (performance).

Collaborators: Daniel Turing (software), Silvio Vujičić (costume design), Alan Vukelić (light design), Jasmin Dasović (sound design).

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Coproducers: BADco. and Domino

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
The production was prepared at the Culture Center Novi Zagreb.

Black and Forth is about obsession, the obsession of watching, the obsession of forging a relationship between the observer and the observed, the obsessive search for the materiality of the invisible, the unexhibited and the unsubstantiated. Every scene on stage is a note to its own making, a note on the possibility of creating an image, a physiognomy of a world held as a promise in the image, the responsibility for the optical unconscious, a note to all that differentiates a technologically produced image from magic. The repertoire of this theater production has been determined by a translation of cinematic procedure and film production into theater. It is inspired by the work of authors and thinkers of structuralist film Tomislav Gotovac, Michael Snow, Slobodan Šijan and others. This production does not seek to translate one means of expression into another, but to inquire how theater must change to accommodate the showing of a cinematic object. We do not see film or theater as media, but as circuits of desire for the very apparatus of representation – BADco. as a theater collective understands the film script as a score of the image, the camera as a manual for watching, and film editing as the narrative function of theater. Theater which occurs in this meeting with film is already a place of missed opportunities, offering the viewer a visual contract with reality, a contract that depicts the eye as the performer, the theater as a watching reality. Returning to the theater what film had taken from it at the beginning of the twentieth century, and what film had left five decades later, we ask:What is the position of the viewer in watching? Are we related to the images that we see? Who are the off-screen, invisible people? When does the film extra become the performer, or the performer an extra in her own performance?

The theatre production Black and Forth is a continuation of the project Responsibility for Things Seen commissioned by the curators’ collective What, How and for Whom/WHW for the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. The audience will have a chance to experience a stage version of the installation presented in Venice. Software developer Daniel Turing has developed an interactive computer system for the project, one that records and stores video material and edits it algorithmically in real time.
The installation and the premiere of the theater production will be first presented in Zagreb in February 2012 as part of the exhibition of the Croatian participation at the 54th Venice Biennale One Needs to Live Self-Confidently… Watching.

Performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Danijel Ljuboja, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Choreography: Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak

Software: Daniel Turing
Cinematographer: Dinko Rupčić
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Sound: Jasmin Dasović
Collaborators: Ana Martina Bakić i Ana Ogrizović
Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

The production presents the text Group Enjoyment by Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a. Tomislav Gotovac, courtesy of Sarah Gotovac.

The production presents the film Chapter 2: Parametricism / “No Future” by BADco. (still image film, B/W, 2011)

Photography: Dinko Rupčić
Camera assistant: Hrvoje Franjić
Video editing: Iva Kraljević
Performers: BADco. i Ivo Kušek
Architectural visualisation: Antun Sevšek
Draftsmen: Igor Pauška, Slaven Josip Delalle
Production assistant: Valentina Orešić
Modelers: Lidija Živković, Ivana Hribar, Barbara Radelj

Coproducers: BADco., Zagreb Youth Theatre
Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
The project was also rehearsed at the Culture Centre Novi Zagreb.

The present times, ridden with the sustained crisis of capitalism, environmental catastrophes and the depletion of common resources, require a reordering of economic and political relations on a global scale. As is repeatedly echoed throughout our work: When there is not enough for everybody, there is no equitable order that can be negotiated. It can function and be understood only on the basis of active policing of differential entitlements and exclusions. Yet attempts to fathom the ongoing reordering of the global space and to imagine a different course of social development to the existing capitalist system run aground at the limits of representation of systemic totality and the fragmention of agency within it. Even in the face of crass injustices, the collective capacity to imagine and project the common future remains captured in images, creating generalised desires, consumerist fragmentation of responsibility and a sense of public progress that are ultimately mobilised to sustain and maximize private profit. Our work reflects this conundrum using what’s most immediate to us as theatre makers: investigating strategies of representation, spatial orderings of representation, future scenarios and asymmetric acts of collective communication.

This work starts as a spatial gesture: an insertion of the outside space into the exhibition room. The back wall has been replicated in the space, and the non-space behind the original wall now populates the exhibition room. This non-space, found outside, might be any number of things – anything that can be imagined. For all we know it is a theatre scene, a stage – and this exhibition room might be just a backstage. But it’s not quite that – it’s a withdrawal of space, a double negativity: not quite this exhibition space, not quite a different place. Well, it could be anything that can be imagined, but many more things that cannot. Maybe a totality of global processes outside of this room that begs the question of how it can be represented.

This work endures as a temporal gesture: it records in images the comings and goings. Theatre, our line of work, always requires our presence. It cannot take place if we’re not there. Imagine if we miss a flight! And here we remain in our absence. In recorded images – as you will too. And in images on screens you will see the presence of your absent fellow-visitors, just as you will perhaps witness the absence of your own presence. Become co-present in time with someone who is not with you in the space. The image is a time machine, a transport in time. It opens and forecloses the imagination of the future.

This work demands a scopic act: the much maligned capacity of images to capture our imagination and to supplant our sociality by its simulation is only commensurate with our capacity to always produce new images, new configurations and new disfigurations of images. Here it’s no different. Produce images we did, attempted to create  images differently we did. And, yet, things don’t stop here. There seems to be something incomplete in images that coax out our action in the receptive act of viewing: our intent capacity to become captured, our passionate passivity in surrendering to our own hijacking, our engaged absorption in the intimacy of images. And it’s not the sovereign, enlightened viewer that is the agent of this activity. Rather it’s a beholder that loses her hold as she becomes immersed in an image and the image loses its clarity as she starts deciphering its detail, unraveling a scene that becomes more and more impossible to relate to as she looks closer and closer, requiring a spiral of reading, a responsibility disturbed by the non-totalizable subject of the image.

Responsibility for the Things Seen is based on BADco.’s analytical performative principles. It is an evolving work, presented here in Venice as ‘theatre by other means’- through an installation and an intervention. It consists of following elements that form an integral work:

• A door left open on the back wall of the exhibition space, suggesting an imaginary space behind.
• The replica of that same wall displaced into the exhibition space letting the non-space outside into this room.
• Five video displays: three set behind the back wall and accessible through cutouts in the wall, and two on the displaced replica wall.
  • Three videos behind the back wall provide intimate cinematic accounts, each accessible only to one spectator at any one time, of displacements in space, image and human presence. The first is a photo essay. The second is a mix of choreography of performers absent from the actual exhibition space and the inadvertent movement of exhibition visitors who are present. The third display shows a live camera shot processed by software subtracting or adding the human presence in the exhibition space.
  • Two interactive videos on the two replica wall displays show short cinematic narratives algorithmically edited in real time using prerecorded material and live feed from cameras in the exhibition space.
• Intermittent choreographic interventions during the opening days of the Biennale.

