NOT QUITE-NOT RIGHT EASTERN WESTERN DANCE

In order to write about the actual situation of contemporary dance in Serbia, I must begin by conceptualizing and contextualizing the local dance scene through its synchronic relationship with neighboring scenes and other European or Western scenes. As contemporary dance is a new phenomenon in Serbia, there are two problematic theses that I would like to put forward as starting points. Firstly, there is no local contemporary dance history; therefore there is no need to follow diachronic traces of today’s situation, and secondly, what is considered and practiced as contemporary dance in Serbia today is contemporary Western dance. Hence, what I need to do here is to clarify the influences, applications, translations, and the importation of Western dance paradigms to this not-quite Western but not-right Eastern context. This is how I make my starting point clear and simple, although harsh. And yet, is it enough? I don’t think so. But then, what can you do?
…I’ll now try to resolve my theses, in the hope that some new problems to think about will emerge from here. I will maintain a theoretical methodology in believing that problems force us to improve and re-think our common opinions and habits. According to this any positivist-scientific approach is excluded from the text .[1]

It is not quite true that there is no local (contemporary) dance history. However, what we can identify as local dance history is a lateral non-teleological network of past traces of various “bodily movement practices”. It doesn’t lead to the actual contemporary dance in Serbia; and is pretty different from dance history in Western European and USA contexts. There is rather an archeology of more or less isolated or indirectly connected points, lost tracks, ruptures, parallel streams, accidents, breaks, a genealogy of discontinuity of beginnings.

Before World War II, there were two strong local paradigms of bodily cultural-artistic practice in Serbia (present also in other parts of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). One is the work of philosopher and choreographer Maga Magazinović, whose idea of emancipating the body was realized through a “new dance” mixture of gymnastics, plastics, rhythms, feminism, and physical culture as education. She combined dance techniques and poetics of Emil-Jacque Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan and Marry Wigman, all together with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. The other one was practiced by SOKOLI, a pan-Slavic movement whose thinking of the body was directed toward a health collective body of the (pan-) nation. Although they operate with similar notions (such as health, body/physical culture…), their ideologies were different: emancipation of the individual vs. training of the collective. Accordingly, while Magazinović made artistic dance works for small numbers of (female) performers, Sokoli organized “slets”, cultural-sport performances for huge numbers of various kinds of performers.

Both paradigms made influences on bodily artistic and cultural practices after World War II in Serbia, as well as on the whole Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. [2] Magazinović had her own group/school in Belgrade, and her students Dubravka Maletić and Smiljana Mandukić continued with the practice, changing partly its leftist-bourgeois ideology toward dance as amateurish culture, encouraged by the socialist state. On the other hand, Sokoli’s slet became official state form of bodily movement – as was the case in many other communist countries – and was used to be performed for various state parades and festivals. The most famous was Youth Day (also President Tito’s birthday) slet on May 25. If these dance paradigms ever had hard critical or emancipating social-cultural potential, they mostly lost it in their ideological mutations in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

What is of crucial importance to remember about the local history of dance was bodily practices developed within new art forms: performance art, happening, and body art in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In these cases, we cannot talk about dance in its actual sense, as it was rather a dance “piercing through” other art disciplines and practices [3] – but we should seriously re-think the status of body of the artist (especially female artists) in, for example, Marina Abramović (Belgrade) and Katalin Ladik’s (Novi Sad) works, that were completely missed by dance theory and criticism of that time. Several decades later, their conceptual influences can be recognized in consideration of the body within contemporary dance, and is stronger than any influence that comes from ballet or amateurish, folklore, collective, or popular dance, which was recognized as dance at that time. Its main importance is thinking of the body through two vectors: as an artistic material or tool (i.e. body as object or medium of art) and, what is even more important, the body of the very artist or the artist’s body (i.e. body as subject of art).

Later on, we can find the nucleus of contemporary dance within the post-modern theatre of the late ‘70s and ‘80s – developed more in Slovenia and Croatia than Serbia and Montenegro. In this framework, I would mention theatre director Nada Kokotović, as well as Ljubiša Ristić, and choreographer and dancer Sonja Vukićević. Her “modern dance” was engaged in the liberation of the ballet body through a not-so-codified bodily movement, and in exploration of theatrical situations through usage of narrative content and stage design. Vukićević’s work was influenced mostly by Carolyn Carlson’s dance poetics and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater, together with references to painting, literature, and film (e.g. to Rainer Wermer Fassbinder).
Sonja Vukićević also appears as a symptomatic dance figure of a local paradigm shift from collectivism, characteristic for socialist countries (such as SFRY), toward an individualism, characteristic for capitalist countries (such as new countries, after the disintegration of SFRY). In fact, she was engaged in the last Youth Day slet, performed in 1987. And instead of the common slet, what we had that year was a modern performance (based on some parts of Damir Zlatar Fray’s Bolero), where Vukićević performed as a solo dancer, (although) together with 9.000 youths. [4] For the first time we could see an individual clearly singled out of an anonymous mass of dancing bodies, which was syntactic and symbolic collapse of the slets’ ideology of “come together!”.

