Epistolary cyber romance betwen Birmingham and Zagreb, with questions an answers in 72 hour intervals.
1.What is your earliest dance memory*? (*however you decide to interpret dance memory)
I think I was dancing around the living room in my old family house. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, old enough to use my legs to jump onto the armchair. In my memory the armchair is also a car. This information is not crucial for my dancing, but it is informative, because in my memory inconsistencies are not only possible but certain. If we agree that it’s ok to jump into one such armchair or rabbit hole, my first dance memory is:
In the living room of my old family house.
My sister, my mom and my grandfather were in the room. I don’t think they were there to see me dance, but they certainly stopped for a moment when I started putting on my dance moves. I think I was wearing a jeans skirt and woollen stockings. I was shaking my bottom left and right, doing zig zags with my knees, singing a song I must have liked at that moment. I was skipping and hopping all around the room. I don’t think my movements were very refined, the dance was more a channelling of some kind of excitement. Also, I don’t think I had the desire to show off, but to express myself, to ground myself as such, more unpredictable with time as I’ve become, in that family, to convey a feeling, to have fun, to postpone the verbal, to change the atmosphere. It was short, I think. I don’t remember if I got an applause, but I think my mom was yelling: slow down, you know the floor shakes, Zrini, it can’t take it, we’ll all fall through down into the neighbors’ flat.’ This, however, did not stop me, but just added caution to my quality of performativity. I think. What I do know is that I was happy driving my armchair car in the rhythm of the song, the music to my dance.
2. In two scenes, how did you learn to (about) dance?
Scene one.
Trešnja theater, dancing with teacher Silvija, changing rooms. A row of benches, things scattered around, things like shoes, clothes and backpacks. The atmosphere is tense because I am crying that I want to go home. My uncle is picking me up because my dad just dropped me off at the dance class and had to go on a business trip. I don’t want to go inside because inside is not only about the joy of dancing, but also the discipline and formation of little bodies and personalities through gestures like smacking the bottom. I had enough. I don’t want to go inside anymore. I am sitting between these two worlds, the world of my little life and the world of the big dance and I am not moving an inch. There’s commotion and others are trying to persuade me to go in, I’m refusing, my uncle is picking me up. We are leaving. I never stepped inside again, but the relationship between discipline and pleasure has remained inscribed in my dance and non-dance decisions. Often it is not a matter of choice. The technique is already working through the corrections given by the person who watches, but also through the willing formation of the dancing body. Corrections promise precision, perfection and beauty through the continuous repetition and hard work. There is pleasure, oh yes, but it is also obscured, because our bodies, alongside training, also dance through market structures, in which they often work as choreographer’s property or as a playful object at disposal for whatever the choreography asks of it. The body also dances through normative categorizations and institutionalized measures. However, all of that also creates a specific adaptability of the body, which, creatively and through pleasure, can affect things. Affect the imagining of new relationships, for example. An then, if the ability of the body to dance is viewed as a creative and a dance problem, I am thinking, how can we dance to overcome discipline? Maybe precisely in that kind of space between life and dance.
Scene two.
Big studio in the then CeKaO, Center for Culture Zagreb. Polished parquet floors, a giant glass window, a mirror tracing the entire southern wall, a few mats, cd player and two changing rooms that serve also as a storage space for administration peperwork. People are chatting, changing, some are running late.
It’s the consistent ekscena group of participants, some regular, some less, some full of energy, some organizing, some pumping up the atmosphere, some selling tofu, some offering massage sessions, some English lessons. And the teacher. I come almost every day, before university or instead. I’m super motivated, I organize, soak things in and dance most often in my pajamas. That’s what we wear. The teacher suggests we separate upper and lower part of the body in the sequence we just learned. I have no clue what that means, but I jump headfirst into the task. I think she is smiling at me. This means a lot for my confidence. Maybe she ‘recognizes me’ and invites me into the new project she is developing with the collective she works with.
_I spent almost all of my professional life working *together, inside performative collectives with emphasis on horizontal decision-making processes. In these settings I have found that it’s a blurry line between me as a choreographer and me as a dancer. At first it made me worry and later sometimes I found it really exciting. In these contexts the questions of equality and authority presented themselves, away from the comfortable spaces of philosophical thinking, as real creative or less creative problems. *Thinking and working collectively have always run parallel with setting conditions for the making of that work so that the *collective choreographic proposals almost always reflected the conditions in which the work was being made. Founded on this dynamic relationship between the conditions of work and methodology, the art practice that was emerging in ekscena was full of diversity, ideas, desires for things to change. Until 2006.
