ROOMS. Memories. Shadows. Encounters.

Dance exhibition

Authors and performers: Darija Doždor, Iva Hladnik, Sonja Pregrad and Zrinka Šimičić
Sound designer: Nives Sertić
Curator: Marina Viculin

ROOMS is a “dance exhibition” with an indefinite number of exhibits, which visitors are free to choose and create their own story, woven from fragments of thoughts and memories; thoughts and memories of the four performers, transposed into their movements, as well as our own thoughts and memories inscribed into the sound and dance material offered to us on three floors, in three units: three rooms.

On each of the floors of the Lotrščak Tower, the visitor may set a dancer in motion by inserting one of three CDs in a player, thus leading her in the area of specific mental and physical associativity for her. The sounds are grouped into three sound images entitled “Memories”, “Shadows” and “Encounters”. The common element of the three chosen terms is elusion, disappearance, evasion … therefore, character / quality particular of dance in the “Rooms”, but also of dance in general. This common feature seems to be dissolving in front of the viewers, it is fragmentary and it refuses to be seen in its entirety, since the visitor, staying in one place, cannot see what is going on in the two other places, in the other two rooms.

Does the viewer perceive every sound connected to movement as music? In what way can a dancer treat sound, apart from music? Does sound, and if yes, how, make this dance different? What happens when exhibition, as something we like to describe as “static”, and dance, as something we tend to imagine as “active”, go hand in hand in front of visitors?

Movement, which exists only “now and here”, and our thinking-associative circuit, which is in always and everywhere, are two – maybe only at a first glance – opposite poles in amidst of which dance emerges. Here its rhythm does not follow the rhythm of music, or the internal rhythm of the body; it is guided by the rhythm of sequencing images in our heads, which is regularly unpredictable, often interrupted, sometimes slow and actually “arrhythmic”, and occasionally even empty, although just apparently. That, of course, opens questions such as, “what is the viewer watching in that case?” or, “when does something start and stop being a dance?”, to which a unique,  comprehensive and completely satisfying answer is impossible to find.

Performances:
11 July 2007, Lotrščak Tower
25 and 26 October 2007, as part of the multimedia exhibition “Silence”, Lotrščak Tower
15 and 16 November 2007, as part of the multimedia exhibition “Silence”, Les Voutes, Association Loi de 1901, Paris, France

The project has been realized with the support of the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

Photography: Srđan Kovačević