SOMA DIVA

initiative, concept, performance: Lana Hosni
music, performance: Andro Giunio
design, friend of the show: Marko Gutić Mižimakov

Soma Diva is conceived as a bodily musical, more or less vocal, performance event. It is both a performance and a question of how to set the conditions for the performance to arrive. The process settings are that I work with
what we have. I give permission for ideas to collapse, pre-conceived or those that are trying to emerge. The rhythm of the dramaturgy of the subconscious is a rhythm that is welcome.

The title of the work soma diva comes from a personal fascination with somatic experiences and the continuous question of how they exist in relation to the external world. At what points does the performer’s inner experience include the space outside and the experience of the other, and vice versa.

I develop my work from a place of need and observations that have gathered during my continuous involvement in contemporary dance practices and creative processes. From observing patterns that inevitably influence the ways in which I create dance (such as: the body tends to move in a certain way, I move in one part of the space more than another, I always choose one rhythm over another…) and beliefs and ‘unwritten’ rules that are perpetuated (such as: pain or some kind of physical discomfort is implied for the purpose of performing the material, the dancer’s body is neutral, the performer has no needs of her own besides the need for performance…), the question crystallized as to what it is that could be embodied in order to embody change.

The soma diva proposal questions the place from which choices are filtered when creating choreographic material, and spends time with those places that would otherwise be avoided or overlooked, with a curiosity about how by staying with those places we can go beyond the first judgment, image, affect or association. In this case, it is sometimes a release of the first impulses and directions in which the body ‘just’ wants to go, and sometimes it is an insistence on a movement pattern that would otherwise remain unvisited or categorized as undesirable. And sometimes it is something in between.

Production: UPUH and Lana Hosni
The project was realized in collaboration with the Peščenica Cultural Center -KNAP, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.
It premiered on November 20, 2021, at 7:00 PM, in the Concert Hall of the KNAP Theater, as part of the SomaHut platform.
Thank you Zlata Hosni and Pogon Jedinstvo!