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Katarína Zagorski
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Katarína Zagorski Mojžišová (1975, Uherské Hradište) has been engaged in a great variety of disciplines, such as dance, choreography, performance, theatre, pedagogy, film, and journalism. In 1999, she received her master’s degree in 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 (1997), and especially Vank (1999), created in collaboration with Eva Klimáčková and musician Oskar Rósza – 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 pedagogical 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 prizes and awards 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 a choreographer to create a production for the festival – in 2005, Mojžišová presented her project The Auction. The following year, in 2007, the production was chosen for the Have-U-Met-Nosti Festival in Dublin. Mojžišová then worked on a series of projects entitled 22 Exclusive Scenes for the Mamuska Nights 2004–2007. She was a lecturer of dance and acting at the University of Limerick in the master’s programme in dance, which is part of a postgraduate study programme of art and technology. The programme interconnects new media, information technologies, electronic music, and digital art. Putting emphasis on practice, the programme explores the impact of technological progress and art on cultural disciplines. Mojžišová also taught dance as part of the sculpture and combined media study programme at the Limerick School of Art and Design, and worked as a pedagogue for the mentoring programme of the Daghdha Dance Company.

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

Zagorski Mojžišová’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 Mojžišová 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 element of her work. After returning to Slovakia, Zagorski Mojžišová entered into cooperation 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. Her latest project is the experimental production Caution: Porcelain.

Since 2015, she has been writing regularly about dance for the Denník N daily, for the web portal tanečniaktuality.cz, for the Dance magazine, and for the monthlies kød, Musical Life and Dance Zone. In 2012–2014, she regularly wrote about the contemporary dance scene in Slovakia for the SME daily newspaper.