Highlights: Perforations Festival New York March 11-20, 2011 (NYC)

The Perforations Festival takes place annually in Croatia and presents a range of artists working in performance art, theater, and dance, whose diverse approaches to art-making blurs the borders between these genres. Their work touches upon issues of identity (public, political, religious), redefining borders and space, a collective past, and personal histories, but most of all their work talks about the present. Highlights from this festival will be presented in New York, offering audiences insight into contemporary lines of artistic thinking from some of the most provocative and influential artists in the region.

The Perforations Festival is also the largest initiative focused on artists from Central and Eastern Europe whose work is created within the so-called independent artistic scene. Curator and producer of Perforations (Croatia and New York) Zvonimir Dobrovic comments: “State-subsidized venues receive the majority of available arts funding in the Balkans, but some of the most exciting and compelling work in the region is being developed by independent artists working outside of these institutions. It is this group of artists that Perforations supports and presents, in part, to counter established funding and cultural policy that has not created a sustainable working environment for these more progressive artists.”

Below is a a curated list of highlights by Contemporary Performance Network. A full program can be found on the La Mama Website

Ivo Dimchev, Bulgaria
Lili Handel
March 11 at 10pm

Ivo Dimchev is a choreographer and performer whose work is an extreme and colorful mixture of performance art, dance, theater, music, drawings, and photography. Over the last several years, he has become known for his radical work in the area of physical theater. Dimchev’s incentive for creating Lili Handel came from the idea of the human body as a subject of physical and aesthetic consumption. Subtitled “blood, poetry, and music from the white boudoir of a whore…,” Lili Handel is the final cry of a variety show diva. The tagedy of Lili’s fading beauty takes center stage as Dimchev conjures the ancient desire of the stage diva to give the public her innermost life, here, in a passionate and sinister display of her pains.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

BADco., Croatia
Semi-interpretations or How to Explain Contemporary Dance to an Undead Hare
March 12 at 8pm & 10pm

BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb that includes core members Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, and Zrinka Užbinec. The collective systematically focuses on the research of protocols of performing, presenting, and observing by structuring its projects around diverse formal and perceptual relations and contexts. Semi-interpretations, or How to Explain Contemporary Dance to an Undead Hare, a solo created and performed by Nikolina Pristaš (Hooge Huysen award winner for Best Young Choreographer in 2002), reconfigures established boundaries between audience and performer and is inspired, in part, by the work of Joseph Beuys, François Delsatre, Franz Kafka, Steven Shavior, Bruno Latour, and Graham Harman.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Perforations Festival New York will feature U.S. premieres from Ivo Dimchev (Bulgaria); BADco. (Croatia); Sanja Mitrović (Serbia); Igor Josifov (Macedonia); Petra Kovačić (Croatia); Željko Zorica (Croatia); Slovenian Youth Theater (Slovenia); Via Negativa (Slovenia); and Ivica Buljan/Mini Teater (Croatia/ Slovenia).