Rituals with Dolphins – A Visual and Dance Performance
📅 Monday, February 16, 2026
🕖 7:00 PM
📍 Atrium, Croatian Natural History Museum
🎟️ Free admission
Croatian Natural History Museum & Liberdance
About the Project
“Rituals with Dolphins” is a visual and dance performance that merges contemporary dance and sculpture within the space of the Croatian Natural History Museum. The project was developed through a partnership between the Museum and the dance organization Liberdance.
Its goal is to connect natural sciences and art through the experience of the body, space, and shared presence, inviting the audience to actively participate. This performance is the first in a series of six dance interventions that will take place throughout the year at the Museum.
🐬 Sculptures of Neutral Buoyancy – Petar Popijač
The central visual element of the performance is the series “Sculptures of Neutral Buoyancy” by sculptor Petar Popijač.
These sculptures achieve neutral buoyancy, losing the sense of weight and appearing to float in space, echoing long-standing sculptural explorations of freeing form from gravity. Popijač realizes this idea literally by working with modern technologies in an underwater environment.
The sculptor “dives” into the sea and models sculptures using a special underwater epoxy (“Aquamend”) with a density equal to seawater. As a result, the sculptures neither sink nor rise but remain suspended in a state of neutral buoyancy.
This method frees sculpture from gravity, static form, and attachment to the ground. The works appear to exist in a microcosm governed by entirely different laws of space and weight.
For this performance, Popijač creates dolphin embryos that float within an aquarium-like space. The embryo symbolizes beginnings, potential, and the continuity of life, but also its fragility. Dolphins appear as beings of strong bodily communication, intelligence, and connection with humans, but also as symbols of a threatened natural world in the era of climate change.
💃 Dance Intervention – The Body in Neutral Buoyancy
The Liberdance choreography is inspired by observing and physically interpreting Popijač’s sculptures. The dancers explore playfulness, weightlessness, and freedom of movement found in the aquatic state of the sculptures.
In the museum space, dance becomes a ritual collaboration with dolphins. Human bodies follow the dynamics of the dolphin embryos, entering a shared, slow, and meditative dance between human and animal, culture and nature.
This ritual is conceived as a symbolic act of closeness, care, and connection — dance as an act of survival and reconnection with one’s own body.
👥 Audience Participation
The audience is invited to be active participants rather than passive observers. The museum space becomes a temporary sacred ground — a ritual space governed by different rules.
Visitors may move freely, join the dance, or contribute music accompanying the performance. The ritual becomes a collective experience with no hierarchy between performers and audience.
🌊 Context
“Rituals with Dolphins” explores bodily identity in the contemporary world. It reflects on the idea that not only nature is disappearing, but also the human body as a stable site of experience and self-understanding.
In a world of accelerating technology and increasing abstraction of the body, the project introduces the concept of “Simple Minds” — an attempt to return to basic, immediate bodily experience through playfulness, presence, and simplicity.
🎭 Artistic Team
Author: Rajko Pavlić
Sculptor: Petar Popijač
Dancers: Lara Frgačić, Luna Lilek, Endi Schrötter, Jelena Braut, Esther Davies, Ljubica Maras, Ingrid Perković, Elena Tota
Lighting Design: Saša Fistrić
Visual Communication: Valentina Toth
Production: Liberdance
Co-production: Croatian Natural History Museum
Supported by: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia & Croatian Natural History Museum