The Labour of Panic is a happening set in the open space of Grobničko polje (Grobnik Valley). In this infrastructural space of large proportions, speeds, and charges, we find no point of entry because, even though one can vividly survey this place of contact between a natural environment and technological systems – power lines, an airport, a car racetrack, a motorway – it is an inversion of the humanly proportioned space in which we normally live, drive, and walk. Its identity is a not-there. Just like the identity of the everyday is this infrastructure of power lines, intersections, and networks that support it.

The Labour of Panic is a happening created in suspended time. A time with a quite certain endpoint and a rather uncertain beginning. However, to allow the everyday to be something else, to allow something to end and something new to begin, the infrastructural space itself must allow the possibility of change. That is the terrain where one outlines the contours and excavates the remains of that which cannot come to be and that which may yet occur.

The Labour of Panic is the final part of the trilogy that began with the performance titled Iskop (The Foundation Pit), staged in 2018 at the house of the architect Vjenceslav Richter and continued with rePublika u orkestru (rePublic in the Orchestra Pit), premièred in October 2019 at Ivan pl. Zajc Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka. The trilogy thematises the relations between work, utopia, and confrontation with impossibilities amid the threat of climate catastrophe.

Performance: Nataša Antulov, Ana Marija Brđanović, Ema Crnić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Nikolina Pristaš, Kalliopi Siganou, Aleksandra Stojaković Olenjuk, Evita Tsakalaki

Orchestra: Puhački orkestar KUD-a “Sloga” Ravna Gora

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš in collaboration with Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Evita Tsakalaki, Kalliopi Siganou and Ema Crnić
Dramaturgy: Goran Ferčec, Tomislav Medak, Nataša Antulov
Text: Goran Ferčec
Music: Gordan Tudor
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić, The motives on the men’s clothes are deconstructed imprints derived from Slobodni crtež (A Free Drawing), a 1980 artwork by Vjenceslav Richter
Light design: Goran Petercol
Graphic design and illustration: Siniša Ilić
Collaborator in spatial analysis : Leo Modrčin
Recording and audio processing: Saša Predovan
Technical support: Bruno Butorac
Translation: Žarko Cvejić
Production: Lovro Japundžić
Drone piloting and aerial filming: Goran Skelac i Vatroslav Španiček
Photography: Tanja Kanazir
Dog: Lava
Thank you: Davorka Begović, Vesna Meštrić, Alan Vukelić, Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka and Eurokaz.

Première performences: 10th and 11th July 2020
Lokacija: Grobnik Valley, Rijeka, Croatia

Co-production: BADco. and Drugo More
The production of The Labour of Panic was supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, City of Rijeka – Department for Culture, Zagreb City Council for Culture
Organizer of the program: Drugo More
The program is part of DOPOLAVORO flagship of the RIJEKA 2020 – EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE project
Rijeka - Port of Diversity
The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb.

The work of Drugo More and BADco. is supported by Kultura Nova Foundation.

Cover photo: Siniša Ilić for The Labour of Panic BADco. (markers on paper, 21x29,7cm, 2020)

Exactly ten years after first release and its implementation in the practice of artists and large educational institutions, the software tool WHATEVER DANCE TOOLBOX is available from 2020 as a free web application; with the accompanying and revised Manual in Croatian language. The earlier 2011 version of the Manual in English is still available for download.

Whatever Dance Toolbox is a web application, a software tool that in many respects functions like an interactive mirror. It has been developed during years of workshopping and collaboration with numerous users with different competences and interests, locally and abroad. Thanks to the continuing interest and a rich dialogue between the software programmer Daniel Turing, us and the users, WDT is today available as an open code software and as a free, downloadable web application. WDT was designed with the aim of expanding the field of research of movement and dance, as a practical support for learning about, the production of and the analysis of choreographic material as well as the development of creative thinking and working within an interactive environment.

About the tool:

"The Whatever Dance Toolbox presents a unique teaching and learning opportunity for students of movement, both on screen and off. WDT references the 1970s material explorations of pure movement and the video aesthetics of electronic arts pioneers. This distinctive poetic element is wrapped into a simple, user friendly interface which encourages experimentation and play in making choreographic decisions.”
- Scott deLahunta, researcher and organizer of research projects on choreography and technology at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, Motion Bank and Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Science

"How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think? Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we think, perceive, and make sense"
- from the book Transmission in Motion, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Routledge London, 2016 

The web application and new edition of the Manual have been realized in the framework of the Audience Development program of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

That artists have tried to change the world is not news. Nor that they tried to save it. But what if neither change nor prospects of salvation are certain, when the threatening catastrophe bestows only way out - to do the impossible? Today, when philosophers claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, when utopia has become a derogatory word, and the certainty of catastrophe disarms our imagination, we decide to exercise and practice the impossible.
This production offers the viewers a unique perspective on the theater space by positioning itself into the orchestra pit - the bowels of the theater machine, but also in the place whose future depends directly on the coming climate change and sea level rise.
The production rePUBLIC IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT finalizes a year-long project started in Chicago, continued in Zagreb, and premiered as a whole in the Croatian National Theater "Ivan pl. Zajc" in Rijeka in collaboration with Italian and Croatian Drama and the theater collective BADco. In this three-part production we return to historical attempts at artistic intervention into reality, from the modernist republics led by writers Ernst Toller and Gabriele D'Annunzio, through the trans-lingual and visual interventions in public space (Paolo Scheggi, Vito Acconci), to tarantist attempts at performing impossible choreographies (Goat Island) or impossible music compositions (John Cage).

