Talk 10th Dec 2008

Zrinka Užbinec

Marjana Krajač

Ana Kreitmeyer and Zrinka Užbinec are permanent members of the collaborative performing group BADco, which has developed specific forms of self-organizing its collaborators in the working process. On the interface of dancing activities, co-authorship and performing practices, Ana and Zrinka map their respective fields of activity.

I would start from your specific position as collaborators, authors and co-authors within BADco. How would you describe it?

Ana: I’ve been with BADco for seven years. Our first encounter was rather intense, we quickly found to each other and began to collaborate from one project to the next. That didn’t necessarily mean that I was a member, so after the transitory phase of questioning the character of our cooperation, I understood that it was all about my engagement and responsibility within the group. I was looking for my own type of investment, my way of belonging to the collective. Even now my involvement is not completely defined. With the foundation (In 2008, BADco became a part of the Black/North Seas Project, financed by the European Commission) things have changed and our activity has increased.
Zrinka: The foundation channelled us more intensely towards investing time and responsibility. It was crucial to set some time apart especially for BADco.
Ana: Regarding time efficiency, it was necessary to get together and find a clearer division of labour. The foundation made it easier for us by encouraging more engagement and involvement within the company. For example, my investment and my time can now be spent in planning and doing the activities that are linked to organizing the audience. The more functions I find in this respect, the more stable and systematized my position will become. And yet, it is not defined and is still subject to change. I’m constantly asking myself what is my actual contribution to the group and what I should do to improve its quality.
Zrinka: I’ve been working with BADco for a much shorter period of time. We began our cooperation in 2006, with the project “Memories are Made of This.” At that time, I was an “associate member” or collaborator. What defines the company is that we hang together regardless of work, we meet and talk in order to distribute the involvement.
It was already while working for the Memories that I found my part in the mechanism. In the beginning, your position tends to be very vague, since you get emotionally involved despite the fact that you’re only an external collaborator. It was already then that the question of my full membership arose. Now that I am a member, I’m constantly asking myself in what way I can contribute. I must still find out what I can offer except for my performing activity. Time has been too short to define my precise position. Some time must still pass before we can clarify in what way I’m changing things and whether I change them at all. BADco is a group of authors that seek to collaborate by self-initiative in that sense and to encourage co-authorship.

I presume that there is quite a ramification of methodologies and thematic fields in BADco. How would you describe your contribution to that? What is your artistic fascination and how are you anchored in these topics from an artistic point of view?

Zrinka: At first, I was rather confused by BADco in terms of art, since I was active at that time as a freelancer within the EkS scene, cooperating with various people from one project to another. Occasionally I would get the wish to create something myself, but because of the numerous projects I had no time to reflect upon it. I was just shifting from one aestheticism to another as a performer that could find her way around in various languages. Shortly before joining BADco, I was a co-author in OOUR. At that moment, the frames were opening up, but they were still not defined. When you enter something that is aesthetically established, you must work additionally in order to find your own artistic position.

And have you found it?

Zrinka: I couldn’t say.
Ana: Even before my first performance with BADco, in which I was alternating with Aleksandra Janeva, I knew what I didn’t want to do. Those various perspectives and the constant destabilization of what I would call my “system” created a fascination with BADco’s aestheticism, methodology, and themes. In terms of artistic position, I don’t regard myself as separated from the company and I don’t really exist as a separate artistic identity. In a way, it just happens after years of working together; the group begins to define you. Your interests can be scanned and the question of habit arises. Collaborators become similar in their logic, principles, and approaches. Moreover, people within a collective don’t belong to the same field of activity, so working options are inexhaustible.
Zrinka: I can subscribe to what Ana said. There is a code of working, of approaches and methodologies, within which I can place myself as an artist.
Ana: For me as an artist, there are certainly other influences, but my activity within the company is the most powerful of all, owing to my full involvement and its clear intention and orientation.
Zrinka: At the same time, there is a permanent paradox. We are a collective, but we insist on developing our own individual approaches.
Ana: We seek to avoid creating recognizable techniques and we certainly don’t want to produce “our dance as a single dance”. We have some interesting and evident differences; we resist the general and the homogenous, looking for the visible differences instead.
Zrinka: And yet, for every show you must find a common code. For our next project, we are planning to begin with individual approaches, followed by a phase of reunification. I’m really interested whether the project will be able to stand this individualisation.
Ana: What I love with BADco is that we always construct something new. I find that moment of surprise in each and every project. We have no well-trodden paths and that creates interest.

The current show is “1 Poor and One 0”. How did that process go from your viewpoint?

Ana: In projects before this one, we were always starting from the physical. In a way, we would put the idea aside and look for something corporal, or rather: we would deal with the problem physically. Thus, the key issue was the reversibility of the process and that resulted in a sort of frustration. We would start from different angles, come out with the problem, but the propositions would branch off and go into different directions. At the moment of producing the concrete material of physical expression, the key issue was how to overcome the first part of the process.

It was the mental code of collecting the material that had to be materialized in spatial and temporal coordinates?

