Milka Djordjevich (she/hers) is a Serbian-American choreographer,
performer and educator whose work blurs the distinction between ‘dance’
and ‘non-dance’ through expanded notions of choreography that operate
inside and outside of established dance traditions. Her work examines
labor and questions notions of ‘neutrality’ through the perception of gender
and identity within the often-presumed ‘neutral’ spaces of theaters,
galleries, museums and public contexts. Past works include her 2024 work
Bob–commissioned by and premiered at the American Dance Festival and
performed at MOCA and New York Live Arts–a dance eroticizing the labor
of the dancing body, the repetition, the discipline, and the fallout. Her 2021
work CORPS–co-commissioned by New York Live Arts and REDCAT with
development support from Jacob’s Pillow, the Baryshnikov Arts Center and
MANCC–is an extension of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of movement
practices, preoccupied with producing neutrality and anonymity and aims to
disorient the militaristic conditioning of groups “keeping together in time.”
Her critically acclaimed quartet, ANTHEM (2017), explores labor, play, and
feminine-posturing, and was developed as a part of a 2017-2018 Princeton
University Hodder Fellowship, received a Bessie nomination for
outstanding performer and toured across the country. Djordjevich’s work
also straddles theatrical, visual art, music, fashion and commercial
contexts where she has choreographed and movement directed projects
such as: Star Choir an opera by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade,
produced by the Industry; pop duo Aly & AJ’s Listen! music video featured
in Rolling Stone; Ephemeral Study No. 1, a performance and film created
with fashion designer Samuel Gui Yang; and Jesse Bonnell’s Paradise
Island, a theater work based on texts written by Richard Foreman. Her
long-standing collaborations with composer Chris Peck challenge
conventional partnerships between choreographers and composers,
rediscovering music as a practice of the body and dance as a mode of
listening. Furthermore, she has performed and collaborated with Dragana
Bulut, Simone Forti, Heather Kravas, Jennifer Monson, Sasa Asentic, Sam
Kim, among others.
