»Based on the life of Ljuba Prenner (1906–1977), a Slovene lawyer and writer active in the interwar period who was assigned female at birth but identified as male from a young age and began to transition to a male appearance as a teenager, Veselič’s choreography They Called Me Puby (Klicali so me Puby) from 1992 is one of the earliest attempts at gender fluidity in Slovene contemporary dance. Traces of Prenner’s biography initiate choreographic and kinetic situations in which binary gender markers are exposed to fluidity, ambivalence, or transition. In the first part, the fluidity is exposed through double exposition; while the first dancer presents a normative female, the second one is dubious in her appearance and dance. The choreography plays with uncertain subjectification through overlappings, duplications, constant merging and dividing. The choreographer dramatizes group scenes as psychological exteriorizations of inner perspectives and imprints of deteriorating social patterns and uses different props (cases and boxes) to elaborate on the emotional states or human relations in the transitioning phases. Veselič’s piece was conceived in the period when physical theatre was expanding on European stages and embraces the expressive, theatrical, and kinetic possibilities of the new dance paradigm to explore an uncommon topic for the time in the Republic of Slovenia. They Called Me Puby was also the first evening performance by Dance Theatre ALDEA (Snežana Premuš, Vesna Kukič, Anuša Sliško, Vesna Ristič, Sanja Slajmer, Vesna Žegarac, Tadej Brdnik, and artistic leader Minka Veselič), a part of Dance Centre Maribor from 1991 to 1994 (transformed in 1994 into Plesna izba Maribor to formalise its status and gain independence), functioning under the umbrella of the Association of Cultural Organizations Maribor and Slovenj Gradec. However, this is not the only dance performance dedicated to Prenner. In Metamorphoses 3: Retorika (Metamorfoze 3°: Retorika, 2015), Bara Kolenc along with Atej Tutta examines the mechanisms of political, judicial, and media rhetoric through the construction of the icon Dr Ljuba Prenner referencing the real-life story of the highly moral and politically controversial Prenner, a transsexual attorney in post-war Yugoslavia.«
From Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik (ed.), Bodies ofm Dance, Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Belgrade, 2024)
