As manager, do you know the tools and procedures choreographers in your house use to create? If yes, do you use some of the choreographic tools in the way you run your organization? If not, do you consider choreographic knowledge as valuable for the context of running a project?
This Atelier at Kino Šiška was conceived and facilitated by the Artistic Board of CoFestival and the Nomad Dance Academy.
An Atelier using approaches from improvisation, somatic practices, composition, and developing specific reflection tools to access topics such as creative leadership, facilitation of processes, inspiration, ideas, focus, organization and decision-making
The Atelier at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana was conducted by Nina Božič Yams and Dejan Srhoj, both with a strong background in dance and performance.
Nina moved to Sweden and is currently working at the University in Mälardalen in the field innovation. Furthermore, she is preparing a big project with the employees of a mid-scale city in the south of Sweden.
Dejan is working as a dancer, dance teacher and choreographer in Slovenia and is still living in Ljubljana. In fact of being such different characters, Nina and Dejan complement one another and therefore they define the Atelier with a strong personal frame and setting.
All participants of this workshop are having a background in the dance or theatre domain and are all coming from different European countries, as well as from different dance and theatre institutions. Each one of them is representing a diverse position or job in this field. This interesting mixture gave the participants the possibility, to share their professional and personal background, as well as their experiences, what they frankly enjoyed. Surprisingly for all of us, they do not differ from one another quite much.
Nina and Dejan were excellent moderators of this event. The methodology they shared with us in those 2,5 days has been truly effective and understandable. After this Atelier, everyone felt enlightened, enriched and strengthened in what they are doing.
Nina and Dejan developed a very clever approach with the aim to equip employees with some choreographic tools in order to enable decision- and working processes in their innovation and/or business contexts. Similar to the creative processes of a choreographer, those tools are defined as “body”, “time”, “composition” and “space” (corresponding to the process stages “exploration”, “reflection”, “sharing” and “tuning-in”).
We explored those tools in different exercises, in which we were constantly reflecting our perception and shared our experiences in different kind of groups.
In summary, we all felt unbelievably inspired and got an amazing opportunity to reflect our daily business and behaviours with each other. We are thankful to Nina and Dejan, offering us this wonderful opportunity to develop our skills and widen out our personal horizons while using artistic methods in daily practices.
A report written by Ulrike Kuner, Head of Artistic Administration at Tanzquartier Wien and Supervisor at EDN, March 2017.
Nina Bozic Yams is a PhD student in Innovation and Design at the School for Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna, Sweden. Her research focuses on exploring how knowledge and methods from contemporary dance practice can be applied in organizations to enable innovation. Her research and teaching are influenced by her experience in both dance and business and her belief in emergent, people-centred processes. Prior to her PhD studies she worked as communications responsible for publishing house Sanje, management consultant at Deloitte, director of CEED (Centre for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development) Slovenia, and independent trainer and consultant in creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship through her company Dream Plant. In the last years she has done consulting and training work for clients, such as Ericsson, Unilever, Volvo, ABB, and municipalities of Nacka and Eskilstuna.
Dejan Srhoj is a dancer and choreographer from Ljubljana working within context of Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia. He practices choreography as ways of observing, curating and teaching. His projects include questions such as; How to observe city as a ready made choreography? How to choreograph a festival? How can several dance pedagogues teach at the same time by creating a CoTeaching score? After brief career as a ballet soloist in Opera house he has co-founded FičoBalet with GoranBogdanovski and has since then been involved in contemporary dance field. He has been teaching improvisational trainings to non-professionals for over a decade and that endeavor led him to closely collaboratewith Nina Božič and further translate knowledge from choreography and apply it to organizational contexts. He has led workshops for employees of Ministry of Culture Croatia, municipality of Eskilstuna and employees of different business firms in Slovenia and Sweden.