Bodies of Dance
Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After
COMING SOON!
The book Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After, created within the EU project (Non)Aligned Movements, is the result of the Nomad Dance Academy’s collective work, researching different contemporary dance practices in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia, since the beginning of the 20th century. With that work, the Nomad Dance Academy network and its local organizations are striving to provide the conditions for the historicizations of regional contemporary dance on the basis of different historical documents, and not only on the pre-existing and partial historical interpretations, anecdotes, and memoirs.
Editors: Nika Arhar and Jasmina Založnik
Research and Texts: Slavcho Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, and Jasmina Založnik
Guest Contribution: Gal Kirn
Edition of Station Service for contemporary dance, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Lokomotiva
This book, with its historical-theoretical position, provides the political, cultural, and artistic framing in which dance practices in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia emerged on various occasions. It articulates a selection of potent features that have been addressed by or appear in and through dance practice(s) and outlines a possible entry point into the wide scope of dance work that spans over a century and across four countries. The group of researchers—Slavcho Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, and Jasmina Založnik—approached the chosen topics from various perspectives with the aim of acknowledging differences in various time frames as well as between the mentioned countries, as well as accepting the necessity of presenting a selection of examples and materials.
The book introduces the complexities surrounding the processes of dance archiving and historicization in the region, and give space to an ‘outside’ voice (Gal Kirn), to present the context of the former Yugoslavia and its major innovative structural elements, which are still vivid in the actual working modes and organizational models.
The main body of the book consists of three chapters. The first, Plurality of Bodies and Their Voices, traces the perspective of the Other as a symptom of the patriarchy and its order. Such a perspective addresses marginalized position of dance and points out its struggle toward shifts and changes of the existing order. It outlines otherness beyond aesthetic tendencies and searches for the instruments and logic of embodying, where dance moves toward life, while emphasizing the everyday, strategies of extending the body beyond form, work with various social groups, as well as thinking of feminism as an engine of contemporary dance and opening perspectives of queer choreography. In the second chapter, Dance Formations—referencing Raymond Williams’s term ‘formations’ as the configurations of organizing and self-organizing communities in the arts and culture—authors adapt the term to the dance landscape in the region to show diverse forms of organizations, schools, spaces, initiatives, and festivals, their ever- changing configurations and reinventions, also with the urgency to practice solidarity within and beyond the scene. The third chapter, Reshaping Spaces of Art and Culture, focuses on dance, choreography, and the body as mediators of Change and examines dance in and through other artistic mediums as well as its presence in public spaces as an important endeavour within the public sphere.
The book is, first of all, a living document of the efforts of numerous individuals and groups who built our dance histories up to the present. It is also a reflection of the researchers’ mutual affinities and differences, and the result of a complex and lengthy process to share our knowledge and dig into local specificities. The book does not aim to totalize but rather to open up some possible ways of thinking about dance, its resilience and resistance, while at the same time building a reflective theoretical ground that could help us to direct our potential/possible future interests.