*That beautiful monster of collaboration.
Scene two: alternative
In this late summer heat I started to breakdance, like back in the day.
Collective experience.
I was practicing interrumptions combined with a dance enriched with alienations explained in movements discussed for days producing confusions projected on a screen from behind. On occasions. Often the voices transcribed in notes embodying movements described with words produced in discussions while making decisions. About late mornings. Collateral injuries; studios transformed while watching movies.
Many questions turning into notes. Movements happening accidentally, haphazardly, together with sounds from the imagination, translated into thoughts shaped by discipline:
Together.
Movements danced by some.
One duet performed for gazes, squeezed into costumes that ripped apart. On loan.
I was very proud.
Confusion. Whispered out loud.
(Excerpt from the text in Kretanja, 2019.)
3. …mirrors are so big, so important, so deceptive (and) when it comes to dance — ask Ana K. to describe your dance – understand her however you do, ask her whatever you want and have her understand you however she does – and then tell us what she said.
She spoke of details, she mentioned precision. She said she often sees rhythm that produces affect.
I asked her what she meant by it:
choreographing in dancing, dancing that destablizes choroegraphy.
(As far as I remember).
I know she said something about mechanical to which I said I would like to no longer be so mechanical.
I asked her what she meant by mechanical:
virtuosity of the machine, production of rhythm, images, associations, movement quality.
(Because I remember that time).
She said it was an analytic approach, a bit studious. She also said it made it look like no movement was accidental, like every movement was a reference to something.
I asked her if it reminded her of a metaphor I shared once with her. The metaphor of the world of performance in which, through rehearsals, reading, conversation and accidence, I am slowly learning the elements, with time I recognize them, sometimes I repeat them. Multiplicity of rhythm, unpredictability.
However, she still sees it as machinic with the purpose of creating rhythm.
I asked her, but where is affect there?
She said,
(as far as I can remember)
that it was about committment to the world of performance where choreography and rhythmicality change the gaze on the body dancing. She said, montage: choreography and authorship in the act of performing. Choreographing in the moment of dancing.
I thanked her.
We did not mention mirrors.
4. Let’s stay with mirros a bit longer though, and reflecting surfaces; from mirrors in ballet studios to mirroring exercises, from performative self-awareness to glass tiles. In which ways is reflection part of dance practice as you understand it, the dance practice that you nurture and develop, and then the practice you teach and transmit?
I will answer this question with an anecdote, it might prevent the risk of using convoluted language that dance sometimes borrows from other fields, although at the same time I might be taking a bigger risk: by looking back, through and into myself, without turning back.
I am sitting in my room in Birmingham and am looking through a semi-transparent and semi-reflective window pane into the yard. These kinds of half elusive things excite me the most. In this case, the glass I am seeing through, in which I can only detect the shape of myself, in which I can see through myself. The perspective changes, things that cannot join, join. For example, the notebook on my desk is suddenly flying across the room while my right hand hangs from the tree. And that’s only if the window is ajar. With just the slightest of movements, the perspective changes and it makes me reflect on my role, I half see the room and I half see the outside. I am moving the window forward and back and choose the position in which I can see a bit of everything, and me depending on the movement.
I liked mirrors only sometimes. I liked the one in the hallway of my parents’ apartment. You could see in it the reflection of the room my sister and I shared. I loved to storm past it, pretending to be the wicked Witch of the West, giving my sister a terrible scare. At that time mirrors fascinated me in relation to vampires and their balls and for a while I would anxiously be checking if I was able to see my reflection in the mirror, if yes, that meant the night went well. I was also checking for other people. If they showed in the mirror – people, if not – vampires. Although every time I saw a person’s reflection, I was actually hoping there wouldn’t be one. They say vampires can’t see themselves in the mirror, but I wonder if the vampires themselves say that or not. From my experience as a watcher the answer is no, not even a shape, not even a semi-transparent one. As far as I can remember, and I don’t want to check because it’s more fun to rely on memory, vampires don’t reflect in the mirror because they don’t have a soul. Their undead presence implies a reflective invisibility of the body and the reason for that is the inexistence of the soul. They glide (ok, not only, they also walk, sit and sleep) in a space caught between the alive and the dead, where the alive implies a soul, and the reflection exists because of that specificity. The fact that I see my reflection in the mirror obviously points to my aliveness and soul-ness, even if I have found an angle at which I can stand in front of the mirror without seeing myself. Take that, my soul.
