Zrinka Užbinec, Ana Kreitmeyer and Sandra Banić Naumovski: Jams (2011)

The performance of the dance performance Jams is created through the encounter of image, live performance and contact between the performers and the audience. In such a space of encounter, breaks in attention are created in which perception thickens, stretches, thins, slows down, intensifies. In doing so, it is impossible to maintain a one-way gaze and its fluid continuity, but the potential opens up for creating one’s own perspective on what is being seen and, at least for a moment, becoming the “choreographer” of one’s own attention. The initial set-up of Jams, in which the performers, uniformed in gray with striking red lipstick on their lips, stand behind the audience, while the audience is faced with itself through a projection on a large screen right next to the front row, points to a polished and cold conceptualism that deals with the relationship between the mediatized and the real gaze. However, as the choreography physically unfolds over the audience’s bodies, the performers become material in the viewer’s experience with their soft and caring touches, and through the quiet personal conversation that they coordinate, they open up new co-plays within the choreographic flow. Thus, Zastoji deals with ruptures in the relationship between performers and audience, and it is precisely in these unexpected touches and silent replies that the great further potential of this work lies, which can only be realized by playing in front of a new audience each time. (written by Iva Nerina Sibila for Plesnascena.hr) 

In Jams, the performance was filmed with four cameras from different angles, so the dancers and the audience have the opportunity to see themselves on the screen at all times. The authors got the idea two years earlier through a performance by Zrinka Užbinec and Oliver Frljić, which they used as a type of recycling that is built upon through repetition. The exploration of contacts with the audience's bodies that make them impossible in the original idea makes the performance very unpredictable. The performance is built by combining three aspects (image, live performance and contact) and the audience space, which, along with the performers, is an inevitable participant in the performance.