Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik (eds.): Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (2024)
Thursday, 27 November at 8:15 p.m.
book presentation
Dance Theatre Ljubljana, foyer
Duration: 30 min.
The book Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After (Station, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Nomad Dance Academy Croatia, Lokomotiva, 2024 ), 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striving to provide the conditions for the historicizations of regional contemporary dance on the basis of different historical documents.
Bodies of Dance, 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. The first chapter, “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 the 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 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 − the 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. Additionally, the book introduces the complexities surrounding the processes of dance archiving and historicization in the region and presents the context of the former Yugoslavia and its major innovative structural elements, which are still vivid in the actual working modes and organizational models.
Therefore, the book is 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 a complex and lengthy process to share our knowledge and dig into local specificities, with articulation of potent features that have been addressed by or appear in and through dance practice(s) and the necessity of presenting a selection of examples and materials.
The book Bodies of Dance was created as an accompanying publication to the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)Working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After, which was opened by the Nomad Dance Academy network in November 2024 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and in March this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. The texts in the book were written by the research group: Slavcho Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, and Jasmina Založnik, as well as guest writer Gal Kirn.
Among those participating in the discussion will be: Nika Arhar, Jasmina Založnik, Rok Vevar and Slavcho Dimitrov.
* The discussion will be held in English.
Organised by: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia in collaboration with Dance Theatre Ljubljana
Free entry
Supported by:
