Stevan Novakovich

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Stevan Novakovich launched his dance career at the age of six with the Yugoslavian National Folk Company and subsequently received his training at the Vaganova-based Ballet Academy in Novi Sad. Upon arriving in the United States in 1993, he trained at the Ballet West Conservatory, Broadway Dance Center and Alvin Ailey School of American Dance. He has performed with Ballet West, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, New York City Opera, Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre and Luminario Ballet of Los Angeles.
Mr. Novakovich has worked with several luminaries in the world of dance including choreographers Stephen Koester, Daniel Ezralow, Bill T. Jones and Doug Varone. He has received numerous honors including the Performer of Great Merit Award, Olympiad Award Winner, Governor’s Award and Honorary Achievement Award in Dance Performance.
Through the U.S. State Department he had the privilege of serving as a cultural ambassador from the United States. During this period, he taught and performed in all four corners of the world. He has been a frequent guest instructor at various American universities (including NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts) as well as academic institutions abroad. Mr. Novakovich has been and still continues to work as a guest teacher at numerous international dance festivals including the Open Look Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Due to his versatility as a performer, Mr. Novakovich is well recognized for teaching master classes and workshops as well as setting the original choreography that range from classical ballet to contemporary and modern dance.
He earned a BFA in ballet from the University of Utah and an MFA in choreography and professional performance from the California State University, Long Beach.
His present day focus is honing his teaching methods and aesthetic philosophies and producing his own choreographic works. He is also working on establishing a non-profit organization S.O.D.A. (Society Of Dependent Artists) that will promote the collaborative approach to commissioning, exchanging and marketing dance/ performance art.

Stevan Novakovich is a twenty-first century choreographer. He is acknowledged and admired for his eclectic choreographic palette, inventive approach, unique interpretations, and mastery of traditions that underlie his work. Combining high technical prowess, curiosity and attention to details with a distinctive contemporary/modern movement style, Novakovich’s inventions are infused with both intense complexity and mesmerizing simplicity. Even as his choreographic styles shift from Neoclassical to Surreal, this artist chooses to transcend the boundaries of Modernism, and his work remains individual and distinctive.
Subjected to the misfortunes of the war in his home country of Yugoslavia, Novakovich immigrated to United States in young adulthood. Here he continues to explore the core essence of human experience at large and its freedoms and constraints in particular. Maintaining his conviction that art should be accessible and communicative, Novakovich produces works of dance that speak to and engage a variety of audiences.
While staying true to his own artistic vision, Novakovich implements artistic styles of the past while welcoming new challenges and tests of time. His deep belief in his artistic goals and free expression allows him to integrate his own limitations into his choreographic exploration, keeping his work truly authentic.
Self-produced and commissioned works by Novakovich range in style from classical ballet and minimalist movement, all the way to Contemporary, Modern, Butoh, site specific, dance for camera, installation, and Avant-garde. This unique, eclectic adaptability makes him available for many different kinds of projects and commissions. As a free-lance artist, Novakovich is available for all kinds of creative opportunities.
For many years now, Novakovich has been involved in educational projects involving children and youth, and has worked on some international projects involving children from many parts of the world. Being committed to humanity’s exposure to the arts, and its humanitarian and diplomatic potential, this artist welcomes projects and commissions that facilitate widespread cultural exchange.

My teaching philosophy is both established and still developing. I am always examining and testing my teaching principles and working to verify my teaching practices through the ongoing process of instruction. The wide variety of my past professional and pedagogical experiences has laid a solid foundation for my understanding of the art of dance that directly shapes my future artistic and pedagogical goals.
My primary educational aim is to teach and inspire all of my students in the art of dance. Therefore, in my teaching I use the whole of my experience to facilitate learning, while staying true to my personal teaching ideology. In a studio setting, my method is to demonstrate a given movement while fully explaining the mechanics of technique involved. I then engage the specifics of a given style. Thus, my teaching encourages the formation of dancers who approach their art both intellectually and kinesthetically. I am committed to creating and sustaining a safe learning environment within which students feel free to grow and experiment without fear of failure.
When teaching in the University setting, I engage different styles within each class period and during the course of the whole semester/quarter, in order to expose the students to a variety of movement patterns. I also implement the element of improvisation, using unplanned movement, to help students discover and express their own personalities. I plan carefully to make my classes physically and artistically challenging, enjoyable and thorough. My teaching style is energetic, interactive and encouraging while it adheres closely to a specific lesson plan and established aims. I teach all levels of ballet, contemporary, modern and jazz dance techniques. I also teach conditioning for dancers, as well as a variety of theory courses including: dance history, viewing dance, dance production, improvisation, composition and choreography. more

As a twenty-ﬁrst century producing artists, my creative and research palette is quite eclectic. I strive to foster an inventive approach to art making, that is in touch with the uniqueness of the present day technology, and ﬁlled with curiosity of the tomorrow’s modernistic possibilities. Maintaining my conviction that art should be accessible and communicative, for many years now I have tried to produce works of dance that speak to and engage a variety of audiences. As someone who has been born right at the brink of the birth of today’s technology, I welcome new challenges and tests of time that the technology offers, and try to use it in my own creative work to expend the artistic freedom of expression. In the past I have tried to ﬁnd innovative ways of integrating technology and the arts, speciﬁcally dance. In my full length work The Hour of Lead, I have used still projections, sound, Internet technology and video projections to combine the performance of live dancers with those of their imaginary cyber re-embodiments. This visually complex work was an attempt to integrate multi faceted issues of dance, with those of technology and digital culture. Later on in my short ﬁlm Evacuated (which made an entry into the Dance For Camera West Festival as well as WestFest ) I have used the newest editing software to analyze the footage of purely improvisational movement material. I have then edited this footage in such sequencing mode that the choreography was made strictly in the post-production editing period. Thus, combining the site-speciﬁc work with that of visual and audio manipulated. In this case the multi medial was used to bridge the boundaries between the pre and post-production material. Presently I have been engaged in research involving the new video conferencing technology, which would allow creative artists and students alike to implement high- speed video conferencing tools to enhance the possibilities of their long distance creating and learning. For many years I have been involved in an international cultural ambassadorial work, which has opened the doors for my involvement in numerous international art projects. Being committed to humanity’s exposure to the arts, and its humanitarian and diplomatic potential, my long term goal is to engage in cross cultural art exchange facilitated by the new video transmission technology, which would bring the artists from many parts of the world together. I am interested in ﬁnding new ways to use the creative voices of international artists using innovative technology so that their works of art could happen simultaneously in many different world locations. As an independent producing artist I use research to further those key issues in my ﬁeld of work that I hold to be of great importance to me. Thus, I am fully and continuously committed to seeking out those funding organizations most likely to support this cause of merging the world of arts and new age technology. I see the modern day Universities and other progressive educational institutions as great places to create, coordinate and realize some of my future creative research projects. I think that the dance world of today has found a new form of expression in new media art. With new stages of technology development, dance has entered an exciting new era that offers entirely new possibilities for creation, global dissemination and experience of art. My personal research centers around the idea of how we as visual and performing artists in the 21st century can challenge our old artistic practices and traditional notions of art making, audience and artist, while using new technology and interactive media to create new aesthetic language. Since computers were essentially “born” in an academic and research environment, I am of ﬁrm conviction that modern day Universities are the places where the new multi media collaborations can and will take place. As far as my research is concerned, I am always more then excited to team up with creative and technologically savvy minds, with whom I can embark on new creative projects, and collaboratively explore new boundaries of dance and technology.