Ever since she returned from the London Contemporary Dance School, where she completed her master’s degree, Snježana Premuš’s choreographic and dance work has been informed with fundamental exploration of the body through choreography and dance. Her first works already signalled different creative interests in possible perspectives on how to think the body and that which we turn into a problem when we try to touch its corporeality. With her performances Amplified Body #1 and #2, and her cycle Stories of the Body, among others, Premuš started building a repository of possible approaches to turning the body inside out, so as to offer its corporeality and its issues for the viewer to see and understand. She tackled this both through entirely material approaches and by applying technology, in collaboration with Ignaz Schick, to digitise corporeality into auditory information in front of our very eyes, and thus secured the materials for her compositional decisions.
Snježana Premuš has recently become a certified practitioner of the BMC (body-mind centering) method, which origins go back to the 1960s in the USA, when American choreographers and practitioners took the contemporary dance to its fundamental pieces (with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen at the forefront), a phenomenological-materialistic somatic method where phenomenology and materialism can interact precisely because we are dealing with the human body. Snježana Premuš employs principles to establish conditions in which a dancer’s body can ensure itself self-observing paraphernalia for visible and invisible movement processes within the body. This way the dancer can experience and understand what goes on in the body, where it takes place, and which anatomic segments are mobilised for its movement.
In recent years, Snježana Premuš has introduced this method to virtually all arts programmes of Zavod Federacija. In her cycle Physical Manifestations she involved dancers and actors of diverse backgrounds (Sanja Nešković Peršin, Mateja Rebolj, Tina Valentan, Teja Reba, Gregor Zorc, Katja Legin, Melina Iordanidou and Liza Šimenc, among others) in the process work and invited audience and observers of different profiles, professions and sensibilities to participate in the process that concluded with a series of phase events, because she was interested in where she would find the threshold where viewers’ “somatic receivers” guarantee visibility to her work. Her works Intelligent Body, The Double, Physical Manifestations: Poiesis of Self, and Every Now is a Time, a Place, are representative examples of her last creative phase. In 2017 she received the Ksenija Hribar Award for her creative oeuvre.
