Bojana Cvejić

Professor of Dance Theory

Ph.D. in Philosophy, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London

I am a dramaturg and researcher, and my writing, performances and videos interweave performance matters and critical theory. Before I came to teach Dance Theory at KhiO, I was mainly engaged in collective platforms for self-organized work and self-education, including Performing Arts Forum (www.pa-f.net, St. Erme, France, where I am still active). I taught at contemporary dance and art programs in Europe (among others, P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, where I have taught since 2002, and Utrecht University’s Theater Studies from 2009 to 2013). Belgrade is the city in which I learnt to protest and to forge political solidarity with artists and cultural workers on the independent scene. As a co-founding member of the TkH/Walking Theory editorial collective (2000-2015), I co-organized various research projects and a journal for performance theory. My collaboration with Ana Vujanović extended to Public Sphere by Performance (2012) and Toward a Transindividual Self (2022), both co-written with her.

I entered the field of theater, dance and performance through opera and experimental musical theater during my studies in musicology and aesthetics (B.A. musicology, M.A. musicology and aesthetics, FMU Belgrade). From 1996 until 2008, I organized and directed performances on the independent scene in Belgrade in which the musical score, for example, a classic like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, would break open into a mobile architecture and dance. I want to produce situations in which spectators or visitors in a gallery take responsibility for their embodied gaze. I pursued this end in Spatial Confessions (Tate Modern, 2014), exploring social choreography as a method to make bodies appear in public.

Since I moved to Brussels in 2000, I have devised and performed in a series of text-based works with the Dutch theater director Jan Ritsema (TODAYUlysses, Pipelines, A Construction and more). Immersed in the performing arts in Belgium, I began to explore contemporary dance in parallel, which brought me to many collaborations with choreographers and theatermakers in Europe, such as Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, Christine De Smedt, Xavier Le Roy, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, BADco, Anders Paulin and more.

What I am working on now / current interests

After the publication of Toward a Transindividual Self: A Study in Social Dramaturgy (2022), I am continuing to investigate transindividuality as a political ground for various forms of collective individuation. “With whom can you imagine sharing the world’s sidewalk?” (Lauren Berlant) is the question I gravitate to while researching the politics of relations and belonging in the age of necropower.

At the moment, I am committed to two more research projects. With the British choregrapher Jonathan Burrows, I am investigating the impact of the neuroscience of motor cognition on choreography, that is, how movement shapes how we inhabit, perceive and anticipate our life-world. I am also writing for the next book on practical dramaturgy from which I received support from KUF.

Pedagogical approach and expectations of students

My seminars at KHiO have covered a broad range of topics: performance dramaturgy and artistic methodology across disciplines (also taught as an open course with participants from other MA programs at KHiO); performative accounts of subjecthood and collectivism; social dramaturgy and social choreography; and critical perspectives on contemporary dance, including transnational perspectives on contemporaneity, critical whiteness, and feminist takes on social reproduction theory. I regularly teach practical research-based workshops in collaboration with artists.

Theory in art is a kind of thought practice that requires ongoing investment, invention of its own problems and words, and adventures in reading. For artists, it is only a resource among other resources that we must learn to activate and take pleasure in. I don’t expect students to master a theoretical text or its lingo, but to stay curious, open and patient with difficulty, to prepare and to give a text time to begin to matter.

Teaching inevitably brings into sharp relief the asymmetries in knowledge and power which divide student cohorts and artists’ communities politically and culturally. It brings out personal insecurities and leads to conflicts. In contrast to celebrating ‘excellence’ per se, I find it is important to cultivate distinctive cultural backgrounds and personalities in tandem with the collective effort to study. While learning to listen with sensitivity and curiosity for the diverse contexts students bring, I encourage a situation in which we are all responsible for shaping the culture of collective study. In my teaching, I address students as a group that individuates itself in a process, and never remains just a sum of isolated individuals. Who are your peers? What do you share in common as a generation? What can you only do together in so far as you are not alone, on your own? You are always welcome to contact me for a tutorial.