Ana Paška concert

Ane Paška is a singular artistic personality who unites music, storytelling and emotion into a single whole. Her stage performances are infused with vignettes from everyday life, shaping a kind of play in which thoughts, words and sentences, as playful as swarms of little birds, take flight and soar to the accompaniment of accordion, piano, cajón and guitar. In a manner akin to cabaret, the artist plays with forms, folds one into another, and creates an airy charge of varied experiences: laughter and sorrow, worry and relief, elation and calm. Song, recitation, acting, the sound of the accordion, the voice of the audience are the elements that shape a soundscape within which a story unfolds about childhood, family, motherhood, human foolishness, money, or spite. Ane Paška is a master of the stage piece, in which striking poetic images, reflective metaphors and psychological associations follow one upon another, and in which everyone recognizes themselves. Through her authentic performance, a musical-theatrical ritual of powerful authorial expressiveness is established.

The ambient quality of Ane Paška's performance is heightened by the linguistic idioms of the coastal region she comes from. Almost without fail, the artist manages to colour the location where she performs with the airy lightness of the south. In this way, the authentic street dialogues and the atmosphere of her native Pag become, for a moment, tangible and powerful features of Bihać's urban landscape. The performance at KRAK will redefine the spatial logic of the industrial zone of the former Kombiteks, and for a moment create a stage backdrop of a Dalmatian street.

Ane Paška graduated in dramaturgy from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb (2010) and earned a master's degree in film and video from the Arts Academy in Split (2019). Since 2014 she has devoted herself fully to her own original work, merging conventional practices such as theatre and music into a new performative form. The artist sees her performance as a salon "for the beautification of the soul" and, playing with words, calls it a "concart."

The performance at KRAK is supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, New York.