Director: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgs: Nataša Antulov / Tomislav Medak 
Choreographer: Nikolina Pristaš
Choreographic collaborator: Zrinka Užbinec
Set designer: Igor Eškinja
Costume designer: Arhiv BADco. - Silvio Vujičić
Installation and integral reconstruction: Oplà stick: the Passion according to Paolo Scheggi
Music: John Cage, Etudes Boreales
Translation: Marta Schwaiger
Video: Marin Lukanović
Video and film materials used: Goat Island, The Sea And Poison; Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, An Andalusian Dog
Performers: Ivna Bruck / Ana Kreitmeyer / Marta Krešić / Aleksandra Stojaković Olenjuk / Petar Kovačić
Stage manager: Sandra Čarapina
Producer of BADco.: Lovro Japundžić

Co-production: Italian Drama and Croatian Drama of CNT "Ivan pl. Zajc", BADco., Chicago Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

The production is inspired by the works of Edvard Munch, Ernst Toller, Gabriele D' Annunzio, John Cage, Vito Acconci, Paolo Scheggi, Goat Island, Karen Brodine and the native women of the western Amazon.

Special thanks to Cosima and Franca Scheggi for granting the rights to the reconstruction of Paolo Scheggi's Oplà stick: the Passion according to Paolo Scheggi.

Thank you: Lin Hixson, Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, Nicholas Lowe, Sarah Skaggs, John Rich, Jasna Jakšić, Drugo more.

Premiere: 20.10.2019 at Croatian National Theater "Ivan pl. Zajc".
Reprise performances: 28.10. and 31.10.2019 at CNT "Ivan pl. Zajc"

The production of rePUBLIC IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.
The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.
The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb and Chicago Cultural Center.

These [compositions] are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible.
John Cage

Impossible Dances is a performative artwork that was initially created for the exhibition documenting the work of the US postdramatic theatre collective Goat Island and was premiered in May of 2019 at the Chicago Center for Culture. The work draws on the documentation and scores of the "Impossible Dances" sequence from Goat Island's The Sea & Poison and John Cage's notes to his Freeman Etudes.

In Impossible Dances we have explored the new ways of practising the impossible. The impossible emerges from the performative process of translation from choreography to choreography, from recording to movement, from poetry to performance. The impossible is necessary because, as we're hurtling toward hothouse Earth, nothing is more urgent that the encounter of a myriad of impossibilities.

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Tomislav Medak
Choreography and performance: Nikolina Pristaš, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec, Marta Krešić
Video: Goat Island,
Production: Lovro Japundžić

CHICAGO
World Premiere: Friday–Saturday, 24.-25. May 2019, 7pm, and Sunday, 26. May 2019, 2pm
Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North
Note: The 24. May performance is preceded by an artist talk at 7 p.m. with Erin Manning with the performance at 8pm.

ZAGREB
Premiere: 01. June 2019 at 19:00
Hala V (Technical Museum Zagreb) – Part of the Platfroma.hr 20 Festival

The project was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

"Prushevsky could have already foreseen what a work of static mechanics, in the sense of art and purposefulness, could be placed at the center of the world, but he could not perceive ahead of time the structure of soul of the residents-to-be in the all-proletarian home being built now in the midst of that plain and all the more therefore he could not imagine the inhabitants of the future tower in the midst of the universal earth. What kind of body would youth have then, and with what exciting strength would the heart begin to beat and the mind begin to think.”
Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit

This unique project by Zagreb's theater collective BADco. - the performance-exhibition The Foundation Pit at the location of the villa at Vrhovec 38 in Zagreb, today known as the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb - begins from research of utopian premises for the planning of the future of housing, socialization and exchange, but also the immediate interconnection of life expectancy and its realization. In the tension between imagination, labor, youth and death, BADco. and our collaborators from the fields of dance, architecture, design and music explore the contemporary role of artists in relations of production and art practices.

This performative exploration of the legacy of utopian construction of the twentieth century explores the mega-structures of Vjenceslav Richter from the late 1960s (Synthurbanism, Heliopolis), the conceptual meta-structures of American architect Lebbeus Woods, and the dystopian-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit.

Andrei Platonov was one of Russia's greatest and most intriguing writers of the twentieth century. His two most significant works, Chevengur and The Foundation Pit (written between 1926 and 1930) are an immersion into dystopic issues and depict the malformation of the utopian idea in the hands of man (who is ineffective, greedy or weak). The protagonists of The Foundation Pit are building a large tower, a proletarian home, one that will enable a communal life for all members of the working class. This home symbolizes a bright future and a utopian society, but by the end of the novel the workers fail to even pour the foundation of this building.