Presented at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia as part of the Croatian Exhibition, 2011

Curators: What, How and for Whom/WHW

Venue: Arsenale

BADco. are Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Lovro Rumiha and Zrinka Užbinec

Software and interactive installation: Daniel Turing

Light design: Alan Vukelić
Cinematography and still photography: Dinko Rupčić
Camera assistant: Hrvoje Franjić
Video editing: Iva Kraljević
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić
Architect: Ana Martina Bakić
Additional performer: Ivo Kušek
Architectural visualisation: Antun Sevšek
Draftsmen: Igor Pauška, Slaven Josip Delalle
Production assistant: Valentina Orešić
Modelers: Lidija Živković, Ivana Hribar, Barbara Radelj
Promotional photos: Dinko Rupčić, Ivan Kuharić
Props production: Zagreb Youth Theatre workshop

Coproduced by: BADco., Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and Zagreb Youth Theatre.

Supported by: City Office for Culture, Education and Sports – City of Zagreb

world premiere:
26.11.2010 20:00 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

additional performances:
27.-28.11.2010 22:00 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
(note different time!)

Point of Convergence is a choreographic experiment persisting in the excess where communication in dance and about dance oscillates between what can and what cannot be stated: insisting on choreographic means – structuring the intensity of communication’s noise – producing the specific conditions of dialogue in dance and dialogue on dance. To understand one another, it is necessary to negotiate the terms of understanding.

The authors Zrinka Užbinec and Ana Kreitmeyer implement this negotiation of the terms of understanding, an understanding that is yet to come to understanding, through a series of mutations of dance expressions. A simple initial choreography is communicated to each other through a series of dance negotiations, understandings and misunderstandings through which newly established gestures lose their meaning, and casual glances and signs of a hand become intensities that are changing the context, transforming meanings into an excess.

During this process of “rough” translation the dance expression of one is exposed to a constant and continuous dance interpretation of the other, creating a choreographic situation that is no longer located on the bodies, but between the two bodies. Attempts at negotiation, at translation, misconstructions, explanations one did not request, disagreements, an attempt at coexisting. The point of convergence is left to the spectators’ gaze where, in the illusory distance, two parallel lines intersect at infinity.

Team of Negotiators: Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Nikolina Pristaš, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec

Choreography and performance: Ana Kreitmeyer and Zrinka Užbinec

Light design: Alan Vukelić
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Producer: Lovro Rumiha
Support: Pravdan Devlahović

We thank the participants of the lab 10 days 1 unity.

Project was made in: Culture Centre Novi Zagreb and Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth – POGON.

Project is supported by: Zagreb City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

A widespread popularity of physical culture, or more precisely “harmonic gymnastics”, in the context of American bourgeoisie at the beginning of 20th century came predominantly through teachings of a successor of the French oratory teacher François Delsarte, the creator of an exhaustive system of exercises the purpose of which was mostly aimed at achieving naturalness, elegance and harmoniousness in oratory and acting. This specific focus on refining and mastering the gestural expression of the body also imprinted itself into the ideology of early modern dance and could be traced in its techniques (Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Ruth St.Denis, Ted Shawn…). By paying special attention to Delsarte’s detailed analysis of gestural expression, especially his prohibition to use parallel gesture in elegant oratory, this choreographic study exhausts that prohibition by insisting on it, thus attempting to shift away from an understanding of dance as a rhetorical gesture and toward an understanding of dance as a phenomenon that is procedurally rhetorical, that achieves effectivity of expression through operating with complex processes persuasively. On the same line, our interest went towards the hiatus between “speaking” and “speaking persuasively” in dance and towards contemporary dance’s relation to the rhetorical cliché of naturalness which substituted the idea of lightness in ballet.

The “image” of the historic performance by Joseph Beuys, paraphrased in the subtitle, seemed like a great conceptual substructure which could host a choreographic speculation on some of the key ideas beneath contemporary contemporary dance but at the same time enable us to ask the question how dance might look like not form the perspective of the spectator or the performer but from the perspective of all withdrawn objects whose “natural” deadness pulls the body away from the world of the living into the black box of the undead.

Composition and modulation: Nikolina Pristaš
Notes and blackboxing: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Hare: Ana Ogrizović
Technical support: Marcell Mars
Speculative dimension: Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak, Zrinka Užbinec.
Producer: Lovro Rumiha

Semi-inspired by the work of: Joseph Beuys, François Delsarte, Franz Kafka, Steven Shaviro, Bruno Latour and Graham Harman

The project was made in: Culture Centre Novi Zagreb, POGON – Zagreb Centre for Independant Culture and Youth and Culture Centre Kalvarija (Rijeka).
Project is supported by: Zagreb City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministry of Culture RH

The production premiered in Zagreb at the Perforations Festival in 2010.

A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday’s clock, nor by today’s, but by tomorrow’s. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen.
In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of a storm today, and SOS signals come from every side. Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (genre); but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? Today we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die- and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start over again, from the beginning, what would we live by? And for what? What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons- horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?’.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1923

The 2009 BADco. production presents a complex operation in time. At the beginning of the new century we ask ourselves: What happens to all future times whose time has run out? What happens when the founding social narratives no longer offer the key to understanding reality?

Embark on a theatrical journey through parables of the future and recapitulations of the past, through an archeology of utopian tales and visions never realized. Kafka’s parallel world of an imaginary “Amerika” he never had the chance to visit, the futuristic vision of Mayakovski’s “The Flying Proletarian”. A flight two hundred years into the future during which you will meet the surviving members of the League of Time: an ufologist, a pilot, a man-machine and a cosmonaut, get a bird’s eye view of the Red Square, hear slogans of biocosmists and peak into American psychedelic art.

Authors: Pravdan Devlahović (performance and choreography), Ivana Ivković (dramaturgy), Ana Kreitmeyer (performance and choreography), Tomislav Medak (dramaturgy and performance), Goran Sergej Pristaš (directing), Nikolina Pristaš (choreography), Zrinka Užbinec (performance and choreography).

Collaborators: Helge Hinteregger i Jasmin Dasović (sound design), Tor Lindstrand (set design), Daniel Turing (software), Silvio Vujičić (costume design), Alan Vukelić (light design).

Translators: Marina Antolković, Alisa Terekhova, Marina Miladinov

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Based on texts and works by Franz Kafka, Vladimir Mayakovski, Aleksei Kapitonovich Gastev, Július Koller, Georg Schoelhammer, Factory of the Excentric Actor, U.S.C.O., Konstantin Melnikov, Joe Meek, Stano Filko, Owen Hatherley

Coproducers: BADco., Drugo more, Croatian National Theater Ivan pl. Zajc
Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
The production was prepared at the Culture Center Novi Zagreb and Prostor+ in Rijeka.

