sobota, 17. 11. 2018 // Saturday, 17th November 2018

4 pm – 6 am, Zagreb, Croatia, Vjekoslav Rihter House:

Return shuttlebus transfer to Zagreb for viewing the two BADco. art pieces on 17th November 2018 is available. You can buy tickets (12 eur) until 16th November 2018 online or at the Kino Šiška box office.

Režija/Directed by: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Koreografija/Choreography by: Nikolina Pristaš

Dramaturgija/Dramaturgy by: Ivana Ivković

Izvedba/Performers: Antonija Dorbić, Ana Kreitmeyer, Marta Krešić, Priska Pia Pristaš, Kalliopi Siganou, Evita Tsakalaki

Glasba/Music: Andro Giunio

Kostumografija/Costumes: Silvio Vujičić

Prostor in čitalnica/Space and Reading Room: Dinko Peračić in/and Miranda Veljačić (Platforma 9,81)

Producent/Producer: Lovro Japundžić

Podpora/Supported by: Urad za izobraževanje, kulturo in šport Mesta Zagreb/Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministrstvo za kulturo Republike Hrvaške/Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

BADco. from Zagreb is probably the most renowned and internationally best-established art collective from the field of performing arts that were formed in our region in the post-Yugoslav period. Its core is composed by Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, and Zrinka Užbinec. They explain that collective consists of three female dancers and choreographers, a dramaturg, a philosopher, and a producer, even if anyone who saw more than one of their works should quickly realise that this collective mechanism is fuelled by the permanent fluidity of clearly profiled creative functions.

The work of collective BADco. is systematically focusing on the research of protocols of performing, presenting, and viewing through structuring artworks in networks of various formal and perceptual relations and their contexts, as the members explain. Work of BADco. is reconfiguring the established relations between the performance and the public, challenges given perspectives including the common architectonic of performances, and challenges the communication structures through which meanings emerge and develop between the choreographic constructions of their works and the reception of the spectators.

Artistic, intellectual, and technological engineering of BADco. collective is intertwined with a broad reference field of various areas that converge in methodologically precisely structured art organisms, in their artistic signs, presence, and thoughts, subjected to a certain accumulation of folding information mass, some of them being readable, other suggestive, and the third only means of cognitive and emotional dynamic that enters our bodies directly. In the works of BADco., artworks of diverse provenance and social, cultural, and political phenomena that can gain the status of performance script, potent choreographic tool, material or reference for artistic conversion are selected or combined with curatorial precision. Their historic span reaches from the Age of Enlightenment to the present time. It seems that within the art laboratory of BADco., their conversion is more heavily influenced by the unstable but very vital milieu of European contemporary dance of the past three decades and not so much the contemporary theatre trends.

BADco. collective and its individual members are well known in Slovenia. Members of BADco. were, due to their strong engagement with the Centre for Performing Arts and publishing of excellent performing arts magazine Frakcija, a natural ally and partner of Maska Institute, producing a few interesting publications together (in the time of fishing scandals in the Piran Bay, such as Postdramatic Fishing, 2003, or Body/Difference, 2000). In the frame of Exodos Festival, art programme of Maska Institute, and elsewhere they presented the following performances: Human. Chair. (2000), Diderot’s Nephew or Blood is Thicker than Water (2001), Solo Me (2002), Deleted Messages (2004), 1 Poor One 0 (2008), A Kilo of Hysteria, Acceleration – Melodrama (2013), etc. In 2011 we hosted members of BADco. in the framework of PLESkavica Festival where they presented their digital tool called Whatever Dance Toolbox (2008).

We decided to put special focus on them in this year’s edition of CoFestival. We will start CoFestival on 17 November with a trip to Zagreb where we will visit the house of famous Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter and his spouse, actress Nada Kareš-Richter, to see the installation The Foundation Pit. In it, BADco. uses the modernist architectural ambient of Richter’s utopianism as a spatial score and combines it with ideas of Platonov’s novel with the same title (1930) in which the author addresses the practical contradictions of utopian projects in the Stalinist Soviet Union. In the evening, we will visit HNK, converted into a site by the collective, to see the performance Correcting Rhythm directed by Sergej Goran Pristaš and co-produced by HNK Zagreb, Dubrovnik Summer Plays, and BADco. collective. Performance is based on a short story by Pavao Pavličić The Good Spirit of Zagreb (1976) in which the main protagonist tries to use the statistical method to create an efficient system by recording accidents and crimes in the city that could project the frequency of negative phenomena and thereby help in their prevention.