Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Kino Šiška are presenting: The 14th edition of CoFestival! It's programme highlights the notion that our bodies are always part of something greater. This encapsulates the power of dance.

The art of dance is one of the very few artistic practices without an intermediary substitute. It is virtually impossible to take it home with you. No book, record, or recording is able to replace the experience of a dance performance focused on the human body. This experience is mainly available only in person, when we are not alone. The latter fact is very close to us with its communal characteristic, until dance becomes a commentary on the gazes mounted on the walls in the form of surveillance cameras, designed to recognize human kinetics and send information about our presence to control centres. This is the subject of the performance Gaitless by Marko Milić and Uroš Krčadinac, which will be featured at CoFestival as part of the European project Modina, dedicated to the relationships between choreography, technology, and artificial intelligence. 

However, centres of surveillance are not always solely external entities. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said, in the spectacle of the world, we are beings who are watched, and so the surveillance cameras in our own eyes – whether we like it or not – are often a form of self-control. The mirror image in our own eyes is a kind of surveillance camera that can occasionally detect foreign objects that it is unable to attribute to itself. The operation of self-gazing can be taken, as in the case of Sonja Pregrad’s Object of Dance, as a queer method and a way of regarding dance or the body differently.

Take a look at the full programme here.

21–28 November 2025
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture

Ann Papoulis, an American dancer, choreographer, teacher, composer and vocalist, is well known in the local dance community for her performances in Ljubljana in the 1990s. She is even better known as a dance educator, having taught a Cunningham class at the Dance Theatre Ljubljana for a number of years. Ann Papoulis, who trained at Cunningham’s studio in New York, among other places, is the ideal interlocutor to take us to the heart of the choreographer’s studio and pedagogical work. She has had a typescript of her book about the maestro ready for some time. In this conversation, we will discuss some of the unpublished chapters from the book.
 

The discussion will be moderated by Rok Vevar.

It will be held in English.

Free admission.

Find details here.

21 November, 18:00
Kino Šiška, upper foyer

In his book Anarchic Bodies: Corporeal Materialism, Affects and the Political (ZG Kontrapunkt – Skopje, 2025), Dimitrov tackles the concept of the political by exploring its complex and constitutive entanglement with corporeality, affects, and matter. Dimitrov looks at artworks by the artists Velimir Zernovski and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the political protests in North Macedonia known as the Colourful Revolution, and the subcultural and punk scene in Ljubljana during the socialist 1980s.

The central problem and the question of his research endeavour is: how can we imagine and enact the political as radical difference – signifying the groundless, contingent, abyssal, and disruptive moment – making im/possible the very grounding of society, if we set the body as an agential, dynamic, transformative, excessive, and relational world, forming materiality, at the centre of our understanding of political ontology. In order to pursue this project, Dimitrov sets some of the core philosophers of the post-foundational philosophical canon such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière in critical dialogue with the trans-disciplinary scholarship of corporeal feminism, new materialisms, affect and body studies.

The discussion with Slavcho Dimitrov will be moderated by Urban Belina.

This discussion will be held in English.
Admission is free.

Find details here.

23 November, 19:00
Španski borci, upper foyer

Croatian dancer and choreographer and former Creative Crossroads artist 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.”

Read more about it and get tickets here.

23 November, 20:00
Španski borci, Main Hall

Participants will first dedicate themselves to a daily training. Based on movement principles deriving from somatics and from Asian techniques such as Aikido, Shiatsu, stretching and breathing techniques, the choreographic practice unfolds: it becomes materiality that can be sculpted in space and time. Here, dancers develop sketches and elements that are part of the research of Schad’s current and recent group works or that simply stand for themselves. The central question here is the notion of subjectivity within a collective moving body that can only function as a whole: how can we perceive ourselves as part of a larger whole, and what does that mean as a choreographic practice, as well as a stance to take?

For 25 years, Isabelle Schad has successfully worked with an open artist constellation in Berlin, exhibiting over 60 works at major venues (HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele, Radialsystem, Tanz im August Festival), and has developed her own, self-developed production space – the Tanzhalle Wiesenburg – into a thriving workspace for a large community within the independent dance scene. The profile of her work is characterized by an interweaving of choreographic style, mediation, practice, and continuous training, as well as a creation of workspace where resources are shared to foster cohesion and community. She works across generations, sharing her knowledge and practice with younger artists who are now in a mid-career generation, in order to in turn pass on her knowledge to the next generation. This creates a new type of training that grows organically, becoming a movement in its own right, with its holistic practice at its heart, understanding body and mind, practice and the visibility of the work as an inseparable unity. She works and researches in various contexts and settings, production spaces, festivals, workshops.

Find the details here.

27 November 11:00–15:00
The Old Power Station

The book Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Station, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Nomad Dance Academy Croatia, Lokomotiva, 2024 ), created within the EU project (Non)Aligned Movements, is the result of the Nomad Dance Academy’s collective work, researching different contemporary dance practices in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia since the beginning of the 20th century. With that work, the Nomad Dance Academy network and its local organizations are striving to provide the conditions for the historicizations of regional contemporary dance on the basis of different historical documents.

