How do you feel about completing your PhD at the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University and returning to more intensive choreographic work?
I completed my PhD in late summer 2024, and I still feel the reverberations of that process. A doctorate in dance studies in the U.S. is an incredibly complex and lengthy endeavor, demanding the utmost from all of us—my peers and myself—including navigating the institutional framework of a university with over seventy thousand students, joining the department’s teaching staff, working through the pandemic, and then reestablishing the university’s operations afterward. The Department of Dance is one of the most renowned in the region, and the university itself is ranked among the top 100 in the world, so the standards are accordingly high.
I found it especially stimulating to be surrounded by brilliant colleagues of different generations, artistic profiles, and interests. I tried to represent the knowledge from our region in the best possible way and to carry on the positive legacy established by our own Vera Maletić, who taught at the Department from 1977 until her retirement in 2000. I’m glad to be part of that lineage and now part of the academic, research, and artistic community it represents.
The PhD deepened and expanded my insights into both theoretical and choreographic practice, allowing me to focus more intentionally on research and academic work.
You’re working at full speed—presenting at the Bodies in Free Fall choreographic convention in November 2024, at this year’s Subversive Festival, the Music Biennale Zagreb, Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, and preparing a research presentation for the June edition of Antisezona titled Through Choreography and Sound: Critical Practice of Spatial Thinking. You’re also preparing a new choreographic work, and this conversation is happening in the context of your workshop and seminar that took place in April 2025, as part of the Meeting Point program, invited by the Studio for Contemporary Dance.
The atmosphere is very work-oriented. I had planned to take a break this year, to slow things down and devote time to other rhythms, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. There’s a complex energy in Zagreb these days—entangled, but somehow propelling you forward. I’m interested in connecting points of artistic inquiry in new ways and, more than anything, continuing to be part of the activity within our dance community—something essential for the survival, development, and stabilization of dance and choreographic practices.
The seminar I gave as part of the Meeting Point program was titled Structures of Surface and Architectures of Time. In it, I touched on moments from a broader set of themes I’m working on in my upcoming choreographic piece, premiering in July 2025, under the title Reconstructions: Choreographic Interventions on Surface Structure—Duration, Erosion, Accumulation, Disappearance. I’m developing the piece in collaboration with five exceptional dance artists—Ana Jelušić, Dora Pocedić, Eleonora Vrdoljak, Marina Brajdić, and Jana Božić—as well as with the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb, and with the support of the Zagreb Dance Center.
To what extent does your theoretical research inform your current studio interests, or vice versa? What is the nature of their relationship?
I see theoretical and practical research as a unified continuum that can unfold through different formats, media, dynamics, and visibilities. Theory informs choreographic work in very specific ways, while choreographic inquiry reshapes the approach to theory into a kind of multidimensional reading. Similarly, theoretical research can become a gesture of practice, just as choreographic and dance practice can be a form of theory.
In the studio, I often explore shifts, deconstructions, and direct encounters between these two modes, framing them as open questions that don’t necessarily seek resolution. In a way, it’s about postponement—choreography as a delay of choreography, and theory as a delay of theory—a deferral toward another point in time where they might intersect and inform one another in unpredictable ways.
What was the conceptual focus of your contribution to Meeting Point, and why did it seem like a good space (and time) for it? Your workshop gathered a full studio of dancers of various generations.
Structures of Surface and Architectures of Time was conceived as a proposal for a dance practice situated at the intersection of free movement, temporal journaling, and spatial inscription. We focused on the materiality of the body and space, moving from questions of improvisation toward spontaneous forms of choreography. The approach was open, fluid, and adaptable—each participant could shape it according to their own interests in the moment.
It also functioned as a kind of morning body journal, where nothing needs to happen beyond an encounter with body and space. I called it the “first dance of the day”—something built through the very act of building, through a certain modality of movement that opens space through temporal observation of structure.
In the Poly studio of the Zagreb Youth Theater, we gathered a diverse group of dancers, choreographers, and educators from different generations. It was incredibly engaging to shape a research space that invites various modes of engagement. Meeting Point is an excellent program that offers a much-needed format of artistic gatherings through practice in the studio, focused on artistic methodologies and approaches.
Time and space for concentrated experimentation are a precious humus of artistic work—something that can be carried by the force of collaboration and collegial energy. It’s important to establish more of these kinds of spaces, where we can meet without pretense, in new constellations and in collaborations that aren’t immediately obvious.
The multiplicity of the seminar space was also enriched by live music, provided by Vanesa Petrač and Ivan Marojević, who perform as the musical duo Cura i Dečko and participated in the studio processes.
We invited Vanesa and Ivan into the process in such a way that music and sound became part of the tasks and structures happening in the studio. I proposed that music enter the experimental horizon as an equal medium, rather than as accompaniment, background, or atmosphere.
I introduced the concept of silence and sound in terms of the presence and absence of musical form, and how musical structures and interventions might be choreographically or spatially conceived—or endure in some experimental mode. The contribution of live, on-the-spot music enriched the texture of exchange in the space, and Vanesa and Ivan devised intriguing musical, vocal, and sonic elements that stem from their genre while simultaneously stepping completely outside of it.
On what foundations have you built your dance practice, and through what spaces, bodies, and thoughts has it traveled? Do you see a difference between working in a studio setting like Meeting Point and working (or preparing) for a performance?
My dance practice centers on thinking choreography and the choreographic in relation to the concept of dance. It’s within the tension and slippage between those two fields that I find a space for research, artmaking, and theory.
I’ve been working for many years, and this temporal, experiential, and artistic thread has become increasingly layered across various formats and media—yet always in a feedback loop with the question of choreography, that is, in a productive irresolution of the very concept of choreography in relation to the gesture of dance, the modality of movement, and ultimately the dance piece itself.
I’m drawn to the slippages, phenomena, forms, and symptoms that arise in that field—in the electric tension between its elements and uneven surfaces. The formats of practice inform each other; there’s a continuous dialogue, reflection, friction.
Lately, I’ve been especially interested in unpredictability, incompatibility, dissonance, mismatch—a kind of edge-work in dance practice that resists easy resolution.
What are your current needs and desires in terms of directing and focusing (or multiplying) your work?
I’m deeply in need of stability and predictability—yet, paradoxically, I’m also moved by instability and incompatibility, even when that mobilization is deeply stressful or invasive. Things are constantly breaking open somewhere; we work in the cracks, often right in the slits—on something barely holding together, yet strangely robust, concrete.
There’s a tremendous energy in the air—structural disarray, chaos. I don’t really sleep anymore; it’s more like a blackout, the bare minimum reboot until the next day. Each day feels dense, almost theoretical in its construction.
I’m trying to identify the best possible way I can support the urgency of the moment—in artistic, political, academic, and personal terms.