Skip to contentSK
SK

Katarína Zagorski
Profile

Katarína Zagorski Mojžišová (1975, Uherské Hradište) has been engaged in a great variety of disciplines, such as dance, choreography, performance art, theatre, pedagogy, film, and journalism. In 1999, she received her master’s degree in dance art and elementary art school pedagogy from the Department of Music and Dance of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Already her early feature productions – Jeren (1999), and especially Vank (1999), created in collaboration with Eva Klimáčková, Oskar Rósza and Csongor Kassai – drew interest and brought much her recognition. Between 2001 and 2002, she completed the Coaching Program at the Moving Academy for Performing Arts (MAPA) in Berlin. She then extended her choreography and performance education as part of the Daghdha Mentoring Program on Choreography and Dance at the Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, Ireland. There she continued to develop her interest in the possibilities of physical expression using movement and dance. She also collaborated on numerous interdisciplinary projects that were very progressive as regards themes and stage presentation. These productions balanced on the edge of experimental art, authentic and documentary genres, taking advantage of the spatial and cultural locations in question.

Her devised projects soon received recognition and she often did work commissioned by art institutions and companies. She took part in numerous international dance festivals as well as festivals focused on performative projects, including festivals presenting projects merging various types of new media. In Ireland, for example, she created the Parsifal Project (2005) for the Framemakers Symposium, as well as the project called Dragon, supported by the Daghdha Dance Company, with which she participated at the Dublin Fringe Festival (2006). The organizers of the Excursions Performance Art Festival in Limerick in Ireland invited choreographer to create a production for the festival – in 2005, Zagorski presented her project The Auction. In 2007, the production was chosen for the Have-U-Met-Nosti Festival in Dublin. Between 2004–2007 she worked on a series of 22 short performance pieces exclusively for the Mamuska Nights. She lectured at the Department of Sculpture and Combined Media at Limerick School of Art and Design and for six years she was a Guest Tutor on the Master’s Programme in Irish Traditional Dance at the University of Limerick. She also taught dance for the Mentoring Programme of the Daghdha Dance Company as well as kids of many primary schools in Limerick.

Katarína Zagorski has been engaged in various dance and theatre experiments and cross-genre projects. The collaborative project O1 with sound artist Robin Parmar was realized as a seven-hour live dance and sound performance. Her numerous interdisciplinary collaborations include short films with the Austrian duo Machfeld, which have received multiple awards and screenings at festivals around the world.

Zagorski’s work from this period is represented in the collection of The National Dance Archive of Ireland. She created and led the Body Technologies lab, which experiments with different approaches to using the body in performance. Its aim is to engage artists from different genres to explore and test the possibilities of existing backgrounds, areas, and categories within an open performance framework. Zagorski is interested in physicality and any form of its expression, be it dance, choreography, performance, sound, or text.

She considers the expression of the body to be the most primal, present, and urgent one. After returning to Slovakia, Zagorski resumed her collaboration with the Dance Studio Theatre in Banská Bystrica and continued her own work as an author. She created the performative site-specific concept Kilometre Dance for the International Festival of Contemporary Dance Bratislava in Movement, which has repeatedly become a successful part of it. Followed the experimental production Caution: Porcelain with Reona Sato, the soloist of the Slovak National Theatre Ballet. Since 2018 she collaborates with Pohoda Festival for which she created projects as Parsifal’s Procession, BE A SUNFLOWER and (SKY) Walking in the Clouds.

Since 2015, she has been writing regularly about dance for the Denník N Daily. She also wrote for the web portal tanecniaktuality.cz, the Dance magazine, kød, Musical Life, Dance Zone, Vienna Review and Limerick Leader. In 2012–2014, she regularly wrote about the contemporary dance scene in Slovakia for the SME daily newspaper.