“But I didn't want to be born myself, I was afraid that my mother would be a bourgeois.”
Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit

The performance-exhibition The Foundation Pit choreographically explores the specific structural principles and gravitational actuality of architectural design and the socrealistic representation of the body. Early Soviet socrealist depictions of accentuated physical strength, revolutionary fervor and the idealized future use precisely the figure of a young girl to represent the society as a whole.

The early works of Platonov often equate the adult woman with pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie - thus victory over sexual relations stands for victory over death, and desire for the female form is supplanted with desire for the future, the new, a communist society (Oxana Timofeeva). That is why the male characters of Platonov seem condemned to either a sentimental memory of the one who had walked by without stopping or the obscenity of a quivering hand in a pocket whilst watching the pioneer girls.

In the ironic turn of the end of the novel, the foundation pit of the never-completed building of a new society, the "uterus for the home of the future life", becomes the grave of the girl Nastya, the embodiment of the emptiness of the promise of future.

We enter The Foundation Pit through a performative reading room, while the whole project will be accompanied by workshops and lectures organized in cooperation with the Urban Design Platform.

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Performance: Antonia Dorbić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Priska Pia Pristaš, Kalliopi Siganou, Evita Tsakalaki
Music and graphic design: Andro Giunio
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić
Space / Reading room: Dinko Peračić i Miranda Veljačić / Platforma 9,81
Translation: Rafaela Božić-Šejić
Technical support: Damir Prizmić i Miljenko Bengez
Production: Lovro Japundžić
Photography: Marko Ercegović
Public relations: Zrinka Šamija

Co-production: BADco. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

Croatian translation of Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit courtesy of Breza Publishing.

Lebbeus Woods quotes © Estate of Lebbeus Woods; translation into Croatian: Ivana Ivković

Thank you: Vesna Meštrić, Božo Dujmović, Leo Modrčin, Lana Pukanić, Aleksandra Wagner, Ante Pejić, Tomislav Medak, Zrinka Užbinec, net.culture club mama

Premiere: 16. November 2018 at the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection

The production of The Foundation Pit was supported by Zagreb City Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb, POGON Jedinstvo – Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth and the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection - Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

Urban Design Platform is comprised of independent cultural organizations Art Workshop Lazareti, BADco., Drugo more, KA-MATRIX, Kontejner, Multimedia Institute, Right to the City, Platforma 9,81, and institutions Zlatna vrata Centre for Culture and Lifelong Learning, Multimedia Cultural Centre Split and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.

Someone makes the decision,
And someone suffers the consequences of the made decision.
Someone attacks to correct the rhythm,
And someone allows to be attacked correct the rhythm.

- Goran Ferčec: Correcting Rhythm

Correcting Rhythm is a theatre production rooted in the crisis of the cognitive framework of the dramatic situation, the explosion of analysis, observation and presentation in terms of suspended causality. A disrupted rhythm is the precondition for a rerun of analytical obsession. Everything is there, everything in its totality, all proportions in all their respects, and nothing emerges out of anything. The rhythm of the body with the rhythm of the society with the rhythm of the planet - perceived as arrhythmia. Relative events. The explosion happened. The murder happened. How do we show what we encountered here? What can we say what was there before? What happened next? How do we show it? How?

... we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I ‘make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month.’ Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Forty years after Pavao Pavličić wrote his short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb we return to the topic of a man's obsession with the rhythm of a city, the rhythm of its crimes, in Goran Ferčec's text Correcting Rhythm.

The production sets off with an inquiry of the very building of the Croatian National Theatre and the inner organization of a space that becomes an observatory of the square below it, the city, territory and cosmos that surround it. The seldom-used Sound Studio transforms into a cabinet that houses a collection of wondrous apparatuses and evidence of an event the production traces.

The production gathers an exceptional team of collaborators: the writer Goran Ferčec as the author of its text, visual artists Marko Tadić as set designer and Silvio Vujičić as costume designer, Austrian composer Radu Malfatti and Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz as authors of music and sound. The artistic team of the production is also comprised of the director Goran Sergej Pristaš, choreographer Nikolina Pristaš, dramaturgs Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak and Diana Meheik.

Performed by BADco. members Ana Kreitmeyer and Nikolina Pristaš and by members of the Drama of the Croatian National Theatre Livio Badurina, Mislav Čavajda and Duško Gojić, with music performed by member of the orchestra of the Opera of the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Bošnjak.

Correcting Rhythm is the culmination of the year-long project Nothing Inert in the World - the observatory of everyday rhythms, that BADco performance collective developed during 2017 in collaboration with visual artist Marko Tadić, Croatian National Theatre, Dubrovnik Summer Festival, Vladimir Bužančić Gallery, Institute Tomislav Gotovac and Croatian Television.

