The book On Dance: So as not to Share Silence and Non-existence, published by the Croatian Centre of ITI, will be presented by its editor Maja Đurinović, dance historian and critic, together with the author Iva Nerina Sibila.
On Dance: So as not to Share Silence and Non-existence, Iva Nerina Sibila
The book On Dance (So as Not to Share Silence and Non-Existence) by Iva Nerina Sibila is structured as a heterogeneous yet deeply coherent constellation of essays, reviews, interviews and conversations, performative readings (or writings), and memories, spanning more than two decades, from 1999 to 2025. The very form of the book can be read as a tension between chronological (chronos) and experiential, condensed time (kairos). Although the texts were written linearly, their reading produces various temporal knots in which past events are continually reactivated through perception, memory, and the body. This is particularly evident in the opening motif, Liebe Sofija, where only photographs and old papers remain, along with a quiet knowledge flowing through bodies. From the very beginning, the author thus establishes the key epistemological problem of the entire book: the problem of rupture, epistemological panic, even incident.
How does one write about dance without reducing it, that is, how does one translate bodily experience into language, into thought beyond logos, without losing its ontological specificity? The author responds by formulating writing not as a secondary act, a posteriori, but as an extension of perception, as an exercise in articulating the perception of dance movement and a kind of organically pure (and innocent) gestuality. In doing so, she defines perception as active, cognitive-affective practice rather than passive observation. Her work can thus be situated somewhere between the theoretical positions of André Lepecki, who argues that dance eludes representation and that every inscription is a belated trace; Peggy Phelan, who insists on the disappearance of performance as well as on its ephemeral-ontological foundation; and Rebecca Schneider, who demonstrates that performance nevertheless persists through bodies and repetition, to name but a few. Iva Nerina Sibila practically demonstrates this through her own hybrid discourse: I read in order to perform, I perform in order to write, I dance paradigmatically (analogically) in order to point toward something else, something far more important.
Yet her texts are not merely documentation, something archivally dead in Nietzsche’s sense of the word, something that needs to be returned to modernity in the same way that hermeneutics restores meaning to sense. On the contrary, they are reconstructions of events in another medium, in other words, new performances. Dance studies, thus understood, horribile dictu, do not function here merely as neutral analysis, but also as a performative discipline.
– Leo Rafolt, PLESNA SCENA.hr, 27 April 2026
