Dejan Srhoj: An Evening of Dance Solos (2022)

With An Evening of Dance Solos, choreographer and dancer Dejan Srhoj creates parallels between a modernist full-length collage of original dances, a vaudevillian cabaret and the aesthetic heterogeneity of contemporary dance. A refreshing dance cocktail! Dejan Srhoj is not the first choreographer and dancer who has taken up the serial format in our country, in which a solo dance work is co-created with various short dance works. Twenty years have passed since Nina Meško opted for this approach in What a Feeling (2003), and eighteen years since the première of 4 plus 1 (2005), with which Igor Sviderski celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his dance career. The difference between Srhoj’s work and the two mentioned above is that An Evening of Dance Solos is conceived on three levels: dance, choreographic, but also meta choreographic, curatorial and social. An Evening of Dance Solos is replete with modernist interferences. It appropriates the full-length format of short dance forms, which have been completely excluded from dance curation by the modern production system of the last 50 years, and provides it with the social context it had in the first half of the twentieth century as a form of entertainment and social critique, cultivated through cabaret and variety (music hall). The moderation of the evening resembles the role of the cabaret master of ceremonies, and the sequence of short dance works, together with musical passages (Bowrain), constitute a form of cabaret and variety seriality. However, in Srhoj’s evening, each of the interferences has a modified function: he converts them into a curatorial framework in which he exposes his body to very diverse and hybrid approaches to contemporary choreography, merges the whole with a meta theatrical environment in which performance transitions into exhibition, art into life, and exposes his performance to dance, collaborative, cumulative, and curatorial tasks. With An Evening of Dance Solos, Dejan Srhoj has returned to his earlier work with a changed approach and a well-thought-out concept, which may develop into an interesting modular format. (CoFestival, 3.11.2023)