When I talk about the 1990’s and early 2000 I can finally talk about the contemporary dance scene in an actual sense, although it was not recognized as a particular artistic discipline at that time. [5] It was present and developed mostly within alternative theatre, especially the Belgrade scene – as nonverbal, physical, dance theatre, and theatre of movement, as well as within various other forms of experimental theatre and performance. Important actors of that context, beside Vukićević’s work within CZKD, were independent theatre groups and authors in Belgrade: Breath Theater, Ister, Blue Theater, Mimart, Omen, Erg Status, Boris Čakširan, Ivana Vujić...; alternative theatre festivals such as BELEF and partly BITEF (Belgrade), INFANT (Novi Sad), FIAT (Podgorica), etc.
According to this kind of institutional/discursive framing, main influences on dance came from theatre: theatre anthropology, choreo-drama, Brechtian theatre, Tanztheater, theatre expressionism, street theatre, butoh and other Far- and Middle-East theatre forms, and not from contemporary dance from the international (Western) scene of that period. For example, until early 2000’s there was no one reference to ”conceptual dance”, which was booming in the international scenes during the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, there were a lot of references to neo-avantgarde art and performance of the ‘60s, which was recognized as a reservoir of still relevant artistic political tools.

Theatrical framing of local dance can also help us to understand the notable interest of SOROS: Fund for an Open Society to support many of these works. In the ‘90s it functioned as the main supporter of independent/non-institutional cultural-artistic projects and scene in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, due to its “advanced” political content, i.e. concretely in the case of Serbia due to its resistance to Slobodan Milošević’s regime. [6] This indicates that the social role of dance was supposed to be enacted at the level of its politically engaged content (which was rendered by theatrical elements, often taken from ‘60s) and not at the level of critical re-thinking of dispositif of institution of dance or of its historical heritage of ballet and mainstream modern dance (which was the case in the West). This can also clarify why contemporary European dance paradigms – led by Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy and other conceptual choreographers – focused on performing self-reflection, did not influence local actors of the performing arts until the last couple of years.

Early Days of Local Contemporary Dance Scene as Contemporary Dance Scene

In the last few years, we can notice the emergence of a contemporary local dance scene, which was eventually recognized and began to constitute itself as “THE” contemporary dance scene. Only two years ago, I claimed that there was no such phenomenon as a “contemporary dance scene in Serbia”, but though there is still small number of productions here the situation has been changing on macro-level.
Although there are a few choreographers and dancers from the younger generation, active since the beginning of 2000s – such as Bojana Mladenović, Dalija Aćin, Isidora Stanišić, Dragana Alfirević, Dušan Murić, Olivera Kovačević, Saša Asentić…, there lacked, however, a crucial necessity for the constitution of a dance scene. That necessity was an organizational infrastructure – which enables what we call art institution or, more precisely, “Artworld”. [7] This led to a situation where there were no dance institutions or organizations that would be responsible for the “dance scene” as a wider organizational, theoretical and artistic context for singular productions. Therefore productions appeared as very rare events, carried out by only a few of the most active choreographers, in an almost empty space. And it cannot be identified as dance scene, however important they might be. I would mention here one lost chance. At the beginning of 2000s there was an NGO, Centre for New Theatre and Dance, which carried out research and archives on new local theatre and dance, invited dance performances by Bad.co, Performingunit etc, and organized several presentations and workshops. But it was cancelled after a few years, and it didn’t make any stronger connections with direct dance actors. (Perhaps it was too early?)

Today, the contemporary dance scene in Serbia has a certain number of its specific subjects. Besides the already mentioned choreographers and performers, there are two specialized organizations: Station, dance service in Belgrade and New Dance Forum, project of Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad (which collaborates with Per.Art). Also, besides B92 cultural centre REX, several official theatre institutions open to contemporary dance programming: Bitef theatre, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Serbian National Theatre; together with theatre festivals: BELEF, BITEF, INFANT, and specialized Choreographic Miniatures. Direct influences come from abroad through workshops organized by Station and guest choreographers invited regularly by Forum, as well as through an event edited by Bojana Cvejić and organized by TkH-centre for performing arts theory and practiced in Belgrade in 2004: Pro Tools festival, in which Xavier Le Roy, Marten Spangberg, Mette Ingvarsten, and Tino Sehgal performed their dance works and talked with local audience. More productive, multi-lateral collaborations are realized within the region (of the Balkans or ex-Yu), through initiatives, networks and regional platforms, which are becoming more numerous and intensive in recent years: Balkan Express, Balkan Dance Platform, Nomad Dance Academy, East Dance Academy etc. Through them all the small contexts help each other in broadening their audiences, transferring knowledge and experience, giving validation and mutual empowering. What has changed the most is access to public funds and international grants. Nowadays, dance in Serbia, especially in Belgrade is regularly (although still not enough) supported by the Ministry of Culture, the City Council for Culture, Pro Helvetia, the European Cultural Foundation, and foreign cultural centers. The problem here is that the support is not in the categories of infrastructure, but mostly from project to project.

