A conversation under a blossoming apple tree, hidden away in a corner somewhere downtown, with some juice and wine, focaccia and a suitcase.
The origin story:
Part One: MTV and a room of one’s own
I have always danced, since I was little. Actually, I think my greatest love was music and dancing was a way to express through movement what music made me feel. My family is big on sport so I tried several sports as well, but it was always obvious I liked dancing more so I started taking folklore classes in Zadar. Soon after my mother enrolled me into music school which also offered dance and rhythmics classes. I was around nine or ten. I felt very natural in that environment so I thought that was the thing for me, but with time… You know how it is in small communities. First I was not the only boy, but soon enough other boys dropped out and I was the only one left. I felt strange. When I was fourteen I had just finished a dance competition and my teacher asked me if I wanted to continue my education and attend the High school for classical ballet in Zagreb. I said no and decided to quit dancing altogether. Puberty hit and I wanted a change. I started high school, hoping nobody would see me as ‘the dancer’. However, Zadar is a small town and everybody knew me and I also realized I was missing dance so I spent the next four years dancing in my room. Mom would notice me leaving the room all sweaty, but I felt awkward telling her the truth. Then we all started going out a lot. At that time in Zadar there was still the club Gotham and I could not wait for Friday to come to go out dancing. Everybody knew me and they always said the same: ‘here’s the dancer’. Often somebody would ask me why I was not dancing. I would say I did not know.
Part two: an attempt at biology
When I turned eighteen and it was time to decide what to do with my life I knew I wanted to do something with dance, but I did not know how or where. I was shy and introverted and it was hard for me to communicate with people. I was good at chemistry and biology so I had the idea of studying molecular biology in Zagreb! That did not work out in the end so I enrolled in the School of food technology and biotechnology and spent a year there. I realized early on that I was not that interested in the subject after all. Thanks to my uncle who had connections to theater I went to see a lot of dance performances. I remember thinking: ‘Oh, I would love to do that too’. It was hard in fact, I wanted to go back to dance so badly, but I did not know how. Then I stumbled upon classes Ana Mrak was holding for Studio youth.
Part three: discovery of the contemporary world
I did not intend to get into contemporray dance. I was more into jazz dance, MTV style and Michael Jackson. However, I was curious so I went to a training Ana Mrak was giving for the Studio youth group. I thought to myself: ‘this girl moves weird, but it looks interesting and it does not seem too demanding’. Already after the first training I realized this was something else. That was it for me, I just could not stop. I told everybody I was dropping out of college and dedicating myself to dance. As a male dancer I was privileged because we are not so many, so I got invited to take part in the morning training sessions with the Studio and the Zagreb Dance Company. Still at that time my career path was not yet clear to me and what being a dancer might mean, but I felt a great passion for dance and I wanted to explore it. I felt conflicted, like I was one person in the studio and another one out of it. I needed time to connect all the dots. A lot of things opened up here in Zagreb before I, at the age of 22, enrolled in the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Modern Theater Department) in Amsterdam.
Actually, I was not at all aware there were dance academies in Europe. I had not given it any thought, but when I did find out, I wanted to have the experience of going to a real dance audition. Leaving Croatia was also a bit frightening, but I knew I would resent myself if I did not do it. When I passed the audition I took it as a sign that I should go and give it a go. I changed cities and countires and at first everything was very new. It was a total shock. My dream came true, but nothing was how I had imagined it.
Part four: experience abroad
The experience of studying at the dance academy was intense, but an experience that was far more positive than negative. I realized through it that dance was definitely something I wanted to do. Since I was immersed in the scene I started meeting people and participating in projects, staying in Amsterdam for another year after I finished. I had a work visa, as we were not yet part of the EU, so that extra year made it possible for me to get to know Amsterdam outside of the academy setting. I had a great balance of work and private life in Amsterdam, but I was very interested in working with Guy Weizman, an Israeli choreographer who was based in the small town of Groeningen. I decided to go there and audition. I was not aware I was actually auditioning to become member of the Staatstheater Oldenburg and Staatstheater Mainz and would stay there at least two years if I passed. I gave it a bit of thought and said yes in the end. I stayed four years and the whole experience was very intense because working in a company is a bit like being on Big Brother. You spend all of your time with the same people and you share everything, and there is an upside and a downside to that. However, we worked with excellent contemporary choreographers, a precious and exciting experience for me. Being a person who thrives on change and novelty, I enjoyed it. Until it got to be too much. After a couple of years I started feeling too many things were changing too fast and I felt lost. I found it hard to disconnect from work. When you spend your whole day with the same people, it is hard to find a world outside it. However great your job is, it cannot be all there is. So I decided it was time for a break. It was hard and strange to leave the people I was close with and leave the security of the company and a regular paycheck, but I knew I could not stay. After eight years abroad I wanted to go home for a while.
