THE WORLD TETHERS
premiere: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at 20:00
ponovitev: Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 20:00
Tunnel of the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre
Choreography, dance: Anamaria Bagarić
Original music: Ida Hiršenfelder – beepblip
Poetry: Pavla Zabret
Movement consulting: Tanja Zgonc
Directing consulting: Peter Frankl
Lighting design: Gregor Kuhar
Set design: Stela Primc
Title: Eva Kokalj
Photography: Blaž Plut
Video: Inan du Swami
Sound engineer: Luka Bernetič
Public relations: Ajda Koloini
Co-production: NEST institute, VITKAR
Partners: Zavod Delak, Nataraja
an inhaled word
settles inside of me
like sediment
because of overcrowding
it doesn’t echo
it only buzzes
and deafeningly stays
Pavla Zabret
The World Tethers is a contemporary dance performance created by Anamaria Bagarić in collaboration with artists from various genres. Together with sound artist Ida Hiršenfelder, they have created a performance that embodies the oversaturation of information constantly seeping into the body. Through the prism of the body, this is expressed as an attempt at a physical representation of an inner monologue, while the music extracts its sounds from deep within, “from beneath the shoulder blades.”
Movement and thought follow the philosophy of butoh dance, highlighting the back as the primary signifier of the crossing between two worlds: the inner and the outer. Since the world moves at a pace the individual cannot follow, a counter-pole is needed—where the environment, even briefly, aligns with their own rhythm. The body becomes this counter-pole, searching within for authenticity and primality, which it cannot reach through thought alone. With every thought deconstructed to its foundations, the body grapples with where to store it, what to do with it, or even if it is its own to think—thus, telling a story of powerlessness.
Through the medium of words, the substance of the performance is expressed in the form of poetry by Pavla Zabret.
Throughout her creative process, Bagarić explored questions of solitude and loneliness, self-inquiry, bodily (in)capability, fluid empathy and transient relationships, exploitation in the name of belonging, conditions for existence, partial perception of reality, the truth of current will, collective emotional withdrawal, the exchange of primality for primitiveness, the idealization of naturalness and the natural state, questions of sexual identity, and finally, the privilege she lives while the world falls apart. A world that, through corporeality, is captured in the tissue of the body (Bagarić), words (Zabret), and music (Hiršenfelder).
