variations on sensitive is a durational work for five dancers. It is an extensive encounter in space and time that gradually reveals patterns of meaning while exploring choreographic structures and modes of movement as causes in themselves: to dance the 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 an 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 at the moment when the city streets were flooded with several hundred thousand people 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 shared dream. The dancers persisting in a vertical position at the beginning and end of the piece, now with their eyes closed, perhaps dreaming the dream, encapsulated my experience in Paris. They affirmed the utopia of a better world as still alive; perhaps it is an absent-minded and vertiginous utopia, a banal and fragile utopia, a multitudinous and irregular utopia. Nevertheless, it is a utopia of the autonomy of a world through which it is evident that we are all made of the same “matter”—a matter that is irrevocably perishable but infinitely creative.” (Katja Šimunić, Journal for Dance Inquiry Movements)