Part five: every journey is a way back home
First it was a temporary thing, seeing people I had not seen in a long time, spending time with family, doing a bit of traveling. However, after a first break, projects started rolling one after another, the first being Tartuffe with Matija Ferlin. People started aksing me if I was here to stay and telling me I was crazy to stay. My reply was that I did not know and that I would see how things went. Then there was a second project and a third and then Ida Jolić and I started collaborating.
Ida and I go a long way back. We did a children’s show together when we were kids. We even went to the same audition in Amsterdam and always kept in touch. I do not remeber any more if I approached her or the other way around, but it went something like: ‘I feel like doing a project, shall we do something together?’ We founded an artistic organisation and started working, although I still was not sure if I was staying or not. On the other hand I still kept in touch with people abroad so I did projects abroad as well. It has been a while since then and I feel again I am in a transitional phase and new things are opening up for me. I am asking myself where I stand as an author. If I like the idea of working choreographically or it just seems like a cool idea or the next logical step. I am at an interesting point in my life and it has everything to do with my personal growth. Sometimes I am troubled by how small the Croatian scene is and how invisible our work feels. We do not have an audience. That is the only thing that really bothers me. Who am I doing it for? When I was younger the only important thing was to be on stage and dance. It was all ego, you just wanted to be seen and aplauded. Now I am more interested in creating work that deals with a certain idea that I want to share with other people. I am interested in the effect it has on people. I am interested in why and for whom I am doing something. Otherwise, I could stay in my room and dance there. The inexistence of an audience creates a sense of isolation. I had a similar feeling at the end of my stay in Germany. You perform and then you go home. There is no exchange, you are left without knowing if what you created made any sense to the people who watched it.
Part six: force (of) returning
Partly that is why I now feel drawn to teaching and working as an author. I am inspired to have other people be on the inside and me on the outside, observing what is being created. I need that feedback, the feeling of sharing something with others. Having the feeling of being in dialogue only with myself no longer fulfills me. Different people have been inviting me to teach or guide classes and workshops since I came back. I have not had so much experience with guiding others through a process. I still feel a bit insecure around it, but I also find it exciting. It opens up a new way of seeing things. I am starting to understand things I used not to, things people said to me or the meaning of a certain experience. I see that it is work, but also how immersed in it we are. We are human and sensitive. I recognize my past reactions and see where I am now, I am no longer that kid. I have grown up, more or less, and I think to myself: ‘ok, it was about time’.
Inspiration: where from and where to
I often get inspired by cinematographic images. I have always been intrigued by the discrepancy between how we present ourselves, how other people see us, and what we are like inside. Everybody has stories to tell and discovering what lies beneath or outside the frame is what intrigues me. My greatest inspiration though is music, as an element which in film or a performance expresses or amplifies emotion. Nature really matters to me as well as the personal sphere that permeates everything that we do in the studio. On the other hand, I also sometimes get inspired by really trashy content like Selling sunset, a reality tv show about a real estate agancy selling luxury apartments in Los Angeles, hosted by twin brothers. Everything in it is fake, but I find something compelling in how over the top everything is. Paradoxically, I feel there is genuine emotion and complex human relationships in the background of it. I am giving a lot of thought to how different friendships mean different things. Each friendship has a different set of standards and rules that do not translate into other intimate relationships. All of this comes into the work, all of myself. Seeing that I had always identified so much with dance, I asked myself who I was when I did not dance. I was so afraid of injury, an injury would feel like the end of the world. It would be so hard for me not to give a hundred percent. Now I ask myself what a hundred percent is. Sometimes I would find interesting bits exactly when I was ‘going easy’ on a certain body part or when I felt bad for whatever reason. To feel ‘a hundred percent’ well is nice, but sometimes an important part of the process is anything but and anything less than that. When I was younger, I thought I could either be a hundred percent well or not at all, no spectrum in between. Now, when I work, I try to give everybody else a notion of what I am discovering for myself.
In the end, the work process is the most important thing. However much we care that the audience like what we do, however much we want to make them see what we see, we have to be open to the possibility that might not always happen. It is also partly a matter of luck. The audience will only see the end result and judge the work accordingly, but you are formed and transformed by everything that was part of that process and it led you in a certain direction. All the people you work with, all the experiences you have, friendships you build, all the encounters and adventures.
