Bojana Cvejić, a dance and performance theorist and a teacher at the Parts dance school in Brussels, is in Moscow for the first time to give a workshop for the students of the SOTA@GARAGE educational program. This lecture gives the public the opportunity to meet one of the world’s most extraordinary specialists in contemporary dance and performance.
Imagine if Guy Debord were resurrected and commissioned to rewrite his philosophical tome The Society of the Spectacle for the current form of capitalism, characterized as neoliberal and post-Fordist, entertaining the notions of experience and service (economy), as well as knowledge (production). What would happen then?
In Cvejić’s imaginary exercise—a 2016 theoretical pamphlet—Debord would be ready to relinquish the concepts of “image” and “representation” and substitute “performance” for them. The society of performance, in comparison with the society of spectacle, entails a conscious and self-monitored re-embodied “showing doing.” We are speaking here of a ritualized motion based on the psychosocial power of embodiment, the affective-experiential ground of persuasive expression by which the subject finds a more real sense of self. The talk presents several theoretical stories about Homo performans and social choreography across knowledge work, museum cultures, and sports.
Lecture will be followed by screening of Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body directed by Marta Popivoda. The film was inspired by a two-year research project Performance and the Public that Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda carried out in 2011 and 2012, during the residency of Walking Theory platform (Belgrade) at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervillier.