THE PUBLIC TIME OF DANCE

CoFestival, the international festival of contemporary dance, is guided by the notion of public time. This concept definitively re-examines the proverbial ephemerality of dance. We understand the public time of dance as a dynamic continuum: a flow of migrations, transitions, transfers, transformations, and continuations interconnecting bodies, relationships, interests, and processes. This extends across diverse geo-cultural environments, individual artistic and cultural formations, aesthetic and production paradigms, and contemporary dance communities. The concept of public time in dance is rooted in the conviction that dance is a unique artistic manifestation of corporeal tradition. This tradition travels globally, moving between different dance studios, stages, and publics. It forms a chain of both articulated and implied bodily experiences and knowledge. We know that dance bodies from different eras inherently contain one another and that their diverse contents are not solely material but profoundly cultural.

In our advocacy efforts to integrate contemporary dance into the domestic cultural system of the Republic of Slovenia, we, together with many of our colleagues in the former Yugoslav republics and other European regions, face a persistent systemic perception according to which dance, as an art of contingency and serendipity, only emerges in the present to then disappear forever, leaving no trace behind. Here, dance serves as a clear example of a temporal experience, as French historian François Hartog explains in Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (2003), which encapsulates the concept of presentism. In this framework, the past is largely lost without a trace, unless its utility can directly inform the currency of the present.

Our proposition for public time in dance is based on the idea of temporally concluded materiality (corporeality) and conductivity. This idea resonates with various theoretical frameworks, including Hewitt’s concept of social choreography. We know that the history of contemporary dance, when examined critically, reveals a rich repository of artistic, cultural, and social practices. Crucially, it also reveals underlying norms and exclusions. These can be perceived and interpreted through their renewed embodiment or recognition. Across various editions of CoFestival, our programmes have frequently engaged with key choreographic works and aesthetic paradigms from dance’s past.

OBJECTS OF DANCE BEYOND WHAT LOOKS GOOD

Sonja Pregrad’s mirror solo, Object of Dance, inspired the CoFestival curatorial collective to revisit the problem of the objectification of spaces and human bodies in 2025. This return is vital because ocularcentrism – the tendency in Western cultures to prioritise sight over other senses – has become a key tool in international politics, as media pervasiveness has made it a primary weapon. Its consequences are clear to everyone. There is no doubt that, in both international and domestic cultural spheres, dance art has now been subjected to the optical currency more thoroughly than ever before, its value being subordinated to anticipated visual fascination, like screensavers on our computers. Reducing dance reception to mere optical data has consistently been a major inhibitor in positioning contemporary dance within cultural systems. It is clear that the genuine operability of dance demands expanded sensory engagement and perception, which must transcend the literal optical surface of a screen. This means that optical fascination cannot serve as a qualitative criterion for dance art, in contrast to purely floristic products.

This year’s programme firmly positions present-day productions alongside pivotal works of historical dance. The Dance On Ensemble will present a selection of these under the collective title Making Dances at CoFestival, offering contemporary artistic responses. We also present contemporary choreographic works with a similar thematic landscape. The theme of our investigation is »objects of dance«. We will delve into production principles and artistic interests in contemporary dance. These are conceptualised through diverse procedures that break free from ocularcentrism.

In the mid-twentieth century, contemporary dance rapidly developed and transformed within American artistic communities. Merce Cunningham and John Cage pioneered a process to distance it from expressive artistic tendencies. These tendencies often translated the invisible and unstable landscapes of artists’ unconscious egos or self-narratives – such as those found in Jackson Pollock’s paintings – into pictorial, auditory, corporeal-kinetic, or linguistic forms. Cunningham and Cage deliberately chose to bypass psychology. They did this by using a series of constructivist and aleatoric procedures in choreographic creation, along with an egalitarian approach to the artistic means they employed.

Consequently, the object of dance shifted from its visually composed form, meticulously arranged in theatrical space into sequential movements, over which the audience and choreographers shared an optical overview. It is important to note that this was not merely a unique artistic expression; at that time, it represented the primary currency of an artwork as an immediately recognisable kinetic-technical style. The object of dance evolved into a problematic development of changes, methodically subjected to predetermined artistic procedures. The endeavour was to devise an entity that transcended the conventional boundaries of artistic ambition, embracing the realm of the enigmatic beyond the confines of psychological planning. The evolution of the object of dance into an exhibition of its elementary parts demanded close examination, reconsideration, and transformation into previously unimagined permutations. The phenomenon also manifested as a procedural confrontation of artistic decisions made by dancers and performers. These individuals entered the same space and time unconstrained by a choreographer’s will. Or perhaps it was the antagonism of artistic materials, expressions, and means, all to be granted equal validity and importance within artworks – a practice that, in the 1960s, became known as a form of choreography or mixed-media sculpture. These innovations, among a plethora of others, profoundly transformed the landscape of contemporary dance. In her 1999 newspaper series on the brief world history of contemporary dance, Ksenija Hribar categorically designated the dance community, which was then preoccupied with experimentation across the USA and soon thereafter in Europe, as dance anarchists.

By 2025, the concept of the dance object has become incomparably more complex than it was decades ago. This is not only because it can designate the goal of a specific dance practice with its own production and research timeframe – in addition to being understood as a compositional, constructivist, performative, theatrical, or multi-media dance product (typically a performance). More fundamentally, humanity’s interactions with its surroundings – with nature, the environment, space, materials, other people, and beings – have brought us face-to-face with profound ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas concern questions of social and political power and positions, the harmful and destructive relationships among people, and what we »objectify« – what we thus subordinate, frame, label, use, consume, or exploit.