Zrinka: In the process of making “1 Poor and One 0,” I was not feeling the safety of a systematized and clear working methodology. The position was frustrating because we had so much performing freedom of reflection. Tomislav Medak was the first who came with the proposition and the topic, explaining his personal point of interest, but the question of methodology was left free. We had to implement the idea by ourselves and to find our own interests within the imposed theme. The result was a number of new propositions. Since we decided not to name a single person that would make decisions, the process that had prevailed until then could not go on. At one moment, there had to be a cut, but I still can’t say what it was and I will probably manage to understand it only retrospectively. In a way, there was never a clear deal, but perhaps the most clarified proposition spontaneously prevailed in those collaborative moments. The performing position was also shattered because of the lack of any physical material at our disposal. Improvisation is always much easier when you have some predefined frameworks and limitations. Moreover, while giving advice to Ivana Ivković, who joined the show as a performer, we had to face an interesting question regarding our further work, namely what the performing position actually included and which “discipline suited us.” Besides, the key of performing the show and growing together with it mostly occurs only later. The more you perform, the clearer and more stable the performing position becomes.
Ana: Besides, after the premiere we came to the idea of adopting the material proposition of “contact without a contact”/“bent feet” and to deal with the “bare hint of a material” in our further research. I never encountered anything like that before, I mean, wishing to deal with something predefined in a separate context. I still want to reflect upon that suggestion, since I think that I haven’t solved it yet in terms of choreography, and to get it done as a feedback on the material within the second show.

How would you describe that incorporation of a mental code and a performing task independently of its source?

Ana: When I approach a task, or some ideas for the material, I first deal with my own impatience. Every time I must realize that my body needs some time, time within which the ideas that I want to bring to the surface with my dance are inscribed into the body. In a way, it is not me who defines how much time is necessary. During that period, the body first gets rid of its habits, the inscribed logic, the familiar, the safe. It is precisely that part which is the most difficult step. To make the body think with a different logic. Perhaps it is better to call it a trial and an upgrade, expansion of the familiar, a clash with the new.
It is interesting that, at the very moment your body adopts the direction you have forced it into, or at least comes closer to it, you want it to start thinking for itself, to make its own decisions in order to surprise you. When that starts happening, I can say that the “material” has become alive. Once it is thus inscribed into the body, there is no forgetting; there is knowledge, and it can be expanded only when faced with a new process.
Zrinka: The incorporation refers to the dominant fragment of the idea that I am outlining: a graph, a graphic representation, a diagram; I am visually focusing my thoughts around an idea.
Ana: I copy images a lot, and I “dance the image through in terms of logic.” But something must first enter the body in order to create that logic in the first place.

Could you call it an intentional body?

Zrinka: The body in process is an “intentional body,” it is self-referential. At the moment of performing, the body is artificial, infected with the idea of the show, and its intention is to transfer that idea. Between the body “that was” and the body “that tries to perform,” there is a body “with the intention to succeed.”
Ana: Perhaps that intentional body is an encounter with a new proposition, which opens up different possibilities and creates the taste for the new, or perhaps even old, but from a different perspective.

How would you describe the body as an entity?

Zrinka: Forcibly self-renewing source.
Ana: A self-decided, engaged cluster of information channelled through the body.

Ana, even though your position within BADco is already that of a co-author, by producing the “Drunken Forests” in corporation with Sandra Banić Naumovski you moved more explicitly towards the responsibility of an author and thereby to a certain responsibility of articulation. Was it a different experience?

Ana: The experience of authorship did not result in any new situation, so to speak. It was my great wish to work with Sandra on the selfish level of friendship. We worked in a sort of luxurious way, since the process was open-ended, lasting for three years in six phases; we started it with the “Corpositions” project. In the beginning, we were working separately and we produced similar principles of movement. In the common process, the specific element was our intuitive work, which we were pursuing according to the concept. We were tacitly focusing on the same thing, “kneading the dough.” I shared the articulating responsibility with Sandra, but there were not too many moments when it surfaced.

Are you fully aware of it?

Ana: I am not. I must still work on it. I have the need to do it, regardless of the authorship. To articulate what you are doing is a basic supposition of being an artist, as much as the wish to learn. Learning about your own work, learning how to work and how to articulate, these are all parts of the process of development as a whole. That is what I gained with the shift towards the author’s position in the “Drunken Forests.” It was the insight that being able to articulate requires work and involvement equal to that of producing the show itself. It is not something that comes by itself, something self-understandable that you may know by simply putting the show on its feet, at least not in my case. As I was becoming aware of my great field of ignorance, these became my priorities: to direct my own engagement precisely to that field – to learn how to articulate.

What will be your focus in the future, do you have any specific wishes, needs, or plans?

Ana: Recently I have developed an interest in pedagogy as a new type of knowledge, which is more long-term than the performing activity. I am thinking about having a one-year training in pedagogy. I am also interested in doing interactive workshops with children, not in a classical way, but rather in a way that would come closer to the basics of choreographic methodology.
Zrinka: I tend to make short-term plans. I’d like to finish all that I’m involved in. As for my own projects, I would like to work more intensely on the articulating responsibility towards the project that I’m currently in.

 

www.badco.hr