The project explores rhythmo-analytical research - conducted according to the writing of Henri Lefebvre - in several dispositives of watching: in the theatre, in the gallery, in public space and in the TV studio, and presents insights in formats of the theatre production Correcting Rhythm, the exhibition by BADco. and Marko Tadić Dispositives of Watching, the reconstruction of Tomislav Gotovac’s performance in public space Adapting to objects on Marshal Tito Square – Marshal Tito Square I love you!  on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary and the TV performance Is there life in the TV studio?.

The research and production work on this series of works has been contextualized through the presentations of artists titled How Work Works and the symposium The Turn organized at the Croatian National Theatre and including a number of artists and theoreticians from Croatia and abroad: Ramsay Burt, Bojana Cvejić, Anders Paulin, Una Bauer, Nataša Govedić, Adrian Pezdric, Gregor Kamnikar, Mila Pavićević, Sergiu Matis, Radu Malfatti and a number of young students of dance and dramaturgy who joined us in workshop during the production.

A special thank you to Pavao Pavličić for permission to use his short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb.

Thank you to: Tena and Tadija Tadić, Gallery Vladimir Bužančić and Anita Zlomislić, Lana Šprajcer, Eleonora Magdalena Vrdoljak, Danijela Vukadinović, Maja Ležajić, Nina Gojić, Ivan Penović

Correcting Rhythm and Nothing Inert in the World were supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia; Austrian Cultural Forum.

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

Media sponsor of BADco.: Yammat FM

The performance Spores departs from the problem of never ending work of maintenance. We maintain the body, the house, the family and the plants, we maintain friendships, relationships, cleanliness and clothing, we maintain infrastructure, organization, space and technology. Maintenance work is the invisible prerequisite of all work and creation. Maintenance is also a daily obstacle to undisturbed work and creation. It stays in the background, repeated as a routine and with no progression. It is in the never ending work of maintenance that progression, change or transformation hibernate.

The body in dance has been considered free of the inertia of the work of maintenance and the humility of the work of production. Movement in dance is supposedly exempt from social conditioning and left to creative self-determination. BADco. approaches this assumption of the free body in dance by analyzing the phenomenon of the turn, the rotation of the body on its axis without a possibility of progress. The turn as an element of repetition forms the ”infrastructure” of dance movement, setting it apart from every other movement, yet when the turn does not exit from its repetition the dance enters a crisis.

The initial inspiration for this performance comes from the poem What Is “Not Writing”? by American poet Anne Boyer, in which she dissects layer by layer her own experience of life as an artist, woman, mother, teacher, partner, activist, friend, unearthing the rhythms of her own daily life and their immobilizing effects.

BADco. authors:

Ivana Ivković (dramaturgy), Ana Kreitmeyer (performance), Tomislav Medak (dramaturgy), Nikolina Pristaš (choreography), Zrinka Užbinec (choreographic assistance).

BADco. is joined by:
Lana Hosni / Emilie Gregersen and Ivana Pavlović / Rebecka Olivia Berchold (performance), Helge Hinteregger and Martin Koller (music), Igor Pauška (space), Silvio Vujičić (costume), Jasmin Dasović (sound),Sara Bundalo (light), with the participation of students of the Danish National School of Performing Arts during the production process.

Production: Danijel Popović

Photographs: Damir Žižić

Thank you: Anne Boyer, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Anna Lea Ourø Jensen, Amalia Kasakove, June Kathrine Lysjø, Karin Bergman, Lydia Margareta Elisabeth Östberg Diakité, Culture Center Novi Zagreb

Premiere: 27. October 2016 at Cinema SC, Student Centre Zagreb

Staff of the Student Centre of the University of Zagreb – Culture of Change: Jelena Erceg (stage manager), Krunoslav Dolenec (technical realization), Miljenko Bengez and Mario Vnučec  (light technicians), Danijel Škrbo and Barbara Šimunović (sound technicians), Stipo Katavić (stage master), Dubravko Dolenec (stagehand)

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

The work of BADco. is supported by the Foundation Kultura nova.

The production was prepared in Culture Center Novi Zagreb and the Student Centre of the University of Zagreb – Culture of Change.

Institutions Need to be Constructed is a hybrid format of a film set, performance and temporary residence placed inside deserted factories or unfinished public buildings - spaces that used to be sites of industrial production and these days may become cultural centers, spaces that through culture celebrated the industrial age in utopistic ways. By reconstructing scenes from three of BADco.'s performances Institutions Need to be Constructed examine the tension between labor and art in our recent history, symptomatically evident in the incomplete state of the three buildings. The first part of the trilogy was realized in September 2015 in former factory Rikard Benčić in Rijeka, the second on 27. February 2016 at the Youth Center in Split in collaboration with Platforma 9,81 and the third installment at POGON – Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth, the former factory Jedinstvo, on 04. March 2016.

