Nikolina Prista�

I would first like to ask you a rather general question: How would you describe your field of artistic and choreographic issues?

I would say that it consists of two main interests: on the one hand, it is the quest for other bodies that can be created in or through dance, and establishing the conditions in which that invention of the dancing body can take place. On the other hand, it is the reflection on various relationships between the bodies and dealing with the dancer’s attention, the relationship between the emerging choreography and the initial ideas and concepts... I always start the process with some real interest in mind, which is related to ideas and creative issues rather than dancing. I tend to dedicate most of my time in that process to the question of finding an adequate dancing expression and whether it corresponds to or only approximates the ideas that preoccupy me.

You mentioned the problem of adequacy with respect to ideas. Can you map various approaches as to the way in which they are adequate to ideas? Do you create a new approach for each idea or is there a common link that you could call your dance philosophy?

There are links, to be sure, and time detachment reveals the continuity of interest. Perhaps I could call them poetic features. Generally speaking, what I’m interested in is the integrity, the wholeness of the body in dance. I’m interested in the body that melts through the range of movement intensities, emerging through the combination of elements and manifestly thinking while it dances, making decisions and vanishing in dance. In “Fleshdance”, I dealt with a cluster of choreographic problems: the animal aspect of the body, the gaze, eroticism and rhythmic movement – which I mostly derived by reflecting on the canvases of Francis Bacon and by reading about his painting. In order to venture into the choreography, I first had to detach myself from painting in order not to fall into the trap of “replicating” or imitating, since translating from one medium of expression (painting in this case) into another (choreography) always entails translating into another system of coordinates, a system that is determined by different parameters. In other words, I had to get familiar with the ideas and poetic processes behind Bacon’s painting in order to turn that painting into a process. Once it is clear what type of corporality I am looking for, it is no longer possible to do just anything; I have to work on that thing until I exhaust it; I produce materials in a similar mode, accumulating what I can locate somewhere nearby and trying to respect that process of production, even if I’m beginning to detach myself from the initial idea.

It becomes an entity in itself.

That’s right. It is in that process that one creates the performative material that you see in the actual performance. And then, towards the end of the process, when you begin to structure, to create the final dramaturgical compilation, the initial set of ideas re-enters the reflection. Then you start thinking more intensely about the measure in which the creative material corresponds to the initial ideas, you ask the dramaturgical question of how all that makes sense, but no longer exclusively on the level of choreography, but also on the level of performance. “Solo Me” is an exception in this respect, since at that time I was only entering the field of choreography and learning an important lesson: I shouldn’t try to create something by supposing one-to-one correspondence between theoretical premises and choreographic practice. That is simply inadequate.

Correspondence in what sense?

At that time I was reading Peter Sloderdijk’s “Coming-to-World; Coming-to-Language.” I was interested in the idea of initiating, or rather self-initiating on stage. But what you can find in the text is not necessarily the same in the choreography – the effects of words and movements are different. Then I realized that what I was reading, what was fascinating me as a thought, was not really easy to translate into a theatre performance. Sometimes enforcing certain things turns out unproductive, because the process is taking you in a different direction.

Speaking about translating a medium, text, or abstract ideas and thoughts into choreographic material, how would you explain the moment of that link, I mean not when something is still an abstract idea or the moment when it is already a choreographic code, but that transfer in between?

As for my personal experience so far, I would say that it is the performer’s intuition. It would be a sort of moving moment, which is almost ludic. All that we experience leaves a trace in, on, and all over our bodies, it is documented in that large sensorial organ, changing us, changing our movements, our attitude towards ourselves and the world that surrounds us. Similarly, I never start from a single idea in the process; instead, I try approaching the theme from various sides.

How would you define the performer’s intuition?

I would say that it is a form of complex expression of not-fully-digested ideas: an explication of something that is found in a situation that has not represented or named itself yet. To be sure, that does not exclude bodily habits or bodily memory, but some new relationships emerge, something yet unarticulated and unpredictable. A useful analogy to explain that could be taken from football: in the heat of the game, the footballer runs where he predicts that the ball will land, depending on the dynamics and the constellation on the field, and a moment before he hits the ball he can’t know precisely where he will direct it, but he will know that in that millisecond when his shoe meets the ball.

Besides the dramaturgic and structural production of the show, which shapes it within certain settings, is there a feedback moment from the material towards the initial idea? Do you think, utopically speaking, that it is possible to upgrade that original idea and, in a broader sense, to upgrade the collective knowledge? “Collective knowledge” sounds really utopian.

