Dance of Our Contemporaneity, Kretanja/Movements, no. 25, 2016, p. 38-47

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity

< Fourhanded and Brain Store Project, Balkan Dance Reality Show. In the photo above: Iva Sveshtarova and Sonja Pregrad. In the photo below: Rose Beermann and Willy Prager. Photo: Neven PetroviÄ&#x2021; >

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity

IVANA SLUNJSKI

Dance of Our Contemporaneity

,, W

e are speaking of contemporary dance.

For those who might find it an abstract notion, what exactly is it about?â&#x20AC;? is a question that seemingly logically fits in with our thematic unbundling and attempts at re-evaluating the name, scope, range and missions of this artistic discipline.

However, it is 2015, the show is called Podium (Govornica)1 , broadcasted on Croatian Televisionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Channel 4, and the question was addressed to Iva Nerina Sibila, invited ahead of one of the workshops organised by the Integrated Movement Research Collective to explain the importance of inclusive dance in the context of contemporary dance practice, which revealed several illogical issues symptomatic of the state of Croatian cultural and social reality. Although the discussion about the adequacy of the term in relation to the idiosyncrasies of the phenomena it encompasses has for some time been present among dance artists and professional reception, to a broader public contemporary dance is still â&#x20AC;&#x153;an abstract termâ&#x20AC;?, but not in the sense of abstraction in which the signifier is not fully transparent, rather in the sense of abstraction used as a euphemism to disguise ignorance.

1

Podium, broadcasted on 21 October 2015, and hosted by Dino GoleĹĄ.

And while some of us believe that both the term and the discipline are ripe for revalorisation, and we are fit for this process, most of the broader public cannot even discern artistic dance from other dance-related activities.

In other words, we are trying to re-evaluate something that has not yet, in fact, been fully adopted or acknowledged beyond the professional circuit. Broader lack of (re)cognition of contemporary dance as an artistic institution would not puzzle this much if it were not for a performative continuity lasting from the 1960s until this day. Moreover, contemporary dance in Croatia has been evolving in Croatia in different forms since the 1920s. The reasons for inadequate establishment are many, both internal â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a body-based art, the inability to reduce movement to the clarity of a linguistic message â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and external â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a female art, insinuations about trivial art, otherness in relations to drama, poorer visibility due to the lack of programme funding, to name only some. Also, everybody is a great connoisseur of visual art and music, or at least a question what it contemporary visual art or what is contemporary music (and do we need them) is not being raised, accepting the fact that they simply â&#x20AC;&#x201C; exist. However, unlike contemporary visual art or contemporary music, contemporaneity in contemporary

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dance is integrated into the very term of the discipline which, in its broader sense, although the term primarily points to authorial aesthetics and dance concepts after postmodern dance, often stretches well beyond its predecessors, early and late modern dance, postmodern dance, in fact all art forms which are not ballet. This again does not mean that ballet cannot be contemporary, or that classical ballet or other structures cannot be found in contemporary dance, or that contemporary dance cannot be pursued on an amateur level. It can, of course. To the contemporaneity of dance it is more important how a body thinks than how it performs, since the performance is conditioned by the way it thinks. Such generalisation of disciplinary complexity on a sentential level applies to any performance art, but in contemporary dance it has a determining significance because contemporary dance is characterised by heterogeneity, by extreme permeability to other arts and fields of work, whose reasons could be sought in transience, in the elusiveness of movement, in a changeability which comes with potency and not as a strategy of vanishing or decay. Therefore, contemporary dance is subject to a perpetual redefinition of its own medium and its boundaries. Nevertheless, despite its frequent changes and different appearances, everyone who is up to a certain point informed about artistic dance has an idea about a specific discipline, although not only ideas about it differ, but they also do not always refer to the same notion.

Contemporaneity and distemporaneity o which contemporaneity does contemporary dance as a contemporary art refer to? One of the possible and quite probably more comprehensive definitions of contemporary art was expounded by the Australian art historian and critic Terry Smith: â&#x20AC;&#x153;contemporary art is that art infused with the multiple modes of contemporaneity, with the fact that we all live in a multiplicity of differences: of time, of culture, of identity, of spaceâ&#x20AC;?2 . We could agree that this definition democratically takes into account the plurality of coexistence and co-participation in time and space, but contemporary art both practically and theoretically much more frequently uses different methods of selection and evaluation to tighten the present of art, led by two mutually supportive principles of exclusion3 . According to the temporal criterion, contemporaneity

T

2 Terry Smith, â&#x20AC;&#x153;What is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to Comeâ&#x20AC;?, Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of Art History, no. 1â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2, vol. 71, 2002, Taylor & Francis / Routledge, Stockholm, 3â&#x20AC;&#x201C;15, p. 3.