The events include discussions on the social and economic aspects of artistic labor, the task of productivity, and valorization of artistic work through non-aesthetic spheres of social production. The discussions include the participation of artists and cultural workers, cultural studies researchers and analysts who reflect on the position of culture in the social system, on new institutional models and problems of institutionalization of contemporary art practices.

a solo procession

“It’s night. You’re asleep, peacefully dreaming. Suddenly the ground begins to tremble. Slowly, the shaking escalates until you are thrown off balance, clinging desperately to any fixture to stay standing. The vibration moves up through your body, constricting your internal organs until it hits your chest and throat, making it impossible to breathe. At exactly the point of suffocation, the floor rips open beneath you, yawning into a gaping dark abyss. Screaming silently, you stumble and fall, skydiving into what looks like a bottomless pit. Then, without warning, your descent is curtailed by a hard surface. At the painful moment of impact, as if in anticipation, you awaken. But there is no relief, because at that precise split second, you experience an intense sound that shocks you to your very core. You look around but see no damage. Jumping out of bed, you run outside. Again you see no damage. What happened? The only thing that is clear is that you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you are still resonating with the encounter.”

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

You go and you arrive somewhere. Or not. You watch and you see something. Or not. The place at which you arrive will not exist for long, the things you see seem like a threat. But what connects the concrete place, its time and its duration, is rhythm; a rhythm which constitutes dance, which constitutes fear, a rhythm which constitutes pleasure. In this new performance by BADco. rhythm forms time which carries the dread, a time which ticks away, a time which hammers in. If the contemporary danse macabre is no longer a procession of dead men or a procession of social classes but rather a chain of vibrations, electromagnetic waves and sonic affects, how else would one choreograph it if not as a solo performance?

Our everyday life unfolds according to different temporal cycles like the calendar, daily and lunar cycles, and basic life cycles – somatic or mechanical. Rhythm is the phenomenon that connects place and time and provides a sort of infrastructure for time. Tempo, a momentary choice, duration, frequencies, sequences and rhythm are all mutually conditioning structures of time and every dance performance, which is a limited temporal image of spatial modifications, benefits precisely from the ways it deploys these structures. The work on this performance is thus grounded in our interest in the so-called rhythmanalysis and focused greatly on the experimentation with a set of varied relations which occur between rhythmic patterning, vibrations and frequencies, as well as different ways of measuring time. A dance performance, whether it be artistic, recreational, religious or social is, on the other hand, only one among many tactics of drowning the body into sonic spaces that produce matching affective states – pleasure, irritation or fear. Furthermore, one of the mythological topoi of the discourse on dance is precisely the body’s attempt to reach a state when it is fully immersed in the act of dancing. This concept of a body that is being danced away proposes that we think about the body in dance as a specific type of object in continuity with other material objects, as a particular condensation of matter within a general continuity of movement.

Choreography in this performance is an attempt to neglect the romanticist concept of the body as a generator of movement and focus instead on the body’s ability to mediate but also to resist different series of movements, gazes and vibrations which chain both living and nonliving mediators together by way of conformation, translation, composition etc. And for this reason we needed to focus our attention on the “underground fluxes” of a dance performance; the infrastructure of dance, background rhythms, the rhythm of elementary corporeal functions and their visceral effects.
BADco.

The performance is jointly choreographed by Nikolina Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec and it is performed by Zrinka Užbinec.
Dramaturgy and set up: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Music and suggestions about sound: Alen and Nenad Sinkauz
Idea and costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Company manager: Lovro Rumiha
Production assistant: Vanja Zubović

The performance uses sound fragments from the movie Come and See by Elem Klimov, the poem Four Quarters by T.S.Eliot and a song Needles and Pins by The Searchers.
” In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
T.S. Eliot from Four Quartets

“Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must form one’s mediators. It’s a series: If you don’t belong to a series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case.”
Gilles Deleuze

Premiere: 16., 17. and 18. 10. 2014 @ Kino SC, Savska 25, Zagreb, Croatia

New dates: 27. i 28. 1. 2015 , 9:00 pm@ Kino SC, Savska 25, Zagreb, Croatia

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

Inspired by the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus

Departing from the problem of the absence of (com)passion and expected emotional reactions, the STRANGER project, using Camus’s antihero Meursault, provides a view of the social and systemic hypocrisies that are hidden behind relationships based on transparency. This stage reading of THE STRANGER focuses on three dominant images borrowed from the novel: the situation of confession, prison, and the moment of the murder itself as the point where all of the novel’s forces accumulate. Shedding light on a narrative and discourse as an attempt to explain what happened generates the level of confession, the law of transparency. Constructing a transparent choreographic score examines, in terms of mise-en-scène, the performative potency of the situations and atmospheres inscribed in the novel. Finally, with light literally shed upon it, the murder, as the central point in the narrative, is presented as a tableau of a continual threat and a stage image that constantly remains incomplete in the spectator’s eye, in its poetic character, always incomplete in waiting for a visual release, unclear because too clear.