I never liked mirrors in dance. Maybe it has to do with the time when I was learning to dance, when we tried to avoid making corrections by seeing ourselves and make them, if necessary, through awareness of the body from within. The mirror representes a seeming objectivity of the perception of the body. Our own gaze from outside. By this kind of conditioning of the gaze, the body would contort itself into various positions that it otherwise wouldn’t. Choreographically speaking, it is interesting. However, in most cases the mirror is about correcting, comparing, relating, all in all a slipppery slope. Looking back at my dance history, subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) corrections are always apllied to and inscribed into my dance decisions. Often it’s not a matter of choice, the correction comes from the watcher, even if it’s me. Through the willing formation of a dancer’s body, since it promises precision, perfection and beauty through continuous repetition and hard work. Not to mention ideal positions and exercising to look the same. By casting the gaze upon yourself from the outside, the body is danced, it’s not dancing. Which is again an interesting choreographic problem, because the body reflects the gaze onto itself.
Personally, when I watch dance, it reflects back my own experience of dancing. Although it’s impossible for me to speak from the non-dancer’s experience, research on mirror neurons speaks to the truth of that. Mirror neurons get activated when executing an action or watching somebody doing something. Some relate it to kinaesthetics, some to proprioception. Personally, by mirroring my own experience , I notice the awareness of the position and movement of my body. That informs me about its experience, its history. Sometimes through images and recognition, sometimes through a direct response to a body dancing, sometimes through affect. The specificity of dance as a form of artistic expression is precisely that kinaesthetic effect – we find out through movement and activation. Dance relies on physicality which creates movements for somebody watching, if only for myself watching. While it dances, the body creates and is being created at the same time. The body dancing negotiates between subject and object, seeing and being seen, experiencing and being experienced. However skilled or unskilled, everyday or specific, it has choreographic autonomy. Not only can we dance according to habit in everyday life, but the body creates itself by the dancing, open to the constant possibility to make itself different.
Off on a tangent maybe, recently I have started liking the relationship between glass and mirror, and already for a while I have been fascinated by the idea of transparency. From artificial skin, the skin of artistic work, second skin, to built in objects, textile and exoskeleton – inserted between artificial skin and skin, between two pieces of glass, forever preserved, unchangeable. The mirror is then an invitation for choreography, an instruction, barely noticeable reflective surface on the glass. Scratched, but not broken. Finally, we wouldn’t wish seven years of misfortune on ourselves.
5. Let’s then stay in the realm of skin. How did the fascination arise and where is it situated (to arrest the moment and not extend into dyacrony too much) today? Where do your interests touch skin in relation to your PhD thesis on cuteness that is cuteness, sweetness, loveliness, what word do you use in Croatian?
Allow me just to quickly jump back into past because touching upon these interests started by pinching the cheek. It also started at a research seminar. After reading the work I prepared fot that occasion, the professor stressed I should stop being cute and I blushed. It started with a classmate who spoke of the art work by describing it as cute. At the same time a person accused another person of manipulating the situation by acting cute, in order to avoid physical conflict. It could have also started in the home, with a lover who plays cute, telling her partner she is leaving or a transparent costume in ‘skin color’ I paste small objects on. Finally, it started without a body, through a combination of text, scenes, drawings, memories, objects, sounds in space, situated inside of something that looked like doll houses, and continued into a PhD.
And here I am today. My PhD research (C-DaRE, Coventry University) is an artistic research, or practice research as they call it in the English speaking world. I investigate relationships between cuteness and violence through choreography and vice versa, the metastability of choreography which occurs in the relationship between cuteness and violence. I still don’t know the right word in Croatian. I don’t. Because I talk about it in English. When I think about it, I think I prefer ‘slatkost’ (cuteness/sweetness), to ‘ljupkost’ (loveliness). Cute reminds me of how in Croatian we say: ‘a, slatkooo (eng. cute, but also sweet)’, I heard it more often, it has a nice ring to it, it’s more physical and my taste buds go wild! However, it’s not solely about cuteness. It’s about the relationship between cuteness and violence so in that way slatko for me fits better than ljupko (lovely) or dražesno (darling) because slatko is small, naive, non – binary, gender complex and combines sense and an epithet. In order to speak about cuteness and violence relationally I use a hyphen, actually en dash, as a graphic translation of their dynamic relationship.