3 Cfr. Dan Karlholm, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Surveying contemporary art: Post-war, postmodern, and then what?â&#x20AC;?, Art History. Contemporary Perspectives on Method, ed. Dana Arnold, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2010, 56â&#x20AC;&#x201C;78, p. 58.

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(of art) excludes all that could be characterised as past, that belongs to history, and to the aesthetic criterion, which in fact means arbitrary or insufficiently universally accepted criteria of assessing the quality or importance of a particular piece, (contemporary) art excludes all â&#x20AC;&#x153;that which is deemed other to it on a synchronic planeâ&#x20AC;?4 . Even though delineating boundaries according to the temporal criterion seems like a demanding and neverending task, because the borders of contemporary art, in Jean-Luc Nancyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words, are â&#x20AC;&#x153;shifting, but which generally donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go back to much more than 20 or 30 years ago, and hence are continually movingâ&#x20AC;?5 , exclusion according to the aesthetic criterion, on the synchronic level, is still crucial for a category leaning on temporality. Since every work of art is contemporary to another work of art made in the same period of time and since it is contemporary to the time it is made in6 or, in other words, since every work of art is contemporary at a certain point in time, the defining exclusive criterion distinguishing an artefact from the horizon of consideration is not the temporal, but rather the aesthetical one. In that respect, an aesthetical judgment does not even need to acknowledge an artefact as a piece of art and it can reject it as a lesser artistic product. Bearing arbitrariness, approximation of the aesthetic criterion in mind, clearly there is a manipulative gap wide enough to intersperse the aesthetic justification with economic and political interests. That way the present of contemporary art is in fact even more burdened with selection according to commercial demands rather than internal artistic reasons. On the one hand, the consumer millstone keeps spawning the hunger for new things, and on the other it dictates what this hunger should be satiated with. Under the imperative of the production of new, how much is new actually feasible in dance art, which stems from physical articulation, bearing in mind that the body â&#x20AC;&#x153;hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t changed much in the last 150,000 yearsâ&#x20AC;?, as dance artist and researcher Jonathan Burrows notes? Or, overflooded by new things, is it just always a â&#x20AC;&#x153;search for a nuanceâ&#x20AC;?, while â&#x20AC;&#x153;most of the nuances are already takenâ&#x20AC;??7 4 Karlholm, ibid.

5 Jean-Luc Nancy, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Art Todayâ&#x20AC;?, translation by Charlotte Mandell, Journal of Visual Culture, no. 9, 2010, Sage Publications, 91â&#x20AC;&#x201C;99, p. 91.

6 Cfr. Nancy, p. 92, and Terry Smith, â&#x20AC;&#x153;â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Contemporaneity?â&#x20AC;?, Contemporary Art. 1989 to the Present, eds. Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2013, 17â&#x20AC;&#x201C;28, p. 20.

7 Jonathan Burrows, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Postdance Dialogues: Keynote Addressâ&#x20AC;?, curated by AndrĂŠ Lepecki, conference Postdance, 14 October 2015, Stockholm, http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=10242. Burrows refers to English artist Grayson Perry, who recognises limited disposal of minimal variations instead of real invention in painting.

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity The opinion that the present is better than some other time is partly a result of egocentric focus on our own existence, therefore everything made now must be better than things made before. However, not everything newly made is at the same time innovative. Art which is capable of innovation in relation to the current paradigm is in a privileged position, which also implies that there is also contemporary art incapable of keeping up with the demand. The works that do not comply with the up-to-dateness display signs of belonging to â&#x20AC;&#x153;the current historical momentâ&#x20AC;?8 or â&#x20AC;&#x153;noncontemporaneous contemporaneityâ&#x20AC;?9 . If they are not categorised as epigonic, these works are labelled as delayed and therefore less attractive, because they include preferences in terms of genre, style, form, theme or subject considered worn out, depleted. On the other hand, constant maintenance of up-to-dateness, as Swedish art historian Dan Karlholm claims, implies constant competition and perfection, an idiosyncratic trait of modernism, â&#x20AC;&#x153;perpetuating old figures of development, novelty and progressâ&#x20AC;?10 . What is this shift that we are actually addressing in contemporary art, as opposed to previous states or artistic paradigms we believe we have overcome? Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definition of contemporary art evokes multiple modalities of contemporaneity, a possibility of coexistence of different times, conditioned by different cultural, geographic and other identities, assuming in principle the temporal fragmentariness, i.e. elimination of a linear flow of time. Such perception of time could be explained with globalisation processes and general immersion in the virtual world, as well as immediate experience of instant information exchange.