Goran Sergej Pristaš –  directing

Goran Ferčec – dramaturgy and text

Nikolina Pristaš – choreography and performance

Zrinka Užbinec – choreography and performance

Ana Kreitmeyer – choreography and performance

Petar Milat – textual contribution and performance

Alen Sinkauz – music and performance

Nenad Sinkauz – music and performance

Siniša Ilić – drawings and stage design

Silvio Vujičić – costume design

Alan Vukelić – light design

Jasmin Dasović – sound design

Iva Dežmar – mask

Lovro Rumiha – production

Special thanks – Maria Tsitroudi, Anders Paulin

They always came for one at dawn; that much I knew. So, really, all my nights were spent in waiting for that dawn. I have never liked being taken by surprise. When something happens to me I want to be ready for it. That’s why I got into the habit of sleeping off and on in the daytime and watching through the night for the first hint of daybreak in the dark dome above. The worst period of the night was that vague hour when, I knew, they usually come; once it was after midnight I waited, listening intently. Never before had my ears perceived so many noises, such tiny sounds. Still, I must say I was lucky in one respect; never during any of those periods did I hear footsteps. Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her. Because I might just as well have heard footsteps, and felt my heart shattered into bits. Even though the faintest rustle sent me hurrying to the door and, pressing an ear to the rough, cold wood, I listened so intently that I could hear my breathing, quick and hoarse like a dog’s panting—even so there was an end; my heart hadn’t split, and I knew I had another twenty-four hours’ respite.
Albert Camus: Stranger

In 1951 the abstract painter Willem de Kooning commented on the radical visuality unleashed by the atomic bomb. The advent of atomic light signaled, for de Kooning, the absolute transformation of visual representation: “Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everybody was the same color. It made angels out of everybody.”
An atomic visuality, forged in the spectacular visuality of the atomic or A-bomb, an A-visuality. De Kooning’s reflection on the atomic detonation and its effect on visual representation is marked by religious excitement and confusion. The sadistic metaphysics of his account, the cruel suggestion of redemptive ecstasy in the monochromatic annihilation, conveys de Kooning’s uneasiness in front of the atomic spectacle.
His language charts the limits of figuration before the visual event that may have changed “the concept of painting once and for all.” “The eyes that actually saw the light,” those who witnessed and understood (or were converted), also lost their vision; in the sacrificial logic of de Kooning’s passage, the witnesses exchanged their eyesight for a sublime visuality: the eyes of those witnesses “who saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy.” Ecstatic, outside, blinded. The last form of light, perhaps, that anyone needed to see. The last light of history, according to de Kooning, or the light at the end of history. (…)
The atomic blast that melted the eyes of angels brought forth a spectacle of invisibility, a scene that vanishes at the instant of its appearance only to linger forever in the visual world as an irreducible trace of avisuality.
Akira Mizuta Lippit: Atomic Light

Excerpts from the following texts were used in the performance:
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers
Mahmoud Darwish: Identity Card

Books we refer to in the performance:
Akira Mizuta Lippit: Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).
Georges Didi-Huberman: Survivance des lucioles
Alexander Garcia-Düttmann: Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood

The film Juke box (1966) by Ante Verzotti is screened during the performance.

Premiere: June 27th and 28th 2015 @ Zagreb Dance Center, Ilica 10, Zagreb, Croatia

Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, Zagreb Dance Centre.

Project is a coproduced by Perforations Festival (Domino)

BADco. for Croatian Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial :: Intangible from Lovro Rumiha on Vimeo.

Is There Life on Stage? – Exercises in Terraforming is an artistic exploration of two connected sets of problems: establishing the minimal conditions for life and the facticity in the theater. Our starting point is the question “What are the consequences of theater’s fictionalization of a reality such as the global environmental crisis?” Therefore our reference horizon spans artistic and media sources ranging from documentary footage of our conquests of outer space, through science-fiction prose and eco-art.

The performance-series starts out from the idea of terraforming, a hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of planet, moon or other body to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by terrestrial organisms. Conceived as serial, made up of individual episodes, the production’s primary interest is to approach and exhaust the topic of establishing new conditions for life and work on stage, networks of relations, ecosystems, forms of life, communities etc. On the one hand we wish to reflect on a heightened sense of urgency to relate the global environmental crisis, on the other hand our aim is to reflect on the status of the real in theater. While theater’s social and political argumentation increasingly exhibits a passion for reality, for the documentary, for the “real people” on stage, theater always inevitably fictionalizes relations between people and things, facts and illusions. And yet, theater always is a collective act of sorts, always a temporary community with its own set of sociopoetic consequences.

The performance has a serial structure whose segments will be changing from occasion to occasion, from venue to venue. The production has  been presented twice as a work-in-progress, while the Rijeka performance in October 2012 opened a cycle of public showings in theaters. The initial project propositions were developed through a number of workshops and collaborations with artists and experts outside of the collective. The performance will remain after its premiere open through continuous workshops with the audience and yet other creators, resulting in yet other segments that will be added to the serial and permutable structure of the performance. It is adaptable to performance and gallery venues, but also other open-air of enclosed public spaces.

Inspired by works and thoughts of Timothy Morton, John W. Campbell, Yona Friedman, Vlado Martek, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Long Distance Hotel and others.

