The Self Tethers

The Self Tethers is the predecessor and sister work of The World Tethers. Both pieces share the same movement solo, yet they differ in structure and context. While The World Tethers exists as a fixed, full-length performance, The Self Tethers continues as a series of improvised encounters.

In this format, Bagarić performs her movement score together with different artists – musicians and poets – allowing each collaboration to reshape the performance in real time.

The first excerpt of the performance was created in 2024 in collaboration with musician Gašper Selko and poet Aljoša Rebrača, and later continued with Ida Hiršenfelder and Pavla Zabret. Together with Ida Hiršenfelder, Bagarić went on to develop the full-length performance The World Tethers (2025). At the same time, she continued to expand The Self Tethers through improvised variations and a cycle of events with queer artists in collaboration with Club Monokel.

The Self Tethers persists as an open structure: a body carrying the same score, entering different relations, and allowing the world to appear through others.

The Self Tethers is a contemporary dance performance in which movement, sound, and voice meet in shifting constellations. The material and physicality of the work emerge from diverse techniques inscribed in the body – dance, expressive and somatic practices – with butoh philosophy as its main conceptual and movement framework.

If butoh offers the movement ground, the second point of departure is a poetic one: a verse by Eva Kokalj, Preveč mene se skriva v svetu, preveč sveta se skriva v meni (“Too much of me hides in the world, too much of the world hides in me”), which could not be translated without losing its tension and was therefore transformed into the image of tethering.