The League of Time is commissioned by Black/North SEAS, an initiative of Intercult, Sweden and is funded by EU Culture 2007-2013.

Premiere: July 2009 in Rijeka, Croatia

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To download an early work-in-progress slideshow presentation of our production The League of Time click below (PDF, 5 MB).

Whatever Dance Toolbox is a set of software tools designed for the analysis and development of dance and movement. Six tools included in the suite can help dancers and choreographers devise, develop and rehearse dance, but can also be used in dance education or by non-dancers to explore movement. The suite is a product of a long-standing collaboration between BADco. and German human-machine interface developer and artist Daniel Turing, and it reflects some of the mutual concerns with the dancer-computer interaction and choreographic thinking.

Using Whatever Dance Toolbox in rehearsal dancers can manipulate the image of movement and work with an ”active mirror” to produce qualities that they cannot produce on their own. Body is placed inside a different relation to its environment, which, in turn, determines and changes its expressiveness. Tools employ visual analysis, tasks and temporally manipulated reproduction of captured images to allow dancers and choreographers to study and complexify their movement and composition. The machine-factor generates an organization of choreographic elements different and alien to what other choreographic methodologies can produce.

Free download and easy setup

Whatever Dance Toolbox comes on a free Ubuntu GNU/Linux LiveCD that you can insert into your computer’s CD/DVD drive and boot into the operating system without having to install it on your computer’s hard drive. All you will need to start working on Whatever Dance Toolbox is a computer with a CD/DVD drive connected by a FireWire cable to a video camera and, preferably, a video projector or a large screen.

Whatever Dance Toolbox can be either downloaded or can be ordered on a CD with a manual written by BADco.

For the latest version of Whatever Dance Toolbox contact: badco@badco.hr

You will need to burn the downloaded file onto a blank CD as an image or create a bootable USB flash drive. You can use either the CD or USB flash drive to boot your computer into the Whatever Dance Toolbox environment.

Detailed introduction and instructions can be found in our Whatever Dance Toolbox – Manual. The electronic version of the Manual can be downloaded here.

Note that the electronic version of the Manual does not include methodological exercises that BADco. has developed and that you can use to develop your own work. As the tool is intuitive, you can develop your own exercises, but should you wish to benefit from our experience you can order the Manual as a book.

Order Whatever Dance Toolbox Manual

Based on the experience of using Whatever Dance Toolbox in our own work and facilitating numerous workshops with the tool, we have developed a set of exercises that can help you in your work. You can order the physical copy of Whatever Dance Toolbox Manual that includes our methodological exercises and a CD with the software suite, please write to badco@badco.hr

The price for the Manual is €30 for individuals and €60 for institutions (packaging and postage not included).

ISBN: 978-953-56603-0-9

Whatever Dance Toolbox – Workshops

If you are interested in organizing a Whatever Dance Toolbox workshop for your students, your dancers, your non-dancers, your scholars, your visual artists, your audiences, we have done a number of Whatever Dance Toolbox workshops tailored to different groups. Please write to us at badco@badco.hr

You can also check out the article by Lise Amy Hansen and Andrew Morrison mentioning Whatever Dance Toolbox: Materializing Movement—Designing for Movement-based Digital Interaction (International Journal of Design, Vol 8, No 1, 2014)

World premiere: 17.-19.10.2008 @ 19:30 Dom im Berg, Graz.

Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Stage: Slaven Tolj
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Video: Ana Hušman
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Sound design: Ivan Marušić-Klif
Sound technician: Jasmin Dasović

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumiere, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.

Coproducers: Steirischer Herbst, University of Zagreb – Student center – Theatre &TD

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.

From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.

Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?

1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
— Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983

Little by little we are replaced … by uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another, each image at its place, as each of us, at our place, in the chain of events on which we have lost all power.
— Dziga Vertov Group, Here And Elsewhere, 1972

This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor.
— Johnathan Beller, Cinema, Capital of the 20th Century, 1994

The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind… In the Lumière film of 1895 it is possible to discover that the workers were assembled behind the gates and surged out at the camera operator’s command. Before the film direction stepped in to condense the subject, it was the industrial order which synchronized the lives of the many individuals.
— Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 2001

Open rehearsal 18.04.2008 at 19:00 @ Culture Center Novi Zagreb – Remetinec, Zagreb

Directed by: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Performed by: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec

On Exhaustion revisits the site of the first film ever made Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory: the factory gate. The first moving images cinema wrought on the eye were those of workers collectively surging across the threshold of factory to leave behind their work. They captured the movement of labor force from its place of industrial work and into the space of cinematic production. As commentators have noted, it is here that the troubled relation of moving images to representationof work began. While the camera’s prying eye preferred for the work to remain hidden behind, granting us rarely ever glimpses of manual toil at the assembly-line, throughout its history the cinema pursued atomized individual stories of disbanded workers after work: their romances, their perpetrations, their destinies in the grand scheme of events.

Co-producers: BADco., Steirischer Herbst, Student Center Zagreb
Supported by: City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, City ofZagreb; Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia
The project was prepared at Culture Center Novi Zagreb – Remetinec.

Premiere: October 2008, Dom im Berg, Graz, Austria.

BADco. in cooproduction with Zagreb Youth Theater.

concept and choreography: Nikolina Pristaš
dramaturgy: Goran Sergej Pristaš

performed by: Sandra Banić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Šimičić, Zrinka Užbinec

space and lights: Slaven Tolj
sound: Helge Hinteregger
costumes: Silvio Vujičić
lights design: Alan Vukelić

authors of new versions of “The Grasshopper and the Ant”: Leonidas Donskis, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish, Dubravko Mihanović, Lana Šarić, Andrija Turčin
authors of referential texts: John Cage, E.E. Cummings, Jean de La Fontaine, Michel Serres, Mladen Stilinović

collaborators – members of BADco.: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak

thanks to: Maja Marjančić, Bojana Cvejić, Martina Hochmuth, Lin Hixson, Ivan Marušić Klif, Dubravka Vrgoč, Mile Blažević, Eks-scena, Center for Culture Novi Zagreb

the project was developed within the artist-in-residence program of Tanzquartier Wien

grasshopper – ants
slackers – workers
parasites – producers
static – change
sounds – noise
music – engines

The grasshopper counter-attacks. At a distance from the anthill, it sings, filling space. The ant cannot get rid of this cry: here is a parasite that it cannot eliminate. The parasite has to find a phenomenon against which the producer can do nothing.
Michel Serres: The Parasite

The ant is a friend
(And here she might mend)
Little given to lend.
“How did you spend the summer?”
Said she, looking shame
At the borrowing dame.
“Night and day to each comer
I sang, if you please.”
“You sang! I’m at ease;
For it’s plain at a glance,
Now, ma’am, you must dance.”
from Jean de La Fontaine: The Grasshopper and the Ant

workshop presentation 10.01.2007 18:00 :: MM Centre, Student Centre :: Savska 25 :: Zagreb

Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Krešimir Mikić, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec & Damir Bartol Indoš

Directed by: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković

Collaborators: Tor Lindstrand (space), Daniel Turing (software), Nicolas Siepen (film), Miljenko Bengez (lights), Silvio Vujičić (costumes)
Design: Gordan Karabogdan

Memories Are Made Of This… performance notes is a project which, metaphorically speaking, travels within a complex topology of memory. It borrows the name of a popular Dean Martin song whilst exercising F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” BADco. is approaching the topic of memory via a process intrinsic to it – forgetting – suggesting two possibilities of entering this complex subject matter: to think in terms of vacuity, blankness, deletion, and further on, mental fissures and emotional crack-ups.

