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Nadine Krstić
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Nadine M. Dougan Krstić has taught the Opanici beginner's group at the Saint Steven's Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Alhambra, California, as well as at the BalkanFest in Claremont.
Nadine, an independent researcher and film-maker in Santa Monica, premiered her documentary film "Dancing through sparks: Korčula's sword dance Morečka enters the 21st century" also following up on her graduate studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
She does research into the dance repertoire of LovransÌŒtina (the Lovran area) participating in the dance events during contemporary carnival celebrations. She compares the dances which are performed by the people of Lovran during carnival with those at dance events in four villages near Lovran. Here she takes into account both differences in gender and role reversal in keeping with carnival customs (Dougan-Krstić 1989). She researches and compares dance events during the zvončari carnival customs in the Kastav region in Istria and the Lenten festivities of the Yaqui Native Americans in Tuscon, Arizona (Dougan-Krstić 1992).
In the context of performance, she monitors the structure of dance which is not firmly structured, and more appropriately describes it as an improvised body movement. She finds similarity and posits a thesis which is hard to accept on the common origins of Shamanistic characteristics in the rituals of two cultures located so very far apart.
Nadine has done field work in Croatia and actively choreographs for Croatian groups in Los Angeles.