Viktorija Ilioska
Creative Crossroads Cycle Two 2025–2026
Viktorija Ilioska is a choreographer, performer, and artist who explores choreography through various mediums, including movement, text, voice, and sound. She studied at the Faculty of Music Arts in Skopje (BA in Dance Pedagogy and Repertory) and at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen (MA in Choreography and Performance).
She views choreography as an evolving, expanded practice that transforms into the organization of space — a toolkit for analysis that functions beyond mere expression. For her, it becomes a critical field of knowledge. In this framework, performance and dance are employed as strategic tools to navigate the tension between structures, order, and procedural systems. She relates to artistic practice as a relationship between doing and becoming, a process shaped by both research and the pursuit of knowledge. The term “procedure,” in her understanding, extends beyond mere methodology; it signifies an open space, a pre-existing region that holds the essence of the research itself. She believes that it is within this space that the true meaning of choreography as an inquiry emerges.
Viktorija’s artistic practice is rooted in research and shaped by thoughtful action and exploration. Her process involves reflection, theoretical analysis, somatic research, and creating work that evolves during the process itself, rather than adhering to predetermined scripts or rules. Rejecting the concept of the mute dancing body, Viktorija incorporates elements of provocation and engages with themes such as labor, gender issues, the portrayal of women in public spaces, the body’s relationship with nature, and the influence of gendered perspectives on identity.
As an artist rooted in the field of choreography and performance, Viktorija has always been, and continues to be, deeply concerned with movement and the body — what moves this body and what movements can influence entire masses of bodies. In recent years, she has approached the body as a resource, intentionally ‘exploiting’ it to raise deeper questions within the discourses of materialist ecofeminism and extractivism. Through choreography, she seeks to create works that question, provoke, and invite reflection, positioning dance as a critical discourse that challenges conventional boundaries.
Read more about Viktorija Ilioska here.
Desert(ed) Dreaming
Performance by Viktorija Ilioska & Katja Cheraneva
Desert(ed) Dreaming is a sensory and poetic invitation to understand lack not as the end but the beginning of something and – amid global exhaustion – to imagine new ways of living together and create possible futures. Here the desert takes on multiple meanings: it evokes abandoned dreams and political drought while at the same time retaining the potential for change, caring and regeneration. Inspired by hydro-feminism, speculative fiction and ecological thinking, the piece explores processes of withdrawal, voiding, extraction and emaciation – physically, ecologically and biographically. How can a new imaginative power be drawn from absence? What can be created on a stage that has already been deserted and transformed itself into an intermediate space, a place of memories and visions of the future.What remains when we leave places, bodies and systems behind? In Desert(ed) Dreaming Katja Cheraneva and Viktorija Ilioska launch a choreographic search through their shared histories of migration between Russia, North Macedonia and Germany.
Choreography / Performance: Viktorija Ilioska, Katja Cheraneva
Dramaturgy: Chiara Marcassa
Text: Viktorija Ilioska in conversation with Katja Cheraneva
Outside eye / dramaturgy: Amèlie Haller, Patrick Faurot
Light design: Laura Salerno in collaboration with Carlos Franke
Costume Design: Laura Stellacci
Sound Design: Antonia Beeskow, Aran Kleebaur
Stage Design / Set: Nina De Ludemann
Artistic Producers: take the money and run GbR
A production by Viktorija Ilioska & Katja Cheraneva, in co-production with Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm and Hessisches Staatsballett in the frame of Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2025 and Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia.
Funded by Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Hessisches Ministerium für Forschung und Wissenschaft, Kunst und Kultur, Life Long Burning network through Creative Europe programme and Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Ministry of the Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and Municipality of Ljubljana.
Supported by Uferstudios Berlin and Lokomotiva – Centre for New Initiative in Arts and Culture, Skopje.
Organized by: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Kino Šiška
Executive production: Jasmina Založnik and Mojca Prešern Levstek
With financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana, project Life Long Burning, supported by Creative Europe and Ministry for Public Affairs
08 November 2025, 20:00
Tanzfestival Rhein-Main
09 November 2025, 20:00
Tanzfestival Rhein-Main
10 November 2025, 20:30
Tanzfestival Rhein-Main
More info and tickets are available here!
new date!
15 April 2026, 20:00
Kino Šiška — Katedrala, Ljubljana
More info and tickets are available here!
Such as Rhymes with Non
Performance
Viktorija Ilioska, as part of NAM ChoreoLab, presents Such as Rhymes with Non at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb on 27 September at 20:00. Conceived as a performance essay, the work stages and reimagines the legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement and non-aligned choreography through speculative verse, spectral video, disjointed dance, and choreographed conversation.
More info here!
On 28 September, at the Multimedia Institute (MI2), Ilioska continues this inquiry through a NAM ChoreoLab workshop, opening a space for collective imagination and embodied reflection on the legacies and futures of the Non-Aligned Movement. Participants are invited into the collective practices of NAM ChoreoLab—exercises, scores, and shared proposals that have grown out of two years of research—extending the trajectory of the performance into a space where other geographies, other first names, and other unfinished constellations can be imagined in the spirit of the Non-Aligned.
More info here!
NAM ChoreoLab is conceived and developed by the curatorial team of the (Non) Aligned Movements project (2021), by way of Nomad Dance Academy. The team includes choreographers and performers Viktorija Ilioska (North Macedonia), Sonja Pregrad (Croatia) and Ana Dubljević (Serbia), along with independent researcher and performer Dražen Dragojević (Slovenia). They align at the intersection of (queer) feminist dramaturgies, contextualized somatic practices, choreographic subjects, speculative and performative theory, archive and memory, decolonial historicism, and futurism. Together, they reassess—and re-align—non-alignment (along with the ‘singularity’ of Socialist Yugoslavia) for contemporary audiences, polities, and communities by way of choreography installation meets intermedia archive meets essay performance.
Hope for the Best – Prepare for the Worst
Performance
Hope for the Best – Prepare for the Worst is a performative training conceived as a way to explore the possibilities of co-existence and adaptability in the face of imagined and imminent futures. Through collective choreography, Viktorija Ilioska invites participants to engage in haptic thinking, using hand gestures, meditative exercises, and shared movement to create a space for reflection and exploration. The work encourages the audience to envision new ways of being together, promoting a slow yet active engagement in collective transformation.
Hope for the Best – Prepare for the Worst is presented at the Macedonian Choreographic Platform (MCP) on 9 June 2025. Read more about it here. Macedonian Choreographic Platform (MCP) is taking place during Performance Platform Festival (PPF) 2025 in Skopje, curated by Viktorija Ilioska and Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski. Find the programme here.
Performance: Desert(ed) Dreaming finaly in Ljubljana!
Viktorija Ilioska and Katja Cheraneva embark on a choreographic search for traces along their shared migration histories between Russia, North Macedonia, and Germany. Desert(ed) Dreaming premiered in November 2025 in Frankfurt and is shown in Lubljana in April!
Performance: Desert(ed) Dreaming
Desert(ed) Dreaming is a sensual and poetic invitation to understand scarcity not as an end, but as a beginning. Viktorija Ilioska and Katja Cheraneva embark on a choreographic search for traces along their shared migration histories between Russia, North Macedonia, and Germany.