variations on sensitive is a durational work for five dancers. It is an extensive encounter in space and time which gradually reveals patterns of meaning while exploring choreographic structures and modes of movement as causes in themselves: to dance a dance is to experience dance itself. The piece contemplates the arrival of historic modernism and postmodernism through the structures of movement and space. The choreography is organized in three parts and follows a durational piano composition titled “November,” created in 1959 by American composer Dennis Johnson. The composition was unavailable for over fifty years until pianist R. Andrew Lee reconstructed and released it in 2013. variations on sensitive is accompanied by a book published on this occasion, featuring a Croatian translation of Jacques Rancière’s text Moment of Dance.

The work was programmed by the Croatian Association of Artists and Meštrović Pavilion, a gallery for contemporary art in Zagreb. Designed by sculptor and architect Ivan Meštrović and built in 1938, the building has served several functions in its lifetime. Transformed into the Museum of the Revolution, it now houses the Croatian Association of Artists.

“I spoke about variations on sensitive at a symposium in Paris, exactly at the moment in which the city streets were flooded with several hundred thousand people walking and protesting against the new labor act that was to be passed by the French Parliament. I saw a protester’s sticker reading: Utopiste debout, Rêve générale: a utopian has risen up, a general dream. In this sense, dancers persisting in a vertical position at the beginning of this piece, and at the end, now with eyes closed, perhaps dreaming the dream, synthesized my experience in Paris, affirming utopia of the better world as still alive; perhaps an absent-minded and vertiginous utopia, or banal and fragile utopia, multitudinous and heteroclite utopia, but nevertheless utopia of the autonomy of the world in which it will be unequivocally evident that we are all made of the same ‘matter.’ A matter irrevocably perishable but infinitely creative.” (Katja Šimunić, Journal for Dance Inquiry Movements)