variations on sensitive is a durational work for five dancers, premiered on October 18, 2014. It is an extensive encounter in space and time that gradually reveals patterns of structure and meaning. The work explores the structures of the choreographic while showing modes and conditions of dance as causes in themselves: to dance a dance is to go through the experience of dance’s horizon. In a sense, the piece contemplates the arrival of historic modernism through movement and the architecture of space. Choreography is organized in three parts and follows a durational piano composition titled November, created in 1959 by an American composer Dennis Johnson. The composition was unavailable for over fifty years, until pianist R. Andrew Lee manage to reconstruct it and subsequently released it in 2013. variations on sensitive are accompanied by a book published on this occasion, featuring a Croatian translation of Jacques Rancière’s text Moment of Dance.

The work was hosted and programmed by the House of Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb. Also known as Meštrović Pavilion, the venue is a relevant site for contemporary art in Zagreb. Designed by sculptor and architect Ivan Meštrović and built in 1938, it has served several functions in its lifetime. It was subsequently transformed into the Museum of the Revolution in 1990 and is now housing 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 general dream, synthesized my experience in Paris, affirming utopia of the better world as still alive; an absent-minded and vertiginous utopia, 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 Art Kretanja/Movements)