SPACETIME (2026-2028)

The Grace of the Impossible, 2026
dance-theatre performance

Conceptually, the work connects contemporary perceptions of being with scientific theories of spacetime. The performance examines how space is perceived within modular structures created onstage, revealing the performers’ sensory awareness as they bridge physical and sensory boundaries, creating metaphysical states – meditative spaces held in tension with active movement and shifting spatial modules.

The Grace of the Impossible is a creative investigation that draws on scientific and philosophical theories as well as artistic practices. The Spacetime trilogy also reflects our contemporary moment – exploring how the internet and artificial intelligence have entered everyday life, crossed disciplinary boundaries and rapidly transformed perception. The performance positions itself between surface perception and metaphysical experience (made possible through theatre).

The performance is organised around spatial points conceived as journeys and stations, creating environments in which the events and relationships between the performers may emerge. The performers enter and leave a series of smaller and in-between spaces as though boarding and disembarking from a train. Different temporalities – “here and now”, “before and after” – are rearranged through techniques of cinematic narration and sound composition, including sound originating from offstage and from the front of the stage – recalling the structural organisation of Chekhov’s plays.

Barbara Novakovič


If every bodily touch is, at its core, merely physical friction and an act of drawing closer that is never complete, and if, as such, it exists only in relation to another person or object – making the touching of one’s own body an even greater paradox – then perhaps every touch is always only an attempt. A series of attempts. Touch always depends on the surface of someone or something, and its neutrality is therefore impossible. It is defined only by what it touches – and that other, whether a body or an object, may even claim that it was not truly a touch at all, but merely a movement or contact. The search for touch may resemble a journey towards an uncertain destination. Perhaps touch really is a kind of joining, but this joining is always the sum of two separate identities or entities. And if a whole requires at least two poles, whose meaning and interpretation, then, is correct? Does an object that cannot itself “confirm” touch diminish its significance, or does it instead free touch from the countless interpretations that eat into human touch?

Bodies and objects remain still when they are not touching, and stillness is never emptiness but, rather, a space and time in which truth accumulates. And the world is not a whole made up of pieces, but a piece within many wholes. Before us are two bodies, the textures of objects and the potentialities between them: they draw closer and perhaps slip away at the very last moment. A continual coming together, yet perhaps never a true encounter. For the more we feel and think, the more enclosed within ourselves and distant we become, the less present we are in the other and elsewhere – and perhaps that is what hurts most. The absence of perfection. The absence of absolutes. The absence of certainty. In approaching, in touching, in meeting. And perhaps that is precisely why we return to them again and again, even though we sense that they may fail each time.

Zala Dobovšek