Sonja Pregrad is a choreographer, performer and performance curator/organizer who lived in Berlin for a while after completing an MA in Solo Dance Authorship at HZT Berlin. Now based in Zagreb, she makes solo and group works that have won several awards and have recently focused on drag, plants and poetry.

In 2023/2024 Sonja Pregrad worked on a choreographic research and production (premiere in November 2023) about the movement geometry of plants in collaboration with Nika Pećarina, Lana Hosni, Ivana Bojanić, Viktoria Bubalo, Anna Javoran and Eva Priečkova. She also toured with the solo Object of Dance, produced in 2022, alongside the group work DOWL from 2021 (Croatian Dancers Association Award for Best Group Performance). These works expanded Sonja's interest in drag as an extended strategy to address performance and dance, continued the methodology of group/composite body choreography and unfolded the idea of sensuality as a vehicle for performance.

Sonja Pregrad was a Creative Crossroads artist 2023/24 of our network partner Divert / Antisezona in Zagreb and completed a residency at Uferstudios in August 2024. In this context, she presented her performance O.

The Temporary NDA Collective is a group of six established artists of different generations living in Slovenia and working as dancers and choreographers (DISCOllective, Dragana Alfirević, Dejan Srhoj, Jana Jevtović, Jan Rozman and Beno Novak). They have found a common interest in the exploration of movement and composition and believe in the fact that every dancer is also an author and not just a tool in the hands of a choreographer.

In 2022, the collective begun working with Deborah Hay, which continued in 2023 with the dance performance Inside the Outside - an open work that calls for an ongoing collective practice, for which the collective took the opportunity of the Creative Crossroads residencies in 2024. Sent by our network partner Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Temporary NDA Collective 2024 spent a residency at Uferstudios, where they also hosted an informal showing.

Creative Crossroads artist for Uferstudios is 2023 and 2024 Lee Méir

Lee Méir (she/her) is a Jerusalem born, Berlin based freelance choreographer, performer and costume designer. Her pieces vary from solos to collective formats, all grounded in her perspective of art as a nexus of ideas, people and craftsmanship. At the core of her artistic work lies an on-going search to understand how humans make sense out of the world around them.

Lee Méir on her plans in the context of Creative Crossroads:
‘During 2024 I will be working on a new solo piece titled best before: crying creatures crying. The solo is the first part of the two year project best before which consists of two stage pieces and a series of platforms for exchange with the public accompanying the working process. best before focuses on notions of perception and recognition, in order to examine the spectrum that stretches between complete ambiguity and that which is so immediate to us, that we don’t even notice it. One of my core questions is how does information transform through the gaze of who is watching, and what are the social and political aspects of interpretation - who sees what, where, and why?

In best before I will continue to delve deeper into my exploration of costumes and objects as tools for building and dismantling physical, cultural, and emotional landscapes. Additionally, I aim to further explore the use of the voice as a means to investigate rhythm and pre-linguistic forms of communication.’