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I.S..: After three solos, a collaboration with students on '10 Tasks' and with dancers of the Studio Contemporary Dance Company on Ensemble followed. What is it that you identify as your method and how do you transfer it to others? What do you deem relevant to underline?
J.L.V.: When I received the invitation from the Department of Dance at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb to convey the principles of my work to students of contemporary dance, I knew I was going to work in the first place with future performers. For that reason I designed the entire workshop around the concept of performativity, i.e. performing strategies. In my view, this is equally, if not even more important as training in different dance techniques, which today still, unfortunately, occupies the largest part of training programmes for professional dancers. First I introduced my choreographic tools through structured improvisation techniques, where body movement is equally important as voice and spoken word. As far as physical work is concerned, I almost always ask performers and students to work with existing vocabularies which don’t belong to them necessarily, but are nevertheless part of their so-called inner repository of everything they saw, experienced or embodied. Hence in the research process the dancers first delve into their memory or sometimes engage in research through books, movies and the internet, and extract the elements that made an impact on them. This becomes the basic building material for the choreography to come. I always insist on a dialogue between speech and movement, i.e. on preparing the body to act through speech and gesture. To that aim I developed a specially targeted training based on the continuum technique, in which working with voice is crucial. The training is designed to prepare the performers to utilise their voice and speech while simultaneously moving. The training includes certain elements, such as pronunciation, breathing and warming up the speech apparatus. The aim is to make the articulation of words and the clarity of the voice present at all times and allow it to support the physical movement.
This technique is specific for dance and performing artists but actors, singers and vocal artists can also benefit from it. 10 Tasks was intended for students and focused on what we pursued during the workshop. Therefore, it had no ambition whatsoever to become a choreographic piece. Still, the structure arising from this work, which was in a way typical of my choreographies, served as a basis for the Ensemble piece, made somewhat later with professional performers. Generally speaking, I always try to maintain a level of transparency regarding the creative process, as I think that it anyhow manifests itself in the performance in one way or the other. When I work with more people, I am interested in seeing the inner universe of dancers; what interests them, what do their bodies remember, what is foreign to them, what habits define them? While in dialogue with them, I slowly embark on the making and accumulating of choreographic material. Moving on to the choreography’s structure, I always first examine what kind of structure the material suggests that could support it well. Dancers’ feedback is extremely important to me; that is how I see how decisions made from my external point of view function internally. Sometimes I make mistakes, sometimes the choreographic material doesn’t support the structure, but at least I can see what kind of friction it engenders.
I.S.: How do you collaborate with dancers on the elaboration of a choreographic concept?
J.L.V.: As I already mentioned, I first try to reach their inner world. I give tasks in which the dancers can explore their memory and offer an array of movements, speech or other performative elements. My work is then focused on helping the dancers develop the skill of mastering these elements and creating parameters to support them in this mastering process. I very rarely work with set material. I prefer setting up parameters that serve as guidelines for the performers. How they deal with the choreographic material within these parameters is quite free. That way they don’t
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