performer, dancer, vocalist

Irena Tomažin Zagoričnik (1979, Ljubljana) completed her BA in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She developed a strong interest in theatre and performance while attending Bežigrad Grammar School in Ljubljana, where she was part of the school’s theatre group IHT, led by theatre director Tomaž Štrucl. She later began taking dance classes, first at Intakt Dance Studio and later at Dance Theatre Ljubljana and contemporary dance training programmes Dance Laboratory and Agon. She received ImpulsTanz Festival’s DanceWeb scholarship (Vienna, Austria) and was in 2007 accepted to the Atelier educational programme organised by the Grotowski Institute (Wroclaw, Poland).
Irena made her debut as a choreographer in 2001 with the performance Hitchock’s Metamorphoses, which was a collaboration with composer Mitja Reichenberg. With her second solo piece Caprice (2005), followed by Caprice (Re)lapse (2006) came a shift in the focus of her creative explorations as she began to work more intensely on voice. Her vocal performances As a Rain Drop into the Mouth of Silence and The Taste of Silence Always Resonates were awarded at the 2009 and 2015 Gibanica (Moving Cake) Biennial of Slovenian Contemporary Dance Art, respectively. The performance Moved by Voice (2017) continues her exploration of the relation between the body, voice, and space.
Among others she has collaborated with Mathieu Copeland in the projects Une exposition à être lue in Geneve (HEAD) and Chorégraphier l’exposition (Ferme du Buisson, Paris), which included her composition Voice’s Empty Spaces. She has been creating – and touring extensively in Slovenia and abroad – a series of solo projects for voice and dictaphones titled iT. In 2011 she created her solo album Crying Games in close collaboration with Aldo Ivančič, with whom she had previously worked in the collective Bast on the album Retinal Circus. In 2014 Kamizdat released her album Taste of Silence in the frame of the international project Co-voicings (2013-14). Irena has been regularly giving voice workshops in Ljubljana and abroad. She is currently teaching improvisation at the Dance Academy Alma Mater Europaea.

Links (music):  Bandcamp / Soundcloud / Kamizdat / Centralala

 

PERFORMANCES

MUSIC PRODUCTION

SOLO CONCERTS AND SELECTED MUSIC COLLABORATIONS

COLLABORATIONS AS CO-MAKER, DANCER, PERFORMER

OTHER COLLABORATIONS

PEDAGOGICAL WORK

AWARDS

OTHER

PERFORMANCES IN MORE DETAIL