Body as Document (2025)
Sanja Mitrović place the body at the heart of her practice – as a vessel of memory, a carrier of stories, and a bridge between the personal and the political. Through language, movement and physical presence, she examines how individual experience can resonate within broader cultural and social realities. Her artistic research project Body as Document investigates the body as both witness and living archive, opening paths towards connection, reflection, resistance, and renewal. A particular focus is placed on butoh dance as a method for addressing sociopolitical themes in theatre. With its focus on corporeality, memory and transformation, butoh offers a set of tools through which lived histories and collective struggles can be brought to the stage. The research is grounded in the premise that physical practice itself has the potential to generate new spaces of truth, empathy and imagination within the theatre-making process. By engaging embodied memory, performance can more profoundly evoke both personal and collective trauma, particularly in relation to migration and displacement. The combination of butoh’s visceral physicality and emotional intensity with the verbal and narrative dimensions of theatre opens possibilities for new forms of performative expression and modes of thinking.
Supported by: Flemish Government.