As I see things today, cuteness – violence works through ambiguity. In a completely unobjective and biased way I believe that choreography can not only withstand, but also produce ambiguous states, practice unstable and non-binary proceses, offer the experience of affective restlessness by posing questions, instead of offering answers or solutions. I have come to terms with the fact that my focus is narrow, I admit it. However, we know as it is that objectivity is questionable so why not talk about things aututheoretically. I am just a d*** dancer afterall. For that purpose and despite it I develop choreographic proposals in the form of vignettes – short visual and textual proposals – snippets from the practice which are responses to what I am reading, watching, feeling, observing. Every vignette responds to a different concern in my research and through them I enter into dialogue with authors in whose work I notice some form of cuteness – violence (Sarah Maple, Mike Kelly, Stuart Sherman, Eve-Meyer Keller, etc.). Cuteness, in relation to violence, is a defence tactic, a sensorial experience, the power of the diminutive, a dangerous intimacy, a feminist and choreographic practice of doing, rather than an esthetic category.
However, I still have a cute little question hanging over me: ok, choreograpghy as a methodology and a way of thinking, but how does the body deal with these qustions outside of movement and dance?
It copes and nurtures an intimate approach to the topic by questioning the effects of writing, imagining or representing violence. In other words, although I am constantly testing out the premise that through choreography we can become aware and think differently the personal-political, at one moment I saw the scars, moles, wrinkles, bruises. Out of which emerged skin choreographies. Some of them orbit around the seemingly soft aspects of violence: collision of violence with my own (non)body, the connection of a soft object and a violent act, subtle gestures of cutting, hidden effects of pressure and artificial skin. The skin is here a reference point: as an organ, the boundary of visibility and an archive of traces. Skin is the only organ that envelops us from within and without. Skin touches. Skin carries intentional traces. Skin is touched. Skin carries unwanted traces. Skin establishes differences. Skin is a sensory boundary. Skin betrays. Skin speaks. Skin screams.
Here is a vignette that connects glass from the previous question, skin and choroegraphy.
Even today there is a choreographic sequence that pops into my mind as a sliver of an image that flashes before my eyes before I can stop it. It interrupts my everyday life, making it unstable and unreliable. The sequence starts by looking around the room and the complete collapse of the usual order of domesticity – glass everywhere. There they are. The atmosphere is tense because of shock, the silence is defeaning because of the neighbours. Retrograde motion, loss of memory, shattered emotions, an immense force; in the air, in the bones, filling the air the floors the future, affecting who they are and who they will be. The sequence ends (or begins again) pushing through the glass door. It seems not to hurt, at least according to what is seen.
A trace remains.
As an annex, I return, just briefly, to the first question because today a different memory came to my mind.
The earliest dance memory is me rolling around the floor in the hallway of the Croatian National Theater during the intermission at Swan Lake. My grandma took me. She was hoping I would be bored (there are four acts), but (for obvious reasons) I wouldn’t go home. We stayed till the end. My grandma and I.
6. Allow yourself a free improvised fantasy and tell us what you see: what could be or or you would like dance to be (like) in the future? What does it look like, where does it move? What color is it, how does it sound? Who or what is dancing?
_~_we take each other by the hand, an invitation to dance that cannot be seen in the eyes. Sapphic?
Poetry and senses. And a forward roll. The light of the sun at noon in the spring, when it is still not hot, intensified by a stage light shining into our backs, casting our shadow in front of us, disappearing as we move. It is not clear where it is, but we know what our focus is – dance for every one out there who is dancing between us and our shadows.
You with the sad eyes
Don’t be discouraged
Oh I realize
It’s hard to take courage
In a world full of people
You can lose sight of it all
And the darkness inside you
Can make you feel so small
But I see your true colors
Shining through
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
Like a rainbow
(Cindy Lauper)
Hoping that folklore is not the only cultural heritage that survives.
Zrinka is currently writing her PhD dissertation at C-DaRe, CU, investigating the metastability of choreography of cuteness and violence.
She graduated form the School of Economics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She holds an MA in Choreography and Performance form JLU, University of Giessen, Germany. In 2017 she was part of the Erasmus exchange at the Akademie der Bildende Kunste in Vienna, Master in Critical Studies. In 2020 she participated in the six month residency program at the Academy Schloss Solitude. She is a docent at the Dance Department at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, Croatia, where she works as a guest teacher.
Zrinka guides classes and workshops that present a challenge to dance as a skilled discipline, speaks of dance that choroegraphs itself and is the sedimentation of experiences, creativity and the exercise of thinking in dance. In her practice, be it research or practice that she engages in alone or collectively, she plays with points of con- and divergence – catching the body that catches the dance that rushes towards choreography, enslaves technical skill and disturbes practice. To the Studio she proposed a dance for pleasure. One that follows melody, rhythm and vocals. By the end of the week our ears hurt a bit. We thank Tim Bernardes who kept us company.