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“My Private Bio-politics” performance by Saša Asentić was from the beginning conceived as an open research within the field of dance and performance in Eastern-European transitional context. It arose as a part of a perennial research and artistic project called „Indigo Dance“ in which a number of associates of different profiles were included – performer and culture worker Saša Asentić, ballerina, dancer, and choreographer Olivera Kovačević – Crnjanski, performing arts and culture theoretician and dramaturge Ana Vujanović, as well as others – and is realized through different work formats: in addition to the performance, there are also a CD presentation “Bal-Can-Can Susie Dance” and historical archive/video installation “Tiger’s Leap into the Past” and “Recycle Bin” as its addition.
Author and performer: Saša Asentić
Assistance: Olivera Kovačević-Crnjanski
Theoretical support and dramaturgy: Ana Vujanović
Duration: 55 minutes
Premiere date: 11th February 2007
Place of premiere: Serbian National Theatre – Novi Sad, Serbia
Supported by: Performance is made in co-production with Centre national de la danse – Paris, research in residency (Theorem Dance residencies), and is prepared within interdisciplinary dramaturgical trainings of THe FaMa in Belgrade and Dubrovnik. Performance is supported by DanceWEB (with the support of the Cultural Programme 2000 of the European Union within the frame of danceWEB Europe).
Concept:
This work tries to deal with its own macro and micro conditions in which it appears.
For the beginning, to make them visible because of specification of mechanisms and procedures of the production of dance on Serbian scene. Then, to intervene. However, this led to a series of questions which were left without final answers. Finally, these questions, in their complexity, became the main intervention which this work is going to try to carry out.
The questions spring from the problem of positioning within relations of global and local bio-powers and bio-politics of dance in Serbia today. How to locate “one’s own (private and public) specificity”? And what is to be done with it bearing in mind the tensions between local ideologies and global expectations related to these ideologies: evacuate it from the work in order to achieve successful communication (or coquetting) with the global, that is, Western, trends, in which this specificity is not included; or to base the work on it even at the cost of failure, i.e. exclusion from conceptual-programmatic map of the international scene? Furthermore, does the former strategy gives us “a right to discourse” or is this decided at a completely different place and by means of completely different procedures?
Which ”bodies” are imprinted in the body that is dancing today on the Serbian scene? For example, which bodies (coming from this specific context) are projected, through expectations of a hypothetical “Western curator, and by this a spectator as well, almost as a genetically determined feature/difference from the “Western one”?
Where the particularity of that context is, in its contemporaneity, very gloomy – that context is not a part of the First World, it is not EU, it is still called the East (even though the West is not called “West” any more), it is post-socialist in the capitalist world, and it is terribly transitional, without a single bit of “flexibility and nomadism” which would make it exotic.
Which are, on the local dance scene, the bodies that hover dancing in the air here, over an “indigo paper” (carbon copy), without being “grounded” in such a context, and which are moved by a wish to be contemporary, maybe even resistant? And then again, which are the other bodies that would carry the local specificity, for which, in fact, neither we ourselves want to know? Nevertheless, if we construct and show them, although we would rather not… which bio-politics are we executing? Isn’t it not already a contribution to some other bio-power? Local? Or…? Where, in this (inter)space are this work and the politics of the body that will perform it in a public space, which we share and in which we continue to live?
Bio
Saša Asentić has interest in re-thinking and experiencing (performer’s) state of “I am…” through differentiation and understanding of actual reality (current situation in transitional society and performing arts scene) through artistic / social / political (re)actions.
He has experience as author, co-author and performer in different performative forms in diverse contexts (since 1998).
Individually or together with his colleagues, he has initiated several international and collaborative performing arts projects: workshops, seminars, festivals, etc (since 2000).
His work was presented in different festivals and art centers in USA, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Lithania, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, etc. (since 2000).
Asentić has autodidactic informal education in the field of performing arts (since 1995), he is initiator of the artistic organization Per.Art (2005) and author and leader of program „Art and Inclusion“ for mentally disabled people (since 1999).
He took part in ex.e.r.ce 2008 program in Centre choregraphique national Montpellier and in 6m1L extenssion project in 2009 in PAF (France) and IN-presentable festival (Spain).
He collaborates with Ana Vujanović, Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, Bojana Cvejić, Olivera Kovačević Crnjanski and others.
Asentić studied Agriculture and Pedagogy at University in Novi Sad, Serbia.
More about Choreography or ELSE
This work is shown here with as courtesy of the artists with educational purposes.
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