CoFestival 2025

14th International Festival of Contemporary Dance
CoFestival 2025

From November 21 to 28, the 14th edition of CoFestival will take place. Organised by Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and the Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, this international festival of contemporary dance is supported by a number of partners. This year’s programme highlights the notion that our bodies are always part of something greater. This encapsulates the power of dance.

The art of dance is one of the very few artistic practices without an intermediary substitute. It is virtually impossible to take it home with you. No book, record, or recording is able to replace the experience of a dance performance focused on the human body. This experience is mainly available only in person, when we are not alone. The latter fact is very close to us with its communal characteristic, until dance becomes a commentary on the gazes mounted on the walls in the form of surveillance cameras, designed to recognize human kinetics and send information about our presence to control centres. This is the subject of the performance Gaitless by Marko Milić and Uroš Krčadinac, which will be featured at CoFestival as part of the European project Modina, dedicated to the relationships between choreography, technology, and artificial intelligence. Kino Šiška is a partner in this project.

However, centres of surveillance are not always solely external entities. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said, in the spectacle of the world, we are beings who are watched, and so the surveillance cameras in our own eyes – whether we like it or not – are often a form of self-control. The mirror image in our own eyes is a kind of surveillance camera that can occasionally detect foreign objects that it is unable to attribute to itself. The operation of self-gazing can be taken, as in the case of Sonja Pregrad’s Object of Dance, as a queer method and a way of regarding dance or the body differently.

The performances of the Dance On Ensemble (Making Dances, a dance evening featuring works by Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Tim Etchells and Mathilde Monnier) and Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik (Cage Open: A Truck Passing by a Music School) are linked to a paradigmatic shift in contemporary dance, which, influenced by the views of American composer John Cage, broke with the tradition of dance choreography being created through the external authority of the choreographer’s gaze. Instead, dance is subject to its own internal mechanisms, constructed by solving choreographic problems that are not necessarily optical in nature. This vastly expanded creative participation, whereby dancers were no longer merely instruments of the choreographer’s vision but co-creators of pieces. Influenced by European constructivism and Cage’s interest in the sensory qualities of everyday life, dance established a space for a wide spectrum of what choreography could be – it no longer needed to appear good by all means.

The gaze of the other, or the second gaze, becomes ambiguous when it seeks to act as our choreographer. Contemporary dance has been involved in the art of performance for more than half a century, and this is effective primarily because it persistently undermines and problematises the authority of the choreographer. This allows us to understand the choreographer as a social norm. Harald Beharie (Batty Bwoy) and Tiran Willemse (blackmilk), however, focus their performances on the gendered aspects of this norm, grappling with what it aspires to establish. Petja Golec Horvat (my own private *) and Bor Prokofjev (Equilibrium), on the other hand, explore their relationship with these demands thoughtfully in a variety of existentialist dance landscapes.
With Deep Song (1937), now considered a classic of contemporary dance, the work of American choreographer Martha Graham will be presented to the Slovenian public for the first time. In the 1930s, dance responded to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism under the Third Reich. The art of dance thus expressed its solidarity with the struggle for things that we have in common and that we must share as a human community. The pioneers of modern dance believed that through dance solos they were dancing as a community or a duet with their fellow human beings, so they never felt that they were alone in their dance solos. Isabelle Schad takes the opposite approach in Studies on Infinity #2 – Nudity and Landscape, intertwining a group of bodies into a multitude in which solitude ceases to exist. Sylvain Huc and Mathilde Olivares, on the other hand, create a kind of fundamental dance duet in La Vie nouvelle, which seeks to celebrate the joy of collaborative dance work.

The programmes of CoFestival, the international festival of contemporary dance, have always been motivated by the notion that bodies are interconnected, a fact that seems more relevant than ever in 2025. Our bodies are always connected to something greater than ourselves. Although this can sometimes be daunting, the power of dance lies in its connection to the community. When we experience the magic of dance together, we are filled with delight. At that moment, we realise that we are not alone.

Mark your calendars and stay tuned to the CoFestival channels — more programme details coming soon!

Festival tickets are on sale!
Tickets for individual performances will be available soon.

21–28 November 2025, multiple venues

Organization: Kino Šiška and Nomad Dance Academy Slovenija