Authors: Pravdan Devlahović (performance), Ivana Ivković (dramaturgy), Ana Kreitmeyer (performance), Tomislav Medak (dramaturgy), Goran Sergej Pristaš (directing), Nikolina Pristaš (performance and choreography), Zrinka Užbinec (performance).

Collaborators: Daniel Turing (software), Silvio Vujičić (costume design), Alan Vukelić (light design), Jasmin Dasović (sound design).

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Coproducers: BADco. and Domino

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
The production was prepared at the Culture Center Novi Zagreb.

world premiere:
26.11.2010 20:00 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

additional performances:
27.-28.11.2010 22:00 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
(note different time!)

Point of Convergence is a choreographic experiment persisting in the excess where communication in dance and about dance oscillates between what can and what cannot be stated: insisting on choreographic means – structuring the intensity of communication’s noise – producing the specific conditions of dialogue in dance and dialogue on dance. To understand one another, it is necessary to negotiate the terms of understanding.

The authors Zrinka Užbinec and Ana Kreitmeyer implement this negotiation of the terms of understanding, an understanding that is yet to come to understanding, through a series of mutations of dance expressions. A simple initial choreography is communicated to each other through a series of dance negotiations, understandings and misunderstandings through which newly established gestures lose their meaning, and casual glances and signs of a hand become intensities that are changing the context, transforming meanings into an excess.

During this process of “rough” translation the dance expression of one is exposed to a constant and continuous dance interpretation of the other, creating a choreographic situation that is no longer located on the bodies, but between the two bodies. Attempts at negotiation, at translation, misconstructions, explanations one did not request, disagreements, an attempt at coexisting. The point of convergence is left to the spectators’ gaze where, in the illusory distance, two parallel lines intersect at infinity.

Team of Negotiators: Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Nikolina Pristaš, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec

Choreography and performance: Ana Kreitmeyer and Zrinka Užbinec

Light design: Alan Vukelić
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Producer: Lovro Rumiha
Support: Pravdan Devlahović

We thank the participants of the lab 10 days 1 unity.

Project was made in: Culture Centre Novi Zagreb and Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth – POGON.

Project is supported by: Zagreb City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

A widespread popularity of physical culture, or more precisely “harmonic gymnastics”, in the context of American bourgeoisie at the beginning of 20th century came predominantly through teachings of a successor of the French oratory teacher François Delsarte, the creator of an exhaustive system of exercises the purpose of which was mostly aimed at achieving naturalness, elegance and harmoniousness in oratory and acting. This specific focus on refining and mastering the gestural expression of the body also imprinted itself into the ideology of early modern dance and could be traced in its techniques (Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Ruth St.Denis, Ted Shawn…). By paying special attention to Delsarte’s detailed analysis of gestural expression, especially his prohibition to use parallel gesture in elegant oratory, this choreographic study exhausts that prohibition by insisting on it, thus attempting to shift away from an understanding of dance as a rhetorical gesture and toward an understanding of dance as a phenomenon that is procedurally rhetorical, that achieves effectivity of expression through operating with complex processes persuasively. On the same line, our interest went towards the hiatus between “speaking” and “speaking persuasively” in dance and towards contemporary dance’s relation to the rhetorical cliché of naturalness which substituted the idea of lightness in ballet.

The “image” of the historic performance by Joseph Beuys, paraphrased in the subtitle, seemed like a great conceptual substructure which could host a choreographic speculation on some of the key ideas beneath contemporary contemporary dance but at the same time enable us to ask the question how dance might look like not form the perspective of the spectator or the performer but from the perspective of all withdrawn objects whose “natural” deadness pulls the body away from the world of the living into the black box of the undead.

Composition and modulation: Nikolina Pristaš
Notes and blackboxing: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Sound design: Jasmin Dasović
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Hare: Ana Ogrizović
Technical support: Marcell Mars
Speculative dimension: Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak, Zrinka Užbinec.
Producer: Lovro Rumiha

Semi-inspired by the work of: Joseph Beuys, François Delsarte, Franz Kafka, Steven Shaviro, Bruno Latour and Graham Harman

The project was made in: Culture Centre Novi Zagreb, POGON – Zagreb Centre for Independant Culture and Youth and Culture Centre Kalvarija (Rijeka).
Project is supported by: Zagreb City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministry of Culture RH

The production premiered in Zagreb at the Perforations Festival in 2010.

Whatever Dance Toolbox is a set of software tools designed for the analysis and development of dance and movement. Six tools included in the suite can help dancers and choreographers devise, develop and rehearse dance, but can also be used in dance education or by non-dancers to explore movement. The suite is a product of a long-standing collaboration between BADco. and German human-machine interface developer and artist Daniel Turing, and it reflects some of the mutual concerns with the dancer-computer interaction and choreographic thinking.