What is still missing completely in the process of the constitution of a local contemporary dance scene are: 1) broadening of the small circle of initial actors (which doesn’t exceed 10 people) and 2) theoretical/critical discourse. Broadening should be understood in the sense of the emergence of a new/younger generation of choreographers and dancers, as well as in the sense of a de-centralization of the scene. The second aspect is a part of wider problem of an extremely centralized cultural policy in Serbia, such that dance scenes truly do not exist outside of Belgrade or Novi Sad, the two biggest cities. For this reason, contemporary dance didn’t appear in the Republic of Montenegro during the time that it was part of the common state (until 2006), nor in the province of Kosovo. An important project was created in an attempt to deal with the problem of broadening or at least its first aspect: “Fostering Creativity”, organized by Station. It was a series of workshops, trainings and consultations, which resulted in seven performances by new-comers, shown as works in progress in 2007, out of which the three best got the opportunity to be completed under professional conditions. Regarding the other problem, the theoretical/critical writing on local contemporary dance is still sporadic, and there is no one theorist and critic specialized for contemporary dance. The crucial problem here is education, as dance is not systematically studied anywhere. Thence, there is one private ballet/modern dance magazine Orhestra, few critics such as Jelena Kajgo and Milica Zajcev write about local dance and ballet for daily newspapers, and few theorists of performing arts and culture connected with TkH platform and journal deal with contemporary performing arts in general. In a way, a need arises as the scene is growing, but the relevant offer is not ready, as education in a new field takes a long time, and as it is still impossible for any local critics or theorists to specialize in only contemporary dance and live from the fees of a few critiques per year.

This was a general historical and current overview to contemporary dance scene in Serbia, from my point of view. What I would like to develop now is more theoretical-political approach to the dance situation. I have put it at the end of the text as I don’t plan to give a set of answers and prepared conclusions here, but rather to open up a critical discussion that is still missing in Serbia…

When I wrote earlier that writing on the contemporary local dance scene can start easily from the moment, I indicated not only that contemporary dance was a new phenomenon in Serbia, but also that the writing didn’t need to explain local historical background since what we had here now was is contemporary Western dance. At that point I left the thesis, and tried to clarify what had existed in the past in the place of the “contemporary dance” of today.
Now I would like to turn back to the actual problems. A few years ago Emil Hrvatin put forward a provocative thesis: contemporary dance exists only in democratic societies and doesn’t in non-democratic ones. [8] Recently, he corrected himself and added: but only as an institution. [9] His argument is basically grounded on the idea of emancipation of the individual (through dance) as a characteristic for democratic societies. This approach is useful for explaining why there was no contemporary dance in Eastern Europe after World War II under semi-totalitarian communist/socialist regimes, in opposition to the situation in the democratic West – whose democracy of the time is also under question but at least they practiced a multi-party political system. However, what we could see from my “mis-historization” is that – although there was no “contemporary dance”, besides “ballet blanc” in the National Theatre, there were different kinds of dance, or more precisely bodily movement practices in Serbia during the time of socialism. What is characteristic for more or less all of them is a general idea of collectivism, which determined predominant thinking of the body as well as forms of dance works. Hence, in keeping with Hrvatin’s thesis on the idea of emancipation through dance I would shift critical focus. Crucial differences in the social and political contextualization of dance (in history) is not between democratic and non-democratic societies but between capitalist and socialist ones.
According to this, “emancipation of individual” (assigned to democratic societies) is not opposite to ideology (assigned to non-democratic systems) but is its particular principle. And its opposition on the other ideological side is “collectivism”. The first idea is characteristic for capitalist society and, speaking basically, emerges from the economic principle of private ownership as its ideological support and protection in the field of social super-structure. The second one comes from socialist/communist ideological vocabulary, and is linked with the basic principle of social and communal ownership. Consequently in the case of SFRY by the principles of workers’ self-management, associated labor, etc., and as it was supposed to be a multi-cultural and classless country, it was condensed in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity”. Therefore, what we find in capitalist societies is a history of contemporary dance as a high art practice of emancipation of the individual – rendering a singular autonomous subject through the liberation of an individual body, expression, creativity, and authorship. On the other hand, practice of that kind was seen in socialist countries as a bourgeois luxury – as they needed socially and economically efficient collective – and was replaced by dance as “come together!” and often almost anonymous cultural practices of slet, parades, amateurish dance, folklore, etc. [10]
Now I would abstain from categorization and evaluation of these bodily movement forms in terms of artistic, aesthetic, and even political values, to conclude something that seems to me more primary. Looking through this lens I would say that dance as a cultural-artistic practice, and this addresses contemporary dance too, is not emancipation bodily practice extricated from ideology but is: a technological tool for shaping the individual body as the social body. I propose this as a departure point of social thinking on dance, from which we can and should start considering qualitative differences and particular purposes of the tool, as well as trials of resistance to dominant ideology of certain contexts. This primary standpoint can also explain the appearance of contemporary dance in the new post-communist and -socialist European countries that together with a transformation of their economical and political structures toward capitalism and multi-party political system, change consequently their ideologies.

