SONJA PREGRAD: PSBP

DOWL

‘In July 1518, the inhabitants of Strasbourg … were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrolled urge to dance. The hysteria began when a woman, known as Mrs Troffea, stepped out into the street and, in silence, began to twist, turn, and shake.’ From where did the outbursts of collective jerky dance, in the time of the plague, come, and what or how can we understand them in contemporary conditions? 

In Sonja Pregrad’s project, DOWL—Dance, dance, Otherwise, We're Lost—is written through a common dance that uses, interweaves, and thus twirls diverse forms of collective choreography—from unison as a classicist form of dance through rave and folklore to decoding visual representations of dance macabre and bio-geometry (patterns of the organic movement) to invoke the composite movement of the collective body. As the critic Ana Fazekaš puts it: “Dance, dance, otherwise we're lost, (...) in its catastrophic optimism, exhausted euphoria and self-inflatable passion can stand as a guiding thought (...).”

#collective body #force of movement #force of dance #a single enormous passion

author: Sonja Pregrad * music: Nika Pećarina * costumes: Tea Kantoci * performers: Ivana Bojanić, Viktoria Bubalo, Lana Hosni, Anna Javoran, Ana Mrak, Eva Priečkova, Sonja Pregrad * production: Četveroruka Association in the frame of Antisezona 21 (in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art)

© Srđan Tutić