The project operates as a notebook, a collection of performance notes and/or notes for a performance. A note is a reminder, a souvenir of some past situation, without an exposition yet open to all possible re-interpretations and fictionalizations, a marker of the possibility of a perpetual divergence.

The performance is a kind of kaleidoscopic dérive through the fragmented textual tissue of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Crack-Up”, situational and atmospheric components of films dealing with memories, traces of dance materials and its spatial structures, and distorted real-time video material, all put together so as to create a complex network of performance elements combined in such a way to allow ambiguous readings, interpretational short-circuits and crack-ups in one’s ability to deduce a coherent linear whole out of things presented.

Joining the regular cast of BADco. on this occasion are Krešimir Mikić and Damir Bartol Indoš.

“Instead of being sorry for yourself, listen” she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks /really/ thinks.)
So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you – suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack is in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes-your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if i ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! the world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked-it’s the Grand Canyon.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up

In co-production with: Intercult, Stockholm, Student Center – Culture of Change, Teatar &TD, Zagreb, Theorem supported by Culture 2000

Performance was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb, PAF, St. Erme, Francuska

The project is supported by the Zagreb City Council for Culture, the Ministry of Culture, Croatia, Goethe Institute (Zagreb) and Embassy of Sweden (Zagreb).

Special thanks to: Mårten Spångberg, IBM/Lenovo, Medic d.o.o., Ivana Sajko, Kazimir Curić (Virtualni ured d.o.o.), Đurđa Janeš, Marko Sančanin & Platforma 9,81, Tomislav Medak

performance within the project Dictionary of War, Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria

13.-14.10.2006

Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the subject of war, to be formed and presented at four two-day events in Graz, Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, each featuring twenty-five contributions from scientists, artists, theorists and practitioners. The lectures, performances, films, slide shows, readings, concerts proceed in strict alphabetical order. Dictionary of War serves to scrutinize a reality that characteristically obfuscates existing power relations, the more people talk about war and peace.Parallel to the performative implementation of the Dictionary, the concepts will be documented and made available for discussion on the Internet as video recordings. Finally, Merve-Verlag will be publishing an actual book version.

http://www.steirischerherbst.at

Nikolina Pristaš, Ivana Ivković

09. 09. 2006, 12:00 @ Trg Petra Preradovića, Zagreb

Urban Festival

By asking ourselves the question to what degree can a protest mobilize public space and impair its rituals, we are analysing the ideal act of the protest, often limited only to the semantic struggle, through entering a direct communication with the environment and passers by; marking the act of performance with the action itself, reinterpreting relationships of everyday communication on one of Zagreb’s squares which, being far from agora, is defined, in the context of a series of festivals and promo actions, by its commercial and entertaining functions.

Our performance act is not the act of protest itself; our performance parasitizes on the notion of the protest’s historical and cultural heritage and recognizable representations of the political protest, appealing to the protest as the power of perseverance; a power to transform being into (the power of) acting.

Choreographer: Pravdan Devlahović
Performed by: Pravdan Devlahović & Zrinka Užbinec
Assistant choreographer: Nikolina Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ivana Ivković
Music: Višeslav Laboš
Lights: Miljenko Bengez
Production: BADco.

Gravidation is a result of the choreographic praxis of variableness and uncertainty of image of the body in transformation, its live passage through a specifically focused spectrum of expression, thought of (own) body in dance through the notion of its indeterminateness, that is, its constant openness to an other and different from what it is in the moment. A charge resulting from that indeterminateness is inseparable from the body, it coincides with it in the sense that the body is always in transition or in process (being dynamic and alive).

The allusion to being gravid in the title of this work correlates to the interest in the transformative power that the process of pregnancy, literally and metaphorically, implies for a woman’s body; an interest for a choreography that, on an abstract level, deals with the constraints that expel the body of a male dancer-performer into a “laden state”, the moments when the body becomes ponderous of itself.

The project was prepared in: Culture Center Novi Zagreb
The project was realized with the support of Culture of Change Program, Student Center, Zagreb.
The project is supported by the Zagreb City Council for Culture, Education nad Sport and the Ministry of Culture, Croatia.

Borba, Preobraženska 6
entrance into courtyard from the Flower Square

the space opens 09. December 2005 at 18:00
10. – 14. December 2005 from 12:00 to 22:00

The project …2005… of BADco. realized with the support of Invisible Zagreb, Platforma 9,81, and subtitled shared space, is a complex installation inhabited by projects, modes of work and communication, by collaboration modules characteristic for the work of the group. BADco. is marking its first five years in this way.

In the space of the former printing shop Borba, today owned by TISAK, BADco. members and our collaborators on previous and future projects will open the doors to presentations of research projects, productions, archives, installations, performances, video works, etc. in an attempt to present the complexity of relations within the group, authors’ and collective positions, project development procedures, but also to stir up a discussion on the topics we see as relevant not only to the group’s work, but to a wider artistic context. The six day program will thematize the continuation and functionality of artistic research, performance structures, performative machines and different aspects of communication of failure and crisis within the project, the group, the public.

The six day program includes five productions, six installations, five research presentations, two public discussions, a lecture, a concert, several video works and a DVDtheque with works by BADco. and our collaborators. Besides BADco. members, others taking part in the project are: Simon Bogojević – Narath, Damir Gamulin, Daniel Fischer, Oliver Frljić, Helge Hinteregger, Emil Hrvatin, Ana Hušman, Oliver Imfeld, D. B. Indoš, Aleksandra Janeva, Ivan Marušić Klif, Petar Milat, Goran Petercol, Vedran Peternel, Platforma 9,81, Silvio Vujičić and many more.

An exhibition of posters created for BADco. productions and a DVD-theque with recordings of BADco. productions and works of our collaborators will be available to view daily in the space of the former printer’s.

The interactive video Deleted Messages was created as a navigateable recording of the performance of same title by Croatian collective BADco. in collaboration with video artist Ana Hušman. The performance was recorded with three cameras that were, as the audience members were, mobile in the performing space, plus a fourth camera that acted as a “surveillance” camera and whose image was edited by software for movement intensity tracking developed by German media artist Daniel Fischer. The viewer has the possibility to change the view angle, to switch between different cameras’ views of the performance.

