Press

Experimental Movement Festival NagiB emerged in 2005 from a need to reaffirm and expand contemporary dance scene in Maribor. NagiB constitutes a space for the strengthening and further development of the already existent dance scene by organizing educational events and by offering quality creations from the area of contemporary performing arts. With this, NagiB consolidates collaborations of local artists with artists from across the world and by way of practical and theoretic workshops encourages the exchange of knowledges as well as their development, redefinition and the unfolding of new processes. By introducing different approaches to choreography, improvisation and dramaturgy, NagiB offers a possibility to local makers and guests of the festival to position their work into a wider context and to reflect and reevaluate their own artistic processes.

The main intent of the festival is to present works from the area of contemporary dance and contemporary performing arts, which reflect the condition of and conceptions about the body in contemporary society. With this, the festival opens up the space for the very aspect of contemporary dance that constituted it as one of the fastest growing and most abundantly developing segment of contemporary performing arts. Namely, the creativity of the body itself to create meanings, to speak about different possibilities of awareness, to have the potential for new forms of perception. The festival presents makers who deliver an experience of the world, which has repercussions for individual’s comprehension of her/himself as well as self in the world. This no longer demands an observer of the work but rather an active and critical participant of the artwork.

Contemporary performing arts present an opportunity for a wider social, cultural and political analysis and are directly engaged in a dialogue with critical thought. Knowledge of fundamental theoretic conceptions about the medium itself and of basic dramaturgical approaches is a requisite for quality practical work. Thus, NagiB this year again prepared a theoretical workshop, which will be led by a renowned theoretician and dramaturge Bojana Kunst PhD (last year the workshop was led by dramaturge Igor Dobričić).

Intercultural artistic collaboration is facilitated also because of geographic position of the festival. In the previous years, the festival hosted, beside Slovenian artists, also authors from Turkey, Venezuela, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria and the United States. This year, the festival will present makers from Croatia, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, Check Republic and Slovenia.