Using Whatever Dance Toolbox in rehearsal dancers can manipulate the image of movement and work with an ”active mirror” to produce qualities that they cannot produce on their own. Body is placed inside a different relation to its environment, which, in turn, determines and changes its expressiveness. Tools employ visual analysis, tasks and temporally manipulated reproduction of captured images to allow dancers and choreographers to study and complexify their movement and composition. The machine-factor generates an organization of choreographic elements different and alien to what other choreographic methodologies can produce.

Free download and easy setup

Whatever Dance Toolbox comes on a free Ubuntu GNU/Linux LiveCD that you can insert into your computer’s CD/DVD drive and boot into the operating system without having to install it on your computer’s hard drive. All you will need to start working on Whatever Dance Toolbox is a computer with a CD/DVD drive connected by a FireWire cable to a video camera and, preferably, a video projector or a large screen.

Whatever Dance Toolbox can be either downloaded or can be ordered on a CD with a manual written by BADco.

For the latest version of Whatever Dance Toolbox contact: badco@badco.hr

You will need to burn the downloaded file onto a blank CD as an image or create a bootable USB flash drive. You can use either the CD or USB flash drive to boot your computer into the Whatever Dance Toolbox environment.

Detailed introduction and instructions can be found in our Whatever Dance Toolbox – Manual. The electronic version of the Manual can be downloaded here.

Note that the electronic version of the Manual does not include methodological exercises that BADco. has developed and that you can use to develop your own work. As the tool is intuitive, you can develop your own exercises, but should you wish to benefit from our experience you can order the Manual as a book.

Order Whatever Dance Toolbox Manual

Based on the experience of using Whatever Dance Toolbox in our own work and facilitating numerous workshops with the tool, we have developed a set of exercises that can help you in your work. You can order the physical copy of Whatever Dance Toolbox Manual that includes our methodological exercises and a CD with the software suite, please write to badco@badco.hr

The price for the Manual is €30 for individuals and €60 for institutions (packaging and postage not included).

ISBN: 978-953-56603-0-9

Whatever Dance Toolbox – Workshops

If you are interested in organizing a Whatever Dance Toolbox workshop for your students, your dancers, your non-dancers, your scholars, your visual artists, your audiences, we have done a number of Whatever Dance Toolbox workshops tailored to different groups. Please write to us at badco@badco.hr

You can also check out the article by Lise Amy Hansen and Andrew Morrison mentioning Whatever Dance Toolbox: Materializing Movement—Designing for Movement-based Digital Interaction (International Journal of Design, Vol 8, No 1, 2014)

World premiere: 17.-19.10.2008 @ 19:30 Dom im Berg, Graz.

Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Stage: Slaven Tolj
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Video: Ana Hušman
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Sound design: Ivan Marušić-Klif
Sound technician: Jasmin Dasović

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumiere, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.

Coproducers: Steirischer Herbst, University of Zagreb – Student center – Theatre &TD

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.

From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.

Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?

1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
— Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983

Little by little we are replaced … by uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another, each image at its place, as each of us, at our place, in the chain of events on which we have lost all power.
— Dziga Vertov Group, Here And Elsewhere, 1972

This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor.
— Johnathan Beller, Cinema, Capital of the 20th Century, 1994

The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind… In the Lumière film of 1895 it is possible to discover that the workers were assembled behind the gates and surged out at the camera operator’s command. Before the film direction stepped in to condense the subject, it was the industrial order which synchronized the lives of the many individuals.
— Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 2001

Authors involved in the project

Dancers: Pravdan Devlahović / Nikolina Pristaš, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec

Choreography: Nikolina Pristaš

Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković, Goran Sergej Pristaš

Music: Helge Hinteregger

Light design: Miljenko Bengez

Video: Oliver Imfeld

Costume: Silvio Vujičić

Visual assistance: Goran Petercol

Other collaborators: Aleksandra Janeva, Tomislav Medak, Ivana Sajko

Executive producer: Una Bauer

Fleshdance is a choreography in which the tactile potential of surface does not govern the movement but rather the movement makes visible the appearance of surfaces and their qualities. Flesh is not a boundary between the body and external materiality; it is a haptic surface which determines movement by its ability to see by means of tactility, to desire without watching, to dissolve in the moment of sensation and affliction. The desire of flesh is not directed towards the other but simply towards that which is external. By exposing flesh within the system of economy of the exchange of gaze, the dancers communicate flesh as the materiality of existence. Twisted animal-like bodies keep loosing the ground beneath their paws as it keeps shifting. Paws, claws, wings, immobilized limbs, non-functional palms feel the limit surfaces of the space. The joy of flesh is neither its yearning nor a possibility of its realization, it grows in the process of multiplication of erogenous zones and levels of intensity on the surface it creates.
- Ivana Ivković

Erotic exposure, paradoxically, does not really involve seeing and being seen. In fact, exposure subverts a certain regime of vision. The exposed flesh does not reveal a secret self that had been hidden, but rather dissolves any self that could be apprehended.
- Michael Hardt, Exposure: Pasolini in the Flesh

…the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body…
- Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Fleshdance was realized in co-production of BADco. and Dance Web Europe with the support of the Culture 2000 program of the European Union and the City Office for Culture, Zagreb