It was created as an accompanying publication to the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)Working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After, which was opened by the Nomad Dance Academy network in November 2024 at the Museum of Contemporary Art during Choreographic Convention 2024 in Zagreb and in March this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. The texts in the book were written by the research group: Slavcho Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, and Jasmina Založnik, as well as guest writer Gal Kirn.

Among those participating in the discussion will be: Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik, Rok Vevar and Slavcho Dimitrov.

* The discussion will be held in English

Admission is free.

Find details here.

27 November, 20:15
Dance Theatre Ljubljana, foyer
 

Nomad Dance Academy's Ljubljana based international festival of contemporary dance, CoFestival, opens its 12th edition on 23 November 2023.

The programme of CoFestival focuses on two curatorial concerns in 2023. The first one presents a selection of artists who have recently created outstanding, fresh, contemporary, but at the same time very diverse choreographic works in the cultural contexts of the area of the former Yugoslav federation and Austria (Igor Koruga, Viktorija Ilioska, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Nomad Dance Academy Croatia Collective, Dejan Srhoj, Tatiana Kocmur, Hungry Sharks). Their works focus on constructions of the potential body and the ordering of the historical dance corpus, architectural brutalism and street dance, the distribution of choreography among different contemporary media, and on the social and interspecies, serial composition of choreography and dance. It should be stressed that our selection is only a fragment of what is emerging as an extremely intriguing, new and artistically fruitful contemporary dance phenomenon in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and Austria.

The second curatorial strand focuses on the (open) boundary between the dance or kinetic act and its perception, which the CoFestival curatorial team understands as a material condition of human empathy, on which our future ultimately depends. The open borders of bodies, geo-political spheres and different materialities – both human and of the ecosystem – are understood as a political condition of contemporary coexistence. “Goose bumps” is a label for a synaesthetic or kinaesthetic experience in which sensory or linguistic information is transformed into a direct material, bodily effect. The syntagm is interesting because it applies to human, bodily experiences an example that goes beyond the anthropomorphic: into nature or the animal world. It is a border as a place of open perception, fluidity without technical barriers. Our contemporary necessity. The performances of Christos Papadopoulos, Thiago Granato and Sylvain Huc, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou and Isabelle Schad, with their subtle assemblies of corporeal or tangible materialities and the contact between what can be done with them in order to open up the pores of our spectatorial skins to bodily reflection, regulate with scientific precision the conditions of our sensual and mental sensibility. It is a pulsation of substance in which nothing is certain, as bodies are formed by their evolutionary time.

Both strands are traversed by a particular metamodernist temporal capture, in which cutting-edge dance works are linked to artistic tendencies, forms, processes, formats and practices that aspired to give dance its practical and disciplinary autonomy during the period of dance modernism, but which artists in our contemporary times have taken up in fresh ways, infused with contemporary dance knowledges, innovations and embodiments. They use them precisely because of their specific (inexhausted) potentiality, which can address the contradictory sites of contemporary social, political and ecological crises in a flexible way, or connect the materials to contemporary life in a refreshing manner. These are choreographies that do not instruct the spectator on how to use them, they do not engage in advocacy of their own doing, they do not seek to make an object out of the act of theatrical reception, nor do they imagine that the forms of their works and practices are devoid of their ideological implications. They arrange the materialities without further explanation, but their links with the last century of dance cannot be denied.

At the 2023 CoFestival, we will also focus on aspects of dance archiving and historicizing with a conference programme, present some of the latest examples of contemporary dance writing, and introduce some interesting international guests. Check out our programme and follow us, because you are always most welcome at CoFestival, the international festival of contemporary dance.

23–30 November 2023, Ljubljana
Find the full programme here.

Thiago Granato invites to an artistic immersion where individual and collective work situations will serve as a basis for exploring different compositional logics. Through choreography we will study the body’s performative capacity to create, penetrate, melt,
fuse, move and transform different contexts. With this workshop Granato will share his work methodology and propose parameters to discuss how we can identify, situate and sustain a performative practice and a choreographic project nowadays.

24–26 November 2023, 10:00–14:00
Old Power Station, Union Hall

Thiago Granato is a Latin American dance artist from Brazil based in Berlin. His productions are the results of processes that insist on promoting experiences of political transformation through aesthetic innovation. His productions have been presented in South America, Asia, Middle East and Europe. Took part of the Ex.e.r.ce 8 Program, Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier (FR, 2008), coordinated by Xavier Le Roy and NPP – New Performative Practices Master Programme at Uniarts – Stockholm University of Arts (SE, 2019), directed by Chrysa Parkinson. In 2022 he co-curated the International Performing Arts Festival and Laboratory Linha de Fuga in Coimbra (PT).