And now, about how it looks like in the dance “daily life”. There is a critical standpoint on the process of contemporary dance influences that come or are “imported” from “the West”. So many times in recent years I have heard complaints by local dance practitioners from Tallinn to Skopje that the only dance practiced in the East, that is supported both locally and internationally, is the one created under the strong influence of Western contemporary dance, conceptual dance in particular. On the other hand, Eastern choreographers who make their works in the current line of contemporary European dance scene are used to being blamed by Western programmers and critics of lacking anything specifically Eastern, and according to this accused of being constantly late (after the West). [11] I heard this kind of accusation for example on Moving Cake held in Ljubljana in 2005 and on BITEF Showcase: Tel Quel in Belgrade in 2006. Unbearable ambiguity of this position is employed even as the main subject of Saša Asentić’s work Indigo Dance (2007).
Going back to the theorization I developed in the previous chapter, the question of whether it is about “colonization” of Eastern Europe through dance gets another light. I would say that it is not about colonization as an aggression that comes from the outside, it is about inner transformation of the Eastern societies toward neo-liberal capitalist societal structure, already developed in the West. Their transformation erases the division on (socialist) East and (capitalist) West – although nor ex-East neither ex-West is still ready to accept it entirely. So when I said recently [12] that what we had in Serbia at the moment was Western contemporary dance, Dalija Aćin asked: How, when I am (in the sense, I am recognized as) an Eastern choreographer? She is completely right. Me too. [13]

The work is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

[1] Besides, the historization that follows is written without full insight into the research on dance scene in Serbia, as as the research carried out by Station at DBM platform is still not completed (see: Mediterranean Dance Map at http://www.d-b-m.org/mapping/index.php?lang=EN). So it is liable to the further changes, according to the research.

[2] Facts and opinions on dance history in Serbia after WWII find in the interviews included in video installation “Tiger’s Jump to History” (Phase 1), by Saša Asentić and Ana Vujanović (Novi Sad, 2006/07; within Indigo Dance project).

[3] The phrases is taken from a statement of East Dance Academy; see Goran Sergej Pristaš, Emil Hrvatin, Bojana Kunst, “East Dance Academy”, Maska, No 103/104, Ljubljana, 2007

[4] At that time she was not only a professional, but also well known as prima ballet dancer of National Theatre in Belgrade and modern dancer.

[5] See more in the Archives of New Theatre and Dance in Serbia, 1990-2000, run by Centre for New Theatre and Dance, Belgrade; now within The Archives of Serbia.

[6] See also: Ana Vujanović, “Blasted Narratives: Belgrade Theater in the 1990s and early 2000s”, in Mind the Map! – History is not Given, ed. Grzinic, Heeg, Darian, Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006

[7] In Arthur Danto and George Dickie’s senses.

[8] “Uvod”, in Teorije sodobnega plesa, Maska, Ljubljana, 2001

[9] Presentation of EDA and discussion with artists in residence; Tanzquartier Wien, May 31, 2007

[10] Metaphorically, “a-professional-Western-contemporary-dancer” is an ideal image of an independent, well-educated and skillful manager of a private enterprise, while “Eastern-mass-of-(semi-)-amateurish-performers” is a projection of Workers Councils where each voice has equal importance and value in a workforce structure that belongs to all of them (in fact, to the society).

[11] Thesis by Bojana Kunst; see her text: “Performing the Other/Eastern Body”, TkH, No 4, Belgrade, 2002 (Lecture, International Conference of The Bulgarian Theatre Association: Cultural Bridges, 4-5 June 2002, Varna, and Festival Tanztendenzen, June 12 2002, Greifswald)

[12] Tanzquartier Wien, May 31, 2007

[13] My explanation reached only historical background of local contemporary dance, which continues Western dance history, and not local/Eastern. Then we developed a discussion about what would be actual continuation of local dance history that may be called contemporary Eastern dance – new slets, parades, amateurish dance? Perhaps… But there is another problem: these practices have never had right to contemporaneity. Therefore, next chapter of analysis of actual local contemporary dance would be on the issue of very “contemporaneity” and rights to it.