If we count the 2014 edition as part of CoFestival’s story as an international festival of contemporary dance − when, for the sake of continuity, we ran the festival on minimal financial resources with just two events − then this year’s programme is the fifteenth in a row. Over this period, we have strived to include in the festival programme choreographic works that are highly diverse in composition, versatile and often very demanding, in order to challenge both ourselves and the local dance audience in ways that sharpen our powers of reception.

Of all the festival’s editions to date, this year’s CoFestival programme is, to the greatest extent yet, made up of contemporary dance and performance works. The artistic works we will be hosting speak in bodily and kinetic languages for which we have not yet taken any language course. They speak with fresh, unfamiliar idioms that we will have to break into together if we want to have any conversation with them at all. Even though a number of this year’s performances touch on questions of gender, what binds this year’s programme together is the seductive membrane of bodily screens and everything that passes behind and through them. At this year’s CoFestival, eroticism is not a producer of pleasure, but a tactical operation through which something may secure its own social  power, its attention, its bodily submission − our lives.

The problem of seduction, of voluntary self-objectification in the gaze of another, and the material, bodily consequences that arise from this, are the subjects of Zhana Penkova Pencheva’s performance I Love When You’re Watching Me (2025) and Imre Vass’ MMXXV (2026). Each performance, in its own way, lays bare the problem of material algorithmics, of a kind of calculability that, in contemporary life, often fills us with dread at the thought that some hidden desire of ours might be fulfilled in the very process of seduction − even before we’re able to recognise it as such.

An entire series of performances in our programme deals with the symptomatology of a “rape” by another’s gaze, with forms of imposed objectification, or with the consequences of dominating social practices − with the ways social mechanisms, ideologies, colonialism, or technology force us into categories we cannot identify with, through processes of marginalisation, stigmatisation, humiliation, or erasure. How to escape them, how to be freed of them? Darko Dragičević, Cherish Menzo, Miloš Janjić, Marko Milić, Lisa Colette Bysheim, Katrine Patry and Samwel Japhet each take on these tasks using different emancipatory artistic means, along with Hristijan Nashulovski in his exhibition On the Line. .

What’s at stake here is the question of how to avoid having to advocate for one’s own humanity. Last year’s book by the young Palestinian poet, activist, and intellectual Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (2025), deals with exactly this question: namely, how can any of the oppressed communities be guaranteed the same conditions that are otherwise, under international conventions, bestowed to human life? Why must the representatives of certain social communities undergo a moral audition in order to be treated lawfully, if not humanely?

The second series of performances deal precisely with those invisible choreographers who arrange, assemble, train, and oversee these kinds of political and social power. They do it through military drill, through the training of dance forms, through the stimulations of fan sports culture, through artificial intelligence or through linguistic norms. One could say this is the very practice that Louis Althusser, in his famous text on the apparatuses of the state (1970) − which have since lost much of their social power in their competition with economic subjects − named: ideology.

The performances by Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi with the Studio Contemporary Dance Company Zagreb Ensemble, by Jason Martin, Moritz Ostruschnjak, Tatiana Kocmur and Jernej Šmid confront precisely these questions, each in its own way. This invisible choreographer − the body of knowledge through which well-organised power produces its subjects − plays the leading role in all of these performances.

Half a century has passed since the choreographies of Pina Bausch began setting audiences a riddle: who, or what, is the true choreographer of this enigmatic dance in any given sequence or performance? Solving riddles of this kind was the condition for identifying History itself − the History in which audiences and performers alike found themselves caught together. Perhaps not so much because anyone believed it possible to reach its end (the resolution of the class questions that drive it), but so that a future could be imagined, one that everyone together might be willing to settle into. The performance Imagine (2026) by Dejan Srhoj and Dragana Alfirević sets us precisely this task.

So that our imagination wouldn’t miss anything essential, we have invited a number of individuals and groups into the CoFestival programme. In the seminar To Stand Behind One’s Own Words, Igor Dobričić will work with participants to explore how condensed forms of demand, statement, and appeal can remain tuned with the bodies that stand behind them. In his dance workshop The Practices of Attention, Sylvain Huc will offer participants tools through which (dancing) bodies can secure a heightened attention − usually also a precondition for successful acts of spectatorship in contemporary dance. Slavcho Dimitrov will talk with the Croatian historian Franko Dota about his outstanding book, A History of Male Homosexuality in Socialist Yugoslavia (Fraktura, Zagreb, 2025). In the four-day workshop Living Dance Archives, archivists and historians of contemporary dance will work out what tools, methods, and approaches can secure for contemporary dance the amount of public time it deserves. Following selected performances, selected moderators will talk with the artists. We will also be talking with our audiences while socializing before and after the shows − something that CoFestival’s curators and artists always look forward to.

Welcome to CoFestival 2026!