Blitz question! Purely intuitively, if you had to present yourself through three films or three film scores – what would you choose?
Films: Melancholia (Lars von Trier), Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrman) and Everything about my mother (Pedro Almodovar)
Music: Radiohead: Reckoner, Billie Eilish: What was I made for and a band I just discovered: The Cannons
When you say that you try to share what you discover about yourself with others both in choreographic and pedagogical work – which methods do you discover for that transmission?
Seeing that sight is such a dominant sense for us, visual imagery helps me when I try to describe a certain quality or texture. The universe is right now a big inspiration for me so I tried to exemplify a certain movement by showing black holes which I find interesting because they can suck in matter and they are impossible to see, we just see the edges, so to say. It is always challenging for me to verbalize my thoughts and really find the right words to express what I mean, to match what I mean and what the listener understands. Alongside expressing meaning, words are also sounds and they have a visual dimension to them as well. They are also tied to memories. When I want to work with certain emotions, I search for words that are not descriptive like sorrow or happiness, but that are associative, that invoke certain emotions. That is why it is important for me that people feel comfortable. Communication and presence are two crucial things beacuse there is no perfect way to prepare. You never know what you are getting into or how things will develop. It is also important for me to be able to admit the things that I do not know or am, still, not sure of. Sometimes I will also draw, although I am bad at it, or I show physically what I mean beacuse I cannot find another way to express it. It is all so new to me, but I feel that I would like to continue working choreographically and collaborate with different people. For a long time I have been saying I am not ready to do the work, but probably I will never be readier because it is not something I can ever prepare for theoretically, I have to learn through experience.
What would you highlight as the most interesting success and the most interesting failure in your choreographic and pedagogical work?
In both cases the most interesting failure is when I would give an incomplete instruction to improvise and then something completely else than the expected would happen. It is much easier for me to guide structured exercises, something clear and exact that I can hold on to. Improvisation, although it looks spontaneous, is really challenging to guide. I would realize that the instruction I laid out in drawing on a piece of paper contained a lot of elements that I had not considered. Also when I would do it I started noticing so many details, so many possibilities working with breath and movement, different qualities and textures. That was my way of finding out what could be activated within a process of improvisation. Sometimes people spontaneously change the instruction and produce something interesting we decide to keep and sometimes I am surprised by a positive reaction to something I wrote off as a cliche or simply lame. I like to include different influences I have experienced, from African dances to jazz dance and hip hop. It is important to allow these things, because when I start to think too much I start to close off. I try to ignore the inner control freak and analyse things later, not during, because it blocks the process, and it is often too soon to know if I am moving in the right direction. I expect the challenge in my choreographic work will be to let go of elements that I like, but that do not pertain to the work. A teacher in Amsterdam called it ‘to kill your darlings’. At the time I did not understand what she meant by it, but now I do. She also said we should just play and that the most important thing is to stay present. And then make the decision, which to a person like me, who always questions whether I have missed something, is a big challenge.
For the end, using an image, what would you like dance to look like in the future?
It is really not easy to answer this question, but I would definitely like dance to become closer to everybody, maybe to people who are not so interested in it now. I look at dance as movement that is constantly present and something we cannot do without, it is just that most of us are not aware of it.
Marin Lemić was borin in Zadar in 1986. In 2008 he enrolled in the dance academy Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten – de Theaterschool where he graduated in 2011.
From 2012-2016 he worked in national theaters in Oldenburg and Mainz in Germany, as part of the contemporary dance companies, working with choreographers such as Ann Van den Broek, Sharon Eyal, Club Guy and Roni, Alessandra Corti, Felix Berner, Sungyop Hong.
Currently he is working as a performer and dance maker in Croatia and abroad, collaborating with Matija Ferlin, Adrienn Hod, Zrinka Lukčec Kiko, marjana Krajač, Jasna Čižmek Tarbuk, Michael Langeneckert, Cocoon Dance.
In 2019 he and fellow dance artist Ida Jolić won two awards given by the Croatian Dancers’ Associations (UPUH and UPPU PULS) for the choreographic work ‘Transformers’ – best choreography (Ida Jolić and Marin Lemić) and best performance (Ida Jolić).
In 2020 he won the Croatian Theater Arts Award for best male performer in the work ‘Transformers’, which was also nominated for best choreography.