Virtual reality also implies freedom from a place, supporting transient identities. In such a view, displacement from a specific time and space and â&#x20AC;&#x153;the sense of being â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;inâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; this time, these times, and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;out ofâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; them at the same timeâ&#x20AC;?11 and the analogue construction of identity not on the difference, i.e. differences between past and present, of coexisting times, of old and new, of art and life, of ourness and otherness etc., but by simultaneous possession of both or by balancing between them, is crucial for contemporaneity and breakdown with modernist constructions and systems established in opposition to them. In an ideal sphere. However, accepting the concept of distemporaneity in which these different times are conditioned by different cultural, ethnic, geographic, historical and other definitions confirms their dependency 8 Karlholm, p. 59.

9 Harry Harootunian (Remembering the Historical Present), quoted in Karlholm, ibid.

10 Karlholm, ibid.

11 Smith, â&#x20AC;&#x153;â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Contemporaneity?â&#x20AC;?, p. 24.

on economic inequalities, diverse hegemonic desires and exploitation policies. Therefore, the division is already deeply ingrained. Who and from what position defines what is contemporary art? Who are they trying to reach in these definitions? What art is being labelled as non-contemporary contemporaneity? What does contemporary dance on the synchronic level register as otherness?

Contemporary otherness glance on the programmes of European dance festivals leads to a conclusion that they feature performances by artists from Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Burkina Faso and other distant countries, but their often accompanying biographic notes mainly reveal that all of them in a similar manner, as much as from their point of view it might seem special or extraordinary, reached the European or American scene, with education and training at suitable academies or differently infiltrating into the existing scene. Non-European authors, regardless of their native ambience, have also proved to acquire performative and stage experiences in western models of knowledge transfer and have used dance techniques stemming from the western mind-set to learn how to articulate their bodies. They are seldom artistically formed in their native countries, and even if they are, contemporary dance as a discipline was imported from the West. This does not only reassure the origin of contemporary dance, although there is still a dispute over the right side of the Atlantic12 , but also the west-centric appropriation of the point of view on the rest of the world. The assumption on the uniting, all-encompassing virtual reality, governed by the principle of fair exchange, fails again. Let us take a moment to reflect on the introductory hypothesis of the contemporaneity of dance, this time inversely opposing it: the way the body thinks is conditioned by the way it performs. The dual alliance of thinking and performing (those from the beginning and those now), bearing in mind the privileged western position, leads to conclude that the contemporaneity of contemporary dance is a construct institutionalising â&#x20AC;&#x153;an exclusive right to universal contemporaneity, urbanity, autonomy [of the body]â&#x20AC;?13 . The desire to acquire knowledge and expand insights, the desire to collaborate, get to know other body histories and their subversive potentials, i.e. approximating to the West and approximating

A

12 Burrows, ibid., â&#x20AC;&#x153;And the Atlantic Ocean stayed where it was / and people made work either side of it / and remained somewhat sceptical of each other / and a little nervous around questions of origination.â&#x20AC;?

13 Bojana Kunst, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Subversion and the Dancing Body: Autonomy on Displayâ&#x20AC;?. Performance Research, no. 2, vol. 8, Routledge, London, 2003, 61â&#x20AC;&#x201C;68, p. 65, emphasis mine.

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the West to others emanates from different motivations.

The other is not allowed to get to close, their physicality is insufficiently articulated, it is still only â&#x20AC;&#x153;attempted or delayedâ&#x20AC;?, â&#x20AC;&#x153;always reduced to a special context: political, traditional, ethnical, localâ&#x20AC;?14 . And it still coexists beyond the time that is imposing itself as universal. As much as the West allows it access to contemporaneity, that much it adjusts and controls it, identifying in it â&#x20AC;&#x153;its own autonomous beginnings and articulation of the present bodyâ&#x20AC;?15 .

