Performing Gender Workshop at City of Women Festival

City of Women Festival 2018 

Egon Schiele, The Friends, 1912

Performing Gender - Dance Makes Differences

A workshop with dance-maker Koldo Arostegui González and dance dramaturg Tea Hvala

September 30th-October 6th 2018, ŠD Tabor, Ljubljana

At the workshop, the choreographer and the dramaturg will share their experiences and skills acquired through the two-year international project Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences with ten young dancers, selected through an open call. The project investigates gender and dance, and provides skills useful in developing new forms of narrative for LGBTIQ identities in Europe.

Gender as a game, as a layer of our identity that we can transform and play with to express ourselves. Gender as a costume we wear, a song we sing, a poem we forget…

(Koldo A. Gonzalez)

We are going to use movement as a tool to get a profound insight into gender, in the ways it is written in and all over our bodies. We aim to create a safe space and playful atmosphere that will allow us to reflect on this topic, look for new ways of understanding it as well as experiment with our genders in a performative and collective context. We will look for the movement that is already there, happening in our bodies. Not knowing which shape it will take, but being a channel for it.

Participants: Martina Delprete, Sara Gorinjac, Vesna Hauschild, Slobodan Malić, Urška Medved, Alicia Ocadiz, Silvia Pederzani, Giacomo Pini, Maša Radi, Danijela Zajc.

About the participants

About the workshop (short interview with Koldo and Tea)

About the Performing Gender project 

The sharing (public presentation) of the workshop: 

Saturday, October 6th at 17h, at ŠD Tabor, Ljubljana

Free entrance.

Production and organization: City of Women.

European cooperation project: Performing gender - Dance makes differences.

City of Women: from occasional to continuous arts and cultural education

Thanks to the amazing performer and curator Teja Reba, I am part of City of Women Festival 2018. The 24th edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Art, based in Ljubljana, is happening between October 4th and 8th 2018 (core program) or actually, for the whole month.

I will be in the role of a mentor/educator (in training). Since 2016, Ana Čigon, Urška Jež, Teja Reba and I have been shaping 45-minute-long school lessons about different aspects of feminism. So far, due to the unpaid nature of this work, we were able to produce only one module/lesson per year. It is shaped as a set of instructions for the professor who want to discuss feminism in his_her class. We have been sending our offer to high schools in Slovenia in the days before March 8, The International Women’s Day, in the hope that it will help the professors to address both the historical and contemporary significance of this “holiday”. Here, you can find the of lessons we have prepared so far (in Slovene only).

At part of this year’s City of Women arts and cultural education program, Ana Čigon and I are guiding high school students to Marwa Arsanios' exhibition Who is Afraid of Ideology? It’s a wonderful title and an exciting, both politically and artistically challenging exhibition of her documentary/art video works. I am very much looking forward to see parts I and II of her video Who is afraid of ideology. Part I was shot in the mountains of Kurdistan in the early 2017; it focuses on the Autonomous Women's Movement in Rojava. Part II was made very recently and deals with different ecofeminist groups in Rojava, especially the way they attempt to take care of the land and themselves.

Video still / "Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila"

You can read more about the content and methodology of our guides to the exhibition here. The guides are part of a larger focus on Marwa Arsanios' work at City of Women 2018. Check the full program here.


Last but certainly not the least, I must add the great news that as of October 2018, City of Women is part of a project called S(v)odobnost, focused on the professionalization of arts and cultural education in Slovenia. Together with SCCA-Ljubljana, ŠKUC, KUD Mreža and Nomad Dance Academy, we are going to be able to dedicate a lot more (paid!) time to the research, networking, organising and learning necessary to set up a continuous, rather than sporadic program of arts and culture education. Thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Public Administration, each organisation is going to be able to employ one person for this purpose for the period of fifteen months. I am happy to say that I am one of those people.