The interactive video Deleted Messages was presented at the international digital performance festival TECHNE06 in Istanbul 17. -22. April 2006.

Authors involved in the project

Dancers: Pravdan Devlahović / Nikolina Pristaš, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec

Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš

Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković, Goran Sergej Pristaš

Music: Helge Hinteregger

Light design: Miljenko Bengez

Video: Oliver Imfeld

Costume: Silvio Vujičić

Visual assistance: Goran Petercol

Other collaborators: Aleksandra Janeva, Tomislav Medak, Ivana Sajko

Executive producer: Una Bauer

Fleshdance is a choreography in which the tactile potential of surface does not govern the movement but rather the movement makes visible the appearance of surfaces and their qualities. Flesh is not a boundary between the body and external materiality; it is a haptic surface which determines movement by its ability to see by means of tactility, to desire without watching, to dissolve in the moment of sensation and affliction. The desire of flesh is not directed towards the other but simply towards that which is external. By exposing flesh within the system of economy of the exchange of gaze, the dancers communicate flesh as the materiality of existence. Twisted animal-like bodies keep loosing the ground beneath their paws as it keeps shifting. Paws, claws, wings, immobilized limbs, non-functional palms feel the limit surfaces of the space. The joy of flesh is neither its yearning nor a possibility of its realization, it grows in the process of multiplication of erogenous zones and levels of intensity on the surface it creates.
- Ivana Ivković

Erotic exposure, paradoxically, does not really involve seeing and being seen. In fact, exposure subverts a certain regime of vision. The exposed flesh does not reveal a secret self that had been hidden, but rather dissolves any self that could be apprehended.
- Michael Hardt, Exposure: Pasolini in the Flesh

…the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body…
- Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Fleshdance was realized in co-production of BADco. and Dance Web Europe with the support of the Culture 2000 program of the European Union and the City Office for Culture, Zagreb

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Choreographers and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Darija Doždor, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Nikolina Pristaš, Goran Sergej Pristaš

Dramaturge: Ivana Ivković

Music: Helge Hinteregger

Space: Marko Sančanin

Costumes: Silvio Vujičić

Coftware: Daniel Turing

Co-production: BADco. & Intercult – Project SEAS: A Baltic-Adriatic Arts Adventure 2003-2005

Deleted Messages is a performance about emergent phenomena in collective movement – a meshwork of infected individual material and groupings. Transcribed and translated dance material evolves within a plane of composition in which singularities of movement coalesce – amalgamate through the iterability of the singular. Epidemic intelligence comes in effect through the possibility of infectious behavior. Sequences of cycles of individual extension time are used to measure stretches of time of different scales, each pertinent to a singular location, all a reference to quarantine.A strategy of marking of territory and delineating of hierarchical structures of performance through nonlinear dramaturgy and spam storytelling dismiss one possible narrative in favor of a complex system of singularities. The capability of generating emergent properties arises not so much from the in-built rules of individual behavior, as from the complexity of the performers’ interactions. The audience is invited to freely move through the performance space. Audience behavior is a component of performance strategy, thus making performance space responsive. Although each performer individually interprets interchangeable material parameters, pattern detection allows meta-information to circulate through the performance space.

Text by: Ivana Sajko
Copyright © 2002 VERLAG DER AUTOREN gmbh & Co. KG, Frankfurt/Main

Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Oliver Frljić, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Ivana Sajko, Marko Sančanin

Set design: Goran Petercol

Music: young Croatian surf band Moon’s Trip

Radio-play materials are used in the performance (Croatian Radio’s production), performed by: Marko Makovičić, Borna Baletić and Ivana Sajko, directed by: Goran Sergej Pristaš

RibCage is a performance based on a play written by Ivana Sajko. A play with two characters and stage directions written to be spoken in the first person, this is a text which carries its politicality in the manipulations of reality, both in dramatic reality as well as in the social construction of reality.

The performance is conceptualized to be a small performing mechanism which plugs into other mechanisms such as family, war, terrorism, nuclear warfare strategies, prison, pop music and the likes. The basic working principle of working process, which came out of the analysis of Ivana’s text, was based on the detecting of the navigational mechanisms of the play instead of dealing with its interpretation, which itself is dealt with in a radio-play made in 2002 by Goran Sergej Pristaš. The radio-play therefore also enters the performance as one of its constitutive elements.

The performance came about as a collective authorial act in which a group of authors-performers (dancer/choreographer, philosopher, theatre director, architect and dramaturgist) searches for possible relationships of self-organization by questioning the existing hierarchical model prevailing in theatre and dance production.

Key words: vitalism, text, family, nuclear war, terrorism, prison, surf, potentialities, pop culture.

Each performance includes one guest performer.

I know that your weapon is pointed at me. In the rare moments when I’m furious and brave, blinded by the lights and the words you write, I would like you to shoot, to stop me, ease me forever, pierce me with death, now, in the back, I would like you to kill me when I’m not aware of it, I want to die like a hero, taken by surprise, because I can’t risk falling on my knees and whining, shitting my pants because of your ruthlessness, wrapping myself around your leg, biting your thigh, starting to weep at the last moment, hiding the back of my head from your sight and shouting: don’t, don’t, but you will nevertheless, you’ll kill me all the same, without reason and, I hope, without warning. We could be the same, I’m charged and you are not innocent. (Would you say something!) Do you see me in dreams sometimes?
(excerpt from the play Ribcage)

Supported by: City Office for Culture, Zagreb

Choreography and performance: Pravdan Devlahović

Collaborators: Nikolina Pristaš, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ivana Sajko

Costume: Željko Drmić, Pravdan Devlahović

Music: Hrvoje Nikšić, Sven Pavlović

Light design: Miljenko Bengez

The choreography explores the possibilities of body’s movement within the extent of a step. A starting point for the creation was the treadmill which offers a possibility to move without traveling through space, proliferation of movement above one single point. Working on a treadmill presumes continuously occupying one’s legs with the locomotion of walking (to maintain on the treadmill and not fall off), so it became interesting to explore the possibilities of movement of the rest of the body in those circumstances. Entire choreography is therefore based on the manipulation of the locomotion involved in walking which consequently travels through other body parts.

Although it appears to be solo performance, the choreography is actually a trio for a treadmill, a dancer and his fingers.
Pravdan Devlahović: Through choreography I explore the possibilities of body’s movement within the extent of a step, within the concrete space that fits my stride. I have translated that spatial limitation of movement (because it is the body that sets the possible breadth of one’s stride) to the range of my torso, arm, head, so they might also move within the step’s interval.

