Sonja Pregrad: Object of Dance (2022)
Sunday, 23 November at 8:00 p.m.
dance performance
Španski borci, Main Hall
Duration: 45 min.
Croatian dancer and choreographer Sonja Pregrad is well-known in the Ljubljana contemporary dance scene, presenting many of her works here and collaborating with several local artists. In 2021, she was featured at the Symposium of “Small Arts” (Emanat) at the DUM project space in Ljubljana, where she presented the remarkable work How Many Cubic Centimetres Can My Body Take Up. In this performance, she boldly objectified the female body using drag as a tool for emancipation. What happens to femininity when it is subjected to drag processes? The history of the LGBTIAQ+ community is a tactical history of dealing with visibility and invisibility, with revealing and concealing. This makes the distinctions between behaviour and performance a political question of normativity and singularity.
Sonja Pregrad uses her contemporary choreographic works to transform such tactics into problems of fundamental theatricality and political socialisation. She asks: “What could a drag persona called ‘Object of Dance’ talk to us about? In this solo, I am trying to stretch the concept of drag from the body (identity) towards movement, speech, and dance as a (theatre) performance. I am appropriating, estranging and modifying the way I perform – gender, body, presence, materiality, and movement – by splitting the roles of an author, spectator and performer into fragments smaller than a singularity.” How can so-called abnormalities be utilised to problematise normativity itself? Pregrad uses drag as a procedural tool to make visible the production of gender, body, presence, materiality (of the body), and movement, not only choreographically, but also sociologically and politically. This is crucial, because within the normative forms of life choreographed by the inertia of social dominances the processes of embodiment are often subjected to the ideologies of dominant, unproblematized, and therefore invisible “naturalnesses” and “normalcies.”
Author and performer: Sonja Pregrad
Dramaturgical advice and sound processing: Nika Pećarina
Outer eye and text writing support: Ana Fazekaš
The work uses parts of Ana Fazekaš’s text “Anxieties: Reflection in Three Extremities,” which was published on antisezona.space as a review of the performances of the block Antisezone: Antirepertoar (February 14-15, 2022).
Costume: Sonja Pregrad and Tea Kantoci
Light: Tomislav Maglečić
Production: OBJECT OF DANCE
Co-production with the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the ANTISEZONA 22 programme
Organised by: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia in collaboration with En-Knap
Supported by:
Cover photo: Nina Đurđević