What comes to my mind now is that primary school definition of art: art is the process of restructuring the reality. I tend to approach my process as if it were my own device for training reflection and creativity. If the process is such that it entails experimentation, error as a creative moment, production, contemplation, analysis, and comparison, then it is undoubtedly my knowledge of things and my experience that are being upgraded. However, I’m also in the theatre in order to communicate about it. I’m interested in doing shows that provoke and invite the spectator to reflect, since reflection is a creative process. Whether the spectator’s knowledge is upgraded, that depends, I would say, on his own activity as well. Working process is like a journey on which the experience of learning is only intensified through contact with thoughts and creativity of your collaborators, since the decision to initiate the working process in order to create a performance is often made only a moment before the process itself starts.

It has a different time coordinate.

Precisely. And then, one must take into account the fact that I look at my performances as points of sedimentation of knowledge and experience, rather than morals, parables, or final thoughts on something.

Transfer on the line of idea-matter is an excellent link to a thought that Kant has presented in the following way: “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general.” (from the Critique of Pure Reason) In that context, what would you call transcendental body? I would think that transcendental body is a body that, in this transport from idea to matter, becomes the connector or transporter that becomes the object questioning the possibility of thinking about itself.

I’m not sure I can answer that question, but first of all I would say that my artistic activity is a combination of curiosity, intuition, and reflection, of knowledge and learning. The link between an intuitive production and a conscious, informed production should be marked by a permanent movement from one to another. If the creative process has any value for me that is more durable, then it is the fact that I’ve learned about things and reflected upon what I was experiencing, be it in my own work or that of other people. That doesn’t refer only to expanding my knowledge on dance, techniques, choreography or dramaturgy, on art in general, but also to my relationship with people and the things of this world. The only thing I am never quite happy with is that I can’t seem to find more time for dealing with “what is discarded” in the process, for documenting questions and conclusions – writing is a useful strategy for arranging your thoughts and impressions, for learning and creative production. As for the transcendental body... For me, it is difficult to link dance with the notion of the transcendental. Basically, I do not see a single abstract idea that is being embodied, but rather the complexity of the process. I experience my body as a complex constellation that I cannot really sort out and often I find it completely opaque, despite the fact that I am able to control my physical behaviour to a certain extent. Perhaps the following example can shed some light on the problem: while working on “1 Poor and One 0,” we dealt a lot with the image of the body in dance, so that process logically brought us to analyzing the images that our bodies produced in free improvisation, improvisation with no tasks. In other words, what do I dance when I don’t know what I am dancing? It turned out that each of us was dancing his or her own (unaware) image of dancing, a sort of one’s own systematization, a sediment experience of dance that could be subsequently described in words. But we couldn’t describe that image by ourselves, since we produced it through the complexity of our bodily articulation. In order to become aware of it, you first need a spectator, and then your work consists in becoming aware of the decisions that you make while you dance, be it consciously or unconsciously, as if you were becoming aware of your own style in dancing, a form for the matter that you already have. That is by no means easy, but it is exceptionally important for one’s work and progress. Coming back to your first question about the common link between my performances, I would connect it to this question in the following way: regardless of how much my artistic interests are formed through exchange with other people and communication with my colleagues, in dance I always turn back to something that is exclusively mine, as if I were still trying to become aware of something.

With some authors I talked about the issue of “limitations of dance as a medium”, but with you I would like to modify my question: what is dance capable of doing? More precisely, how can dance, both in the local and in the global context, reach far beyond its primary field of activity and address the problems of the civil society, cultural production, or cultural ideology?

Do you mean dance as an artistic expression or...?

Precisely. We must define whether we are speaking of contemporary dance as art in general or about the contemporaneity of that art, and the other thing would be D-A-N-C-E in some Cunninghamian sense.

Perhaps it is more adequate to speak of choreography, for dance is a phenomenon of the human body. Images and ideas that we produce and represent in our performances can change the perception of the spectators, add something to their perspective. The possibility that this change of perception should really happen is one of the reasons why I’m in the theatre.

Speaking about the change of perception, how would you define that change, in relation to what?

In relation to the existing attitudes or relationships between the things in this world. I’m not in the theatre in order to prove that the world is as we know it. I’m interested in performance as an opportunity that stands in between what we already know and what we may not know or even think about. That is precisely what art makes possible: all those new worlds you could think about and the relationships within them.