I used a treadmill as a starting point of the choreography’s conceptualization. It offers the possibility of moving without traveling through space, movement above one single point. Working on a treadmill presumes continuously occupying one’s legs with the locomotion of walking (to maintain on the treadmill and not fall off), so I became interested in exploration of the possibilities of movement of the rest of the body in those circumstances. In the performance I try to force the locomotion ability of one body part onto another extremity. In the process I am more interested in the consequences of those causalities, then in walk as a motion.

I have expectations only of myself.

I can image my body resembling a treadmill in an everyday pedestrian, street environment.

BADco. in co-production with The Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance

Supported by: City Office for Culture, Zagreb

Exhibition

Projections/light: Goran Petercol
Video installation: Simon Bogojević Narath
Sound installation: David Simons
Tehnical support of projections and sound: Ivan Marušić Klif
Digitalna obrada fotografija: Željka Gradski Galić

Performance

Text and direction: Ivana Sajko
Performers:
Željka Sančanin (Estragon),
Franjo Dijak (Vladimir),
Rakan Rushaidat (Lucky),
Pravdan Devlahović (Joker)
Video projections: Simon Bogojević Narath
Light: Goran Petercol
Music: David Simons, Lisa Karrer
Tehnical support of projections and andsound & software: Ivan Marušić Klif
Light tehnicians: Miljenko Bengez, Mario Vnučec

CD

Music: David Simons, Lisa Karrer (c) 2004
Recording and editing of documentary recordings: Ivana Sajko
Editing, mix and mastering: Hrvoje Nikšić
Voices: Pravdan, Franjo, Rakan, Željka, Ivana
Recoreded everywhere, mixed in Hrvoje’s studio.
Design: Igor Masnjak
Photo: Jasenko Rasol, Goran Petercol, Simon Bogojević Narath

Mass for election- day silence (time of action), dead body behind the wall (location of action), & the hoofs in the throat (manner of performance)?

(The mass is both a musical form and a sacral ceremony. But in any case it is a performance that in its structure carries adisjunction between the spoken and the sung parts, while introducing the theme of the victim – “dead body behind the wall”. A violation is present in the knowledge of that which is situated beyond. It is present in the thought that terrifies more then the presence itself.)The potentials of the text affect different media expressions that constitute the exhibition, the performance and the CD. Personal expressions expand from the text in a way that allows each author to recognize (or is it seduction?) certain layers of meaning significant to ones work. The pattern is written again through a multitude of positions: an image, a movement, the music, space, echo, duration… (The text affects even when it is not read or spoken. Examples? The motif cycles of the exhibition’s projections – Petercol’s ciphers as Angels, Fists, Crime scenes devoid of dead bodies, Faces in the midst of speech whose crooked mouths become masks… Or clay heads crushed in Narath’s video. Everything can be deduced back to the beginning. But, at the same time, all becomes detached from it and continues to act on its own. The text is left as a possible reference. A free choice.)

The video installation and the installations of the projected images/light are conceived as fragments, derived from the text, transformed into a visual thought and then materialized through different procedures into art pieces. The video projections refer to the motifs of rape (the “weaker” body) and vomiting (the utterance of the “stronger”). The perpetual vomiting contextualizes the whole space and connects the other art pieces both with the metaphor and the documented recording of the act. The procedure of animation itself that is used to dilate and decant the images one into the other creates bizarre duration. The video of the rape has a responding reaction. It consists of a head crafted out of polymer modeling clay animated by crumpling and un-crumpling. (A rape is a question of a relation of powers. A banal question. Nothing penetrates into the horror of that state. Illustration is forbidden. The choreographic direction was: rape the other’s movement!)

The pertinence of image, sentence and movement is supplemented. How to grasp the statement that is constantly repeated: “She’s dead.”? With Picasso. The reason is banal: the characters in the cubist paintings cannot be alive. The body of the dancer transfers from one painting to the other. (The introduction scene is an exhibition materialized through distorted physical positions. Or the recognition of death in the painter’s object.)

The music by David Simons in his treatment of Rossini’s Messesolenelle uses Picasso as its model. The first movement “Kyrie Eleison” is sampled following the broken movements of a dancer who carries the memory of the shifting planes of Picasso’s models. (Rossini’s Messesolenelle is not composed for god, but for man. It is subversive in its social role, as the notion of an angel brought by the text and further decomposed by the exhibition and the performance is subversive towards its heavenly role. “The angel’s will is by its nature love. Angels cannot help it, they must love because they are ruled by the power of nature.” said Thomas Aquinas. The angel is a victim who redeems the sins of others by forgiveness through the act of love. To be able to love unconditionally he/she denies his/herself. The consistency of his/her love turns into revenge.)
The exhibition contextualizes the performance – it is a reservoir from which to draw the material to allow for the possibility of different viewpoints. The projected images are digitally modified. Whether author photography or clippings from newspapers and magazines, the images’ original visual information is violently altered. They are projected in five different groups that are shown during the first five days of the exhibition in reverse sequence from the one connecting it to the text. The digital modification for the Angel series consists of erasure of sexual distinctions from erotic photographs and the creation of the illusion of a corpse missing from murder scene photographs published in the crime sections of newspapers… The projected images rhythmically interchange with use of additional lighting: the light pulsates in regular intervals or passes over the projection as a vertical streak of light. It is more powerful then the projection, so the image subdues or disappears when they overlap. Light is also transferred as a vertical streak to the stage where it lights the performers. The light does not only make things visible, but can also hide them, therefore it does not have the function of servicing expression, it is expression itself.
The exhibition space is a static vehicle for the installation. Its borders frame the work and every author of an installation, whether it has a dynamic structure or not, must confront that fact. The sound installation is also confined by space (as spatial echo later in the performance defines the medium of transfer of speech from the microphone directly into an earpiece of the spectator. Intimate and inescapable listening.) Simons’s installation is set up so that sound floats via four positions on the edge of space, describing it, materializing it and creating panic. Four sound sources respond to the four light ones.

(All begins and ends in speech. It spreads into consequences. Some of them we execute. Some we just bare.)
It is spoken as if it regurgitated. The vomiting is real. It is done by an actor playing a politician. (Hoofs in the throat!) Narath’s video of regurgitation is animated in a way that duration of details opens through its expansion from within.

(The preface states: Speech is the weapon. And politics. Political speech is almost stronger than religious one, because it carries ideology as a faith, and it does not excuse itself over the truth or the lie, the provability or the sterility of its own words-bullets. The political speech is rhetorical. It convinces and effects regardless of being erroneous. The speech is transmitted and stabbed into audience’s memory like a contagious disease. Speech by which you’ve been infected will determinate your future opinion in some way. Therefore it should be ethical. It never is.)

Goran Petercol & (Ivana Sajko)

Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb City Office for Culture and Zagrebačka banka d.d. (donation)
Sponsors: Končar Elektroindustrija d.d., Končar-Energetika i usluge d.o.o.

