Nina Meško and Lana Kariž Meško: Preschool for Diving

One of the inevitable consequences of the planned postponement of the implementation of work, which we, today, in a more general domain like to call procrastination, is the possibility that the work will change in the meantime. On the one hand, this ever-present possibility has a feedback effect on the process, which commits itself to the accommodation of deviations; on the other hand, over time, the author layers an abundance of reference points that become a kind of private archive, a kind of bond with herself through the diachronic structure of continuities and breaks.

Nina Meško’s dance and choreographic work is characterised by a questioning of the concept of choreography as the meaning of dance material, which is expressed, on the one hand, in the process of ‘exposing the context of dance (pre)production’ (as Rok Vevar wrote about her performance Stanje stvari (The State of Things)) and, on the other, in the tendency to practise the inherent choreographic nature of social life. In her proposal, Meško cites the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss who, in his Techniques of the Body (1935), showed that physical habits are shaped by culture and society, ‘although in many circumstances they are practised, transmitted, and perceived as natural’, from which it follows that the body can be understood as a kind of ‘storehouse of its history (movement)’.

This private archive was initially  planned, in 2006, as a project that would expand the author’s archive of conversations with choreographers, dancers, and other performance artists. The archive began emerging spontaneously during her stay in Vienna at the Tanzquartier residency programme, where she recorded 12 open-form conversations. In 2023, her interest in the heterogeneity of dance practices is turning inward, so to speak, as she collects material from her own dance performances (photos, notes, music, reviews) to hand over to her daughter, an aspiring dancer, who ‘knows almost nothing’ about Nina’s dance work, having never seen her dance, live nor on video, and whose interpretation in dialogue with Nina will be a potential performance.

In a certain sense, the archive of conversations thus becomes a conversation with the archive, but one whose course spontaneously (and reversely) enriches the archive of conversations and, through this double movement, functions symbolically as a dialogue between the present and the past. The emphasis has started shifting from the intercorporeal to the intracorporeal, from the question of the function of dance and choreography in the formation of a community, to the more intimate question of ‘storing experience in movements, gestures, and rhythm’.