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PechaKucha Communicating Dance Zagreb: Martina & Jelena
Croatia has 3 contemporary dance ansambles and the rest of the scene consists of independent authors or small, often temporary collectives formed around a specific project
Small budgets for contemporary dance and their non-strategic spending leaves independent authors with just a very small «piece of cake»
Zagreb Dance Centre covers only a few logistic gaps depending on the possibilities, and the rest is covered by Teatar &TD, Pogon Jedinstvo or Zagreb Youth Theatre
No matter their experience or success the authors have a very limited space for creating their work and most of the time the artist is a one-man-show responsible for everything from logistics to promotion to post-production. Young artists are particulary sensitive in these sorroundings
The performances are usually held once, twice or a few times and then they dissapear with no or a very small chance to develop, grow and tour. The audience for contemporary dance is very small and contemporary dance has got a reputation of being too self-absorbed and conceptual
After doing one DasArts Feedback method session on Martina's piece Luna Malekova, and a very good response from her and the audience, we decided to continue doing it with other resident authors of Zagreb Dance Centre
We think this is a very usefull tool especially for young authors who can benefit from getting feedback and from meeting new audiences
It provides a possibiliy of a constructive feedback during the process, from people they could not get it from otherwise, and not only after the premiere when the piece will probably no longer have the chance to be performed
This is also a possibility to bring a wider audience closer to dance and dance authors, create more interest in contemporary dance, broadening the conversation towards other disciplines
It's also a fun way to communicate about dance with the yougest audience by using game-like segments of the method
While doing this in Zagreb we encoutered a few issues and challenges the first one being fear and distrust from the authors. So we asked ourselves how can we get rid of this fear to opening up during the work process
The second challenge is lack of participants so we asked ourselves how can we interest more people to participate and do we invite people who the author doesn't know
The third issue are different needs of the authors. We were also questioning how could we improve the method ourselves and adjust it to different authors and situations
There is also a question of continuing this collaboration: how to document the method, how to spread the interest in it, should we do it also with pieces that are finished, after they are officially performed
Since we had good reactions from the young audience we were thinking how to involve schools and students
What next? We decided to continue working with residents in Zagreb Dance Centre through the entire year 2015 and if we have positive results to do it during 2016 as well
We also decided to include workshops with the same authors about different issues of communication
We decided to work more on getting different audiences involved
Some of them would probably include dance students and dance classes participants from Zagreb Dance Centre, and students from the other fields as well
We would also like to work on adjusting and enrichening the method in our own, locally relevant way