The Watt+Eau project is a BADco. and Eks-scena collaboration, supported by the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb and the Imaginary Academy in Grožnjan. Started in July 2002, the project gathers together a group of young dancers, choreographers, and dramaturgy students at a ten-day workshop in Grožnjan. Through everyday classes, and even more so through discussions, the creative atmosphere of the relatively isolated small medieval town gave birth to distinctively different artistic concepts and modes of research.

In its second stage the project was relocated to Zagreb (as a part of the Urban Festival in September 2002) with a number of public presentations in various urban localities: the main city square, in the display of a furniture retailer, inside a private apartment with video projections on the outside of the apartment building.

Watt+Eau is not about re-inscribing localities with its presence or about questioning the “authenticity” of city/experience, but rather about researching the relation between public and private, relation to spatiality in thecontext of today’s technoglobalizing world where the idea of a fixed geographiclocation or even fixed identity becomes obsolete, even reactionary, in the new mobile culture.

Participants: Sandra Banić, Selma Banich, Maja Drobac, Iva Hladnik, Ivana Ivković, Ivana Karačonji, Ana Kreitmeyer, Nina Kurtela, Petra Kurtela, Goran Manić, Natalija Manojlović, Silvija Marchig, Ana Markić, Barbara Matijević, Tom Medak, Roberta Milevoj, Iva Pavičić, Željka Sančanin, Maja Sviben, Lana Šarić, Sanja Tropp, Andrija Turčin, Alen Zanjko

Concept Aleksandra Janeva
Music: Pascal Brocholicchi, Mark Sauter
Performers: Gabriel Castillo, Nico Delpy, Markus Karner, FranciscoMoreira, Cristina Numa, Aleksandra Janeva
Lights: Begonia Garcia-Navas
Co-production: BADco., cour des capucines

Persen is a tranquilizing drug and relives the following signs of nervousness: irritability and agitation, emotional tension and enxiety, difficulty in concentration and memory disorders, stage fright and examinations tremors, tiredness ocuring immediately after getting up or after the slightest effort.

Solo in A Major, op. 69

Choreography and performance: Pravdan Devlahović

Dramaturgy: Ivana Sajko, Goran Sergej Pristaš

Music: Ludwig van Beethoven: Simphony no.7, Op. 92, second movement, Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor: Lovro Matačić

Light design: Miljenko Bengez

And this is no longer a beginning

Choreography and performance: Nikolina Pristaš / Ana Kreitmeyer

Dramaturgy: Ivana Sajko and Goran Sergej Pristaš

Music: Ivan Marušić – Klif

Costume: Silvio Vujičić

Light design: Miljenko Bengez

Solo Me is a solo for two performers – a performance in which two different choreographic solo materials, opinions, processes come in touch with each other. Although both solos were made separately and can be performed as such, the performance focuses on the idea of juxtaposition, adjoining and refraction of one material in another.

Solo in A Major, op. 69, choreographed and performed by Pravdan Devlahović, initiates questions of defining the space surrounding his body (as a space that is being watched) by minimal alternations of movement which, in elaboration, gradually infect the whole body. Pravdan walks his choreographic material, passing through different points in the space in a way that the moment he finds the right spot he abandons it in search for a new one. By doing so he exposes his body to various perspectives in relation to the viewers, incorporating this consciousness of being watched all the time as an integral part of the performance.

And this is no longer a beginning, coreographed by Nikolina Pristaš and performed in alternation by Ana Kreitmeyer, is an attempt to thematize the act of (self)beginning. Thinking about the idea of multiple beginnings, reiterated attempts at always different quality of more or less the same movements brought her to the idea of writing one choreographic sentence in different (choreographic) fonts. The chosen fonts found their corporeal equivalents by means of different perspecitives, technical foci, formal strategies and orientations which, in process, redefine the differences in affective result in relation to the main sentence.

Premiere: 04.-05. October 2002. in Bergen, Norway

Performed at: Podewil, Octoberdance Bergen, P.S. 122, Sushi San Diego, 4+4 Days Prague in Prague, Kanuti Gildi Tallin, Donumenta Regensburg…

Supported by: City Office for Culture Zagreb

Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš (2), Pravdan Devlahović (tri), Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld (4)

Dramaturgy: Ivana Sajko, Goran Sergej Pristaš

Light design: Goran Petercol

Costume design: Silvio Vujičić

Performers: Jelena Vukmirica, Saša Božić, Nikolina Pristaš, Pravdan Devlahović, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld

2tri4 is a dance performance that represents works by three young choreographers within a segmented frame. As these are debuting choreographies by these authors, our wish is to create possibility for the surfacing of the autonomy of their choreographic writing and to keep only those formal premises shared by the three choreographers (the joint choice of music composer, costume designer, light designer and two dramaturges).

2 is an intimate pulsating dance piece uniting two different bodies, two different natures of movement. 2 is an attempt to keep in contact in spite of intentionally imposed obstacles: to shut one’s eyes, to listen to the body of the other and find the mute language of communication. To be blind on stage is not a metaphorical denial of the visual but a search for a more intense sensibility to the vibrations that fill the space around the dancers. 2 is a struggle for stability through the minimal mechanisms that support the structure: breathing, sounds, vibrations of the air, memory of space, feeling for the invisible other.

Performed by: Jelena Vukmirica / Ana Kreitmeyer, Nikolina Pristaš

tri emerges from an enthusiasm for form, from the triangle and its diagonal dispersion, from the images of bodies in space which by shifting positions also modify the spacing and from these shifts derive their poetic potential. tri(o) is a closed form – harmony that is constantly on the verge of being thrown out of balance. Disbalance as a precondition of movement, but also a possible source of movement, a reason for support and creation of a new contact that will sustain the unity. An intentional move out of balance breaks the starting composition and personalizes geometry through intuitive search for the return of harmony.

Performed by: Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Nikolina Pristaš, Pravdan Devlahović

4 is derived from the continuity of the first motif – the nature of a single movement. It initiates a sequence being developed, changed, translated from one body to another and achieves continuous interaction among 4 performers who create variations of the same motif by detaching it from recognizability. Within this mechanical logic, the body creates by connecting 4 elements which together make a machine dependent on a constant and unchangeable axis – the object in space. Thinking in terms of mechanisms becomes a challenge, parts of the body a device and the movement combinations a method for closing the circle – end of work.

