Maska - Volume 39, Issue 221-222, 2024

The theatre looks out from both directions. On the one hand, the artist’s (director’s) gaze determines our (spectator’s) gaze, and on the other hand, there is the question of whether the artist’s gaze is able to see through our eyes and, of course, whose eyes they are. Are they created by the theatre itself – in the name of all its direct creators and thus in its own image and according to its own wishes, or is ‘their studio’ also open to those who come to the theatre from the substance itself – from the living substance of the dramatic texts? So also to those who find it difficult to afford a theatre ticket. Is a theatre that does not look backwards, then, still credible as a universal or legitimate representation of the world and its social relations?

Within the social world of Contact Improvisation, the question of class relations remains conspicuous by its absence. Whilst ongoing debates in the global Contact Improvisation (CI) community and recent scholarship have foregrounded the problem of Whiteness, there have been few attempts to provide intersectional analyses of the racialised, classed subjectivation of contact dancers. To make such future enquiry possible, this paper dismantles originary CI myths about ‘natural’ movement, also attended to by Bojana Cvejić, and explores the question of social antagonism through analysing the dance form’s discursive norms and movement vocabulary. As this essay argues, the contact dancer occupies a paradoxical subject position: between a neoliberal embrace of risk-taking and precarity, and a cruelly optimistic prefiguration of the commons.

This text detects a current context collapse within the independent scene of dance and choreography. It looks at the political potential of artist-driven spaces and asks if and how they could provide a forum for debate and collective articulation.

With the platform and space höjden studios in Stockholm as the main example, the text connects it to other practical initiatives such as PAF (Performing Arts Forum), ICC (Imaginative Choreographic Center and PIM (Para Institutional Models). The text briefly touches on theories of the commons and aesthetic autonomy in order to raise a concern about the collective attention to art works and artistic practices, and propose a direction where the production of discourse within common spaces centres it.

This dialogue between Julyen and Andreja was inspired by the desire to present, more closely, the work that both of them are engaged in, each in their own way and in their collaboration, most recently in the performance titled A Scoreless Time (2024). An integral part of their collaboration is the conversations they have before and after working on stage and within the process itself.

The reflections recorded in the interview open up some key questions about the experience of performance works, as well as about relationships and expectations; both of the audience and the performers.

Common questions that arise in the field of instant composition, i.e. improvisation, are: how imperative is it, in our opinion, that the audience knows the performers are improvising? Is it possible to see the work of performing as such?

Reflecting on Katja Legin’s piece A House a Home (Hiša Dom), Maša Radi Buh pays less attention to the concretization of individual moments, but rather focuses her thoughts on the relationship between the theatrical, the performative, and the movement. In both the language of the performance and the presence of Legin the text recognizes a (co)existence in dualities which in no way simplify, but rather reflect the complexity of maternal and other care work in relation to the contemporary woman.

In December 2023, Nika Arhar and Jaka Bombač participated in Choreographic Turn #8 (CT). Here they reflect on the dance practices of Liza Šimenc, Tina Rozman, Tina Benko and Ema Križič, as well as on the parameters of their own work and ways of adopting a more autonomous research position within the constellation of CT.