Mateja Bučar: Dependance (1997)

The performance Dependance is dedicated to A.L. Chizhevsky, Russian scientist and thinker, born 7th February 1897 and today known as founder of Geleobyology, the scientist that first started of to elaborate the dependence of all living processes on Earth, biological and social, from the activity of the Sun.

Mateja Bučar

The choreographic oeuvre of Mateja Bučar has brought the relation between different materialities and bodies on the level of research, connected with the questions when and how materials can be observed or seen transformed into subjects, bodies in the process turned into materials, and how the process of perception could be objectified. Bučar observes these processes in “consideration of the extra-semiotic aspects of dance, read through a phenomenological understanding of kinaesthesia” (Bučar 2015, 8), as she is interested in “how our understanding of movement and choreography is rooted in basic aspects of our perceptive capabilities” (ibid., 11). Bučar’s choreographic proposals aim to situate the spectator into a position in which it would be possible to “re-experience the process of perceiving itself anew” (ibid., 99). Her choreographic work is thus committed to building the temporal instruments of perception, combining the set and object constructions with movement scores, exposing physical differences next to contrasting materialities, or installing short choreographies into the kinetic inertia of the urban landscape. Inspired by Adorno’s notion of the negative aesthetics, her work is committed to breaking into our mechanisms of perception with kinetic and material anomalies, contrasts or gradualities, by which our everyday perceptive limits become visible.

From Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik (ed.), Bodies ofm Dance, Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Belgrade, 2024)

MATEJA BUČAR

The strive of defining what the life on our planet and universe depends on, inspired us into creating a situation where we gain freedom by understanding what our own existence depends on. As the effort of each single performance of this world is in constructing its own individual »communicational system« this effort alone is what makes all performances of the world depending of each other. Synthesizing our tribute to A.L. Chizhevsky and this statement, we created a dance piece for which the intensity of light was conditioned by the activity of the Sun on 7th February 1997 (the 100th birthday of A.L. Chizhevsky), and the rhythm of light was determined by the heartbeat of dancers dancing in performance of Paula Massano happening simultaneously in Centro Cultural de Belem in Lisbon, Portugal. The heartbeat of the dancer in our performance was in the same time transmitted and incorporated (as light) into the performance of Paula Massano. »And once we experienced the exchange of our heartbeats, this performance is free to depend on itself and so use the heartbeat of its own dancer to guide the rhythm of light.«