Talk no. 8: Snježana Premuš - Rok Vevar

About

NOTATING CORPOREAL REPOSITORIES: The work of choreographer and dancer Snježana Premuš brings into focus the body as an archive. The body as a kind of a repository. As such, it can suggest unacknowledged, inapparent, concealed, misplaced, dormant, but nevertheless available kinetic possibilities, sedimented in particular bodily specificities. At the same time, it can also imply a catalogued kinetic storeroom, a stock of visible movement representations and styles with which the body stocks up during socialisation processes, education, and, of course, ideological training. Although the two aspects of such an archive are manifested materially, by the body, they prove to be in an extremely exclusive relationship with one another. The different ways toward exclusions and the balance of corporeal repositories, as realised in the opus and practices of Snježana Premuš, will thus be the topic of our next discussion.

Biographies

Snježana Premuš started to dance at Plesna izba Maribor. After completing her MA at the London Contemporary Dance School, she continued developing her dance, improvisation, and choreography practices in different international projects in Glasgow, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Pamplona, Athens, and Ljubljana (On the Edge Festival, Paris, DanceWeb scholarship, Vienna, Tanzfabrik Berlin scholarship…). In 2012 she finished the study of Body Mind Centering in Berlin and obtained the EAY certificate (embodied anatomy and yoga).
Her choreographic work is centred on the body and presence. Refusing to understand the body as a mere “body image” or a mechanism, the body in her work is commonly described as “sonic manifestation of a corporeal split” (Rok Vevar, Amplified Body); “a performance of metacorporeal, metaphysiological landscapes of comical, imaginary, or metaphysical images” (Katja Praznik, Move As).
Over the span of two decades Snježana has worked with a large number of international groups, producer, and festivals. In 2009 she cofounded Institute Federacija with Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Gregor Kamnikar.

Rok Vevar is a writer and theatre critic and a theoretician and historian of contemporary dance. He is the author of the book Deadline – Selected Articles and Essays (2011). He has graduated from comparative literature and literary theory at the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, studied theatre directing at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (1998 – 2000), and attended GILŠ Kodum Ljubljana (1993-1996). He co-directed three performances with Simona Semenič. As mentor and dramaturg, he collaborated with a number of dance artists. He is the initiator and curator of Ukrep – Festival of Dance Perspectives and of the School of Creative Criticism. He has been part of Pre-Glej projects in Glej Theatre. He has contributed to the compendium Contemporary Performing Arts (Maska, 2006) and the book 500 dramskih zgodb (Mladinska knjiga, 1997). He is the editor of the Digital Collection of Contemporary Dance in Španski borci Culture Centre.