SONJA PREGRAD: DANCE AS MATERIAL - workshop 29.6.-3.7.2026.
At the Mediterranean Dance Center, choreographer, performer, educator, and organiser Sonja Pregrad leads the workshop Dance as Material. Through five days of work, the workshop explores improvisation, instant composition, and the relationship between movement, thought, space, and time.
The workshop is intended for professional dancers, performing arts students, performers, and anyone interested in authorial work through body and movement.
29 June – 3 July 2026 / every day 13:30 – 16:00
Mediterranean Dance Center, Svetvinčenat
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
What are you dancing about?
What are you doing when you dance?
How does your dance move your thoughts?
How does dance place your thoughts into space?
How can you describe or articulate your dancing?
How can you move text?
What does thinking do to the moving body, and what does it do to the timing and rhythm of dancing?
These are some of the questions that will guide us through this workshop of improvisation and instant composition, where we will dive deeper into them as tools for creating dance.
We will explore how nature and our perception of time change through dance (what is a minute, what is a beginning, middle or end?). We will also work with space, exploring the space that the dancer’s body creates in symbiosis with the audience’s gaze, or that of other dancers, and how we can become architects of that space through movement. The body and its anatomy will serve as a resource that we will activate through different kinds of attention in order to enter different territories, intensities, and landscapes of dance. At certain moments, we will also play with shifts in materiality by translating dance into text, installation, video, sound, and back into dance, using them as tools for developing choreographic and authorial ideas.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP LEADER
Sonja Pregrad is a choreographer, performer, educator, and organiser with an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship from Universität der Künste Berlin. Her work focuses on the im/materiality and objecthood of dance and on the choreography of relations. She perceives dance as a contextualised and relational gesture. Independently and collaboratively, she has created works presented throughout Europe and beyond.
As a performer, she has worked with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Boris Charmatz, Isabelle Schad, Sanja Iveković, Keren Levi, and others. She is co-organiser of Antisezona, a contemporary dance and performance programme at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and one of the co-founders of the internationally recognised improvisation and performance festival IMPROSPEKCIJE. She regularly teaches at the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, as well as at international programmes including ImPulsTanz, DOCH Stockholm, and ROAR Berlin.
For her artistic and production work, she has received three Croatian Theatre Awards, four awards from Croatian professional dance associations, and a special recognition at the 26th Slavonian Biennale.
INFORMATION & APPLICATIONS
Workshop fee: 150 €
Package Sonja Pregrad + Borna Babić workshops: 250 €
The workshops are part of the ARTivacija educational programme, but can also be attended independently.
Special offer:
• two workshops + accommodation 28 June – 3 July → 450 €
• two workshops + accommodation 28 June – 6 July + entrance to programmes on 4 & 5 July → 750 €
Accommodation packages include accommodation in double and triple rooms.
Applications via form on the LINK
The number of participants is limited.
Special package prices are valid until 15 June or until all places are filled.
More about Borna Babić’s workshop on the LINK.