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Katarína Brestovanská
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Katarína Brestovanká graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, where she majored in social and cultural andragogy. She started dancing at a very young age, while she was a student at the private Art School in Prievidza. In Prievidza, she simultaneously played the piano at Ladislav Stanček Music School, an activity she has continued doing until now.

In 1999, she received an artistic scholarship at the Minamiza Kabuki Theatre in Kyoto, Japan. In 2002, she studied on a scholarship at the Bunkamura theatre for contemporary art and dance in Tokyo, Japan. Between 1999 and 2007, Brestovanská was employed as a dancer in the modern dance ensemble Allegro and in the Bralen Dance Theatre. She worked for the elledanse theatre as a dance performer in 2007–2010.

Brestovanská attended various workshops led by well-known dance artists: Kira Kirsch (Axis Syllabus, Germany), Frey Faust (Axis Syllabus, Germany), Wim Vandekeybus (Ultima Vez, Belgium), Laura Arís (Ultima Vez, Belgium), Milan and Zuna Kozánek (Artyci, Slovakia), Sri Louise (Underground Yoga Parlour, USA), Anton Lachký (LesSlovaks, Belgium), among others.

Brestovanská has established and headed the civic association Nový Priestor (New Space) – a centre for education, research, and the creation of new dance and physical theatre. In 2011–2017, she was a production manager of the association. In 2021, the association gave birth to a comprehensive interdisciplinary dance project En Vorentoe, whose art production relies on research activities conducted in close collaboration with related artists and creative teams of.

In 2020, Brestovanská cooperated on the concept and production of a site-specific performance entitled Via molae made for Schaubmar’s Mill of the Slovak National Gallery in Pezinok. She has long collaborated also with the German dance association MichaelDouglas Kollektiv. She used choreographic research to co-produce a project with the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv in 2021 called Shifting Systems. She also took part in the preparation of participatory situations offering intersections with social issues in the project entitled The Polarity Party, The Polarity Party reload – online version, which was created by the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv together with the dance art innovator Dana Caspersen from the United States.

The 2022 work-in progress All Inclusive 1052 became the prototype of a long-term project based on working with polyphonic movement of dance bodies in relation to the music sheet to Johan Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D Minor. In her solo, Brestovanská captures the principles of Bach’s music and translates them into the aesthetics of the dancing body. The movement material and its energy and vibration layers are inspired by the knowledge gained in the ongoing group research entitled “Musical Work as the Foundation of Working with Dance, Performance, Text, and Sound.”

In November 2022, Katarína Brestovanská and Zdenka Brungot Svíteková met during the creative process of making the project The Tea Ceremony. The project is a reminiscence of the time when Katarína Brestovanská was awarded the Bunkamura scholarship to study the Noh theatre at the Centre for the Performing Arts Shiga in Japan, where she lived and worked for two years. Together with Zdenka Brungot Svíteková, the project draws on Tadashi Suzuki’s acting method, which Svíteková studied under SITI Co, as well as on the experience of working with Japanese contemporary dance in the i-Dance Asia programme, for which she was awarded a scholarship in 2015.