Performed by: Saša Božić, Nikolina Pristaš, Pravdan Devlahović, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld

Co-production: BADco. and Zagreb Dance Company

Supported by: City Office for Culture, Zagreb

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Dramaturgy: Ivana Sajko

Set design: Goran Petercol

Music: Helge Hinteregger

Performers: Nikolina Pristaš, Pravdan Devlahović, Aleksandra Janeva / Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak

Diderot’s Nephew or Blood Is Thicker Than Water is a live-art/dance performance in which we attempt to tell the story based on the synopsis for a perfect philosophy play, Socrate’s Death, by Denis Diderot. The synopsis itself was never elaborated into a play by the famous dramatic writer and philosopher. Performance is made in the form of a serious dance mock-heroic in which five performers/choreographers, going through different performative models, set up a multilayered performative, narrative and interpretative system filled by extreme emotional and physical situations. The performance was made in relation to a fixed thematic outline but the working out of the theme rests on personal authorial contributions of the performers. The act of performing is characterized by structured situational improvisation.

A GESTURE, PERHAPS

01.

Theatre as Afformance Art is art of non-activity and caesura. Whereas performances still provide a certainty of presentation within an act, afformativity subverts this certainty. Every clarity of action, position and meaning disappears and theatre does not know whether it amounts to anything, or has a meaning. If we agree that European bourgeoisie has irreversibly lost it’s classical gestularity, thus creating a more passionate quest for gestures themselves, when the body of people became choreographed and cut through with nervous cramps and ticks, theatre became a place where this uncertain quest for gesture took place. Opposite from Aristotelian distinction between the poiesis, where means have a purpose outside themselves, and the praxis that is a purpose in itself without means, a gesture is a sphere of pure mediality where means become obvious as such. Theatre in it’s afformative gestularity is not a composition of means through which we fulfil a purpose, nor a superior sphere, where action is own purpose, but pure non-verbal communication of communicability, as if something in your mouth obstructs your speech, as an actor’s improvisation supposedly compensates for her loss of memory or inability to speak. Theatre is the silence of pure gesture. Or a gag – a minimal thing, if you will.

02.

When you experience the history as a space of emergence of events speaking about anachronism is no longer satisfying. History is therefore an inventory of plurality of possibilities depending on kairos of a given constellation. Our recommended approach follows a practice that liberates sedimented practices of their historicist weight, and a certain vocabulary defined by Hellenic and early Christian experience becomes a shibboleth of a transitory, minimal, human existence. Whether we talk about Hellenic techniques of subjectivisation of the self (parrhesia) or a tensed Christian awaiting of the second coming of Christ (parousia), the key is to think of the world qua the space of activities simultaneously as the object of knowledge and as well as the grounds where the subject is tested by way of truth, which is the subject himself.

03.

Enigma of modernism lies in a strange promise that forces things to be simultaneously completely different and yet remain the same. Modernism differs in it’s self-understanding from the classic age in it’s desire to think the reality of this aporetic relationship of the same and the different, one held exclusively virtual by the ancient Greeks, where an attempt to consider actuality through logics in it’s simultaneity with the other of itself was regarded a symptom of not allowed barbaric oath into the knowledge of the community. The news supposed to be comprehended here consists of a challenge to locate this relationship in a heterogeneous space where none of the aspects of action (theoria, praxis, poiesis) cannot uniformly and finally assert it’s advantage. Homogeneity of logics and continuum has been moved in heterogeneity of hyperbologics and caesurae, that thus become elements of shaping the impossible promise. It is not something monumental or perceptible, but almost nothing, or scholastically speaking, ens minimum. That minimal relationship cannot be a fundamental category, yet is more elementary than the things that can be considered of a theoretically explicit interest. A question of modernisation cannot primarily be the one questioning the modernity’s difference and the truthfulness of this difference from the historical configurations that precede it. The point here is drawing the attention to the potential character of the historical time itself. Modalisation of time means destructing the irreversibility of history, which opens a space to coexisting singularities that cuts into each and every body.

Petar Milat

References: Giorgio Agamben: Mezzi senza fine, Hent de Vries: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Michel Foucault: L’hermeneutique du sujet, Rodolphe Gasche: Of Minimal Things, Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatisches Theater

Self-sufficiency would be the term to describe the mode in which Diderot’s Nephew presents its performative production. What it is ‘about’ or what it departs from is endlessly deferred or metonymically substituted for. Inasmuch as the event of trial and death of Socrates recurring as a topic as it is the textual regime lost, an open chain of authors (Plato, Diderot et al.) possibly worked on, serve as broken bonds of reference to reverse the causes or intentions of acts to the effects of performed events. Their singular movement-, speech- and gestural forms suggest intricate motivations which cannot be subsumed under one signifying regime or total context, but give way to a complex opaque material surface which engages spectator to derive her own understanding. Thus incomprehensibility between over- and under-determination of “what is performed” in performance renders a case of theatre standing for a contingent parallel model of world: one which operates in itself with no claim to its origin but demanding to be looked at from multiple non-privileged positions.

Bojana Cvejić

The performance was made while BADco. was on artist-in-residence program at Art Workshop – Lazareti (Dubrovnik), had its premiere on August, 7th, 2001 at the Split Summer Festival was subsequently shown at the Karantena Festival in Dubrovnik. Diderot’s Nephew had its Zagreb premiere in November, 2001.Performance was made in co-production of BADco. with Art Workshop – Lazareti (Dubrovnik), Teatre &TD (Zagreb) and Split Summer Festival.Supported by: Zagreb City Office for Culture.

Director and Choreographer: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Dramaturgy: Ivana Sajko

Music: Helge Hinteregger

Performers: Nikolina Pristaš, Pravdan Devlahović, Damir Bartol Indoš

We must make a distinction between the chair as an occasional necessity of stage action and the chair as a collaborator in a new relationship between character and milieu. The modern actor knows the chair as one of the permanent tools of his art, primarily because it is the property that most directly engages his body in the stage world… To sit is to be, to exist suddenly and plentifully in the material world (“I sit, therefore I am here”); and in this sense classical characters are bodiless: they exist in a vague intersection between elsewheres established by poetry. But when characters begin to sit as naturally as they stand, the body comes fully into it’s own as the center of a new spatial concern…
Bert O. States: Great Reckoning In Little Rooms

Man.Chair was developed as a work in progress piece presented in a form of public rehearsal with no premiere. The research was based on the repetitive capacity of authentic performance Man-Chair, first time performed in 1982 by Damir Bartol Indoš. We wanted to reconstruct, remake, remix and upgrade the original peace (which is screened on video) using dance improvisations and individual approaches of dancers towards the technical and semiotic characteristics of the first performance Man-Chair. The aim was to build the theatrical structure from the performance art piece (which was never meant to be repeated) through the dance variations.

Man.Chair is musically structured dance-impro performance, which avoids any thematic fulfilment. There are, rather, some parameters of rudimentary relation between body and object. In the process of development performers are focusing on the following parameters:

- Resemblance between physical characteristics of object and body
- Mental investment of energy and emotion in object
- Objectification of body
- Tension between “technical” and “natural” bodies
- Tension between order of objects and order of bodies