That way the importance of its opinion and action, of its authority are imperilled, immediately contesting a possibility of equal coexistence of a different kind of autonomy. How to create a different autonomy of the body, a body with alternative history? In what form is contemporary dance beyond the western context possible? Are other recent, coexisting dances also acknowledged as dance art? What about contemporary dance in predominantly Islamic countries where the view on body and physicality, especially female, is problematic, to say the least?

However, dance otherness needs not to be sought outside Europe. It suffices, for example, to take a peek into the book Europe Dancing. Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity16 , edited by AndrĂŠe Grau and Stephanie Jordan, to conclude what was taken into consideration between the Second World War and the turn of the millennium, when this book was published. Interestingly, among Central European and Eastern European countries, the focus was kept only on Hungary, where before the downfall of communism there was nothing except ballet because other forms of artistic dance were forbidden.

Since the 1990s, with the help of a few careful initiatives and lucky investments, the Hungarian scene has become an inevitable fact17 . Unlike Hungarian, Croatian dance, boasting almost a hundred-year-old heritage, is nearly invisible in the European context. All these years have 14 Kunst, ibid.

15 Kunst, ibid.

16 Europe Dancing. Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity. Routledge, London and New York, 2000.

17 Among the first generation of choreographers, evolved since the 1980s, the ones to note are PĂĄl FrenĂĄk and GĂĄbor Goda, among the second generation, gathered around the Inspiration programme

by Workshop Foundation, there are Ă&#x2030;va Duda, Adrienn HĂłd, MĂĄrta LadjĂĄnszki, RĂŠka SzabĂł. The third generation boasts Anna RĂŠti, KlĂĄra Pataky, the Bloom! company. An important role in the promotion of dance since 1998 has been played by TrafĂł House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest (http://trafo.hu/en-US), as well as other independent organisations like L1 Association (http://www.l1.hu/en/about/).

The Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy was launched in 2004 (BA level in dance and graduate level in pedagogy). Important festivals and platforms: SzĂłlĂłDuĂł, MonotĂĄnc, L1 KortĂĄrs TĂĄncfesztivĂĄl, MU TerminĂĄl, dunaPart.

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not engendered a single name that might keep track with the contemporary dance poetics, and not even a single dance piece by Croatian authors and performers relevant outside Croatia could be singled out. Moreover, Europe Dancing mentions Croatia only once, in the context of art as a platform for identity research which is â&#x20AC;&#x153;never politically innocentâ&#x20AC;?18 . The editors in the introduction illustrate this with ganga as a symbol of expressing Croatian nationalistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; intolerance to Serbs during World War II and since the 1980s, leaning on the conclusions made

by Bosnian ethnic music theorist Ankica PetroviÄ&#x2021;, active since the late 1990s at UCLA. Indeed, how then even to connect an ambience which keeps its rural polyphonic vocal form for nationalistic incidents with the existence of a highly-evolved contemporary dance scene? It is much easier to avoid Croatian dance art as a probable non-contemporary contemporaneity. However, the rurality of this form and the intolerance leading to the Balkan vortex of neverending hatred and wars are merely external factors, just an image refracted through a lens employed by those living west of us. The real reasons â&#x20AC;&#x201C; going back to the beginning â&#x20AC;&#x201C; could be sought in Croatian cultural strategy which bears no interest in dance art. Dance has been marginalised for decades, underfinanced, without a solid structure to support and establish it on the European scene.

The performance Balkan Dance Reality Show19 created and performed by Rose Beermann, Willy Prager, Sonja Pregrad and Iva Sveshtarova moves away from the conservative views of the Balkans which blossomed in the period of European nationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; national awareness-raising and which flood from AndrĂŠe Grauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Stephanie Jordanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conclusions, revisited in the wars that followed the breakdown of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Hints of cruelty and primitivism remained in the wild animal costumes worn by the performers in the first half of the piece, but their imagery was somewhat alleviated with slow, sometimes inert motion and the softness of the costumesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fabric, due to which they rather reminded of large plush toys. The creative team were more akin to the idea of the Balkans as a liminal space, fostered by 18 Grau and Jordan, p. 4.

19 Associate dramaturge: Angelina Georgieva. Sound: Emilian Gatsov â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Elbi. Text/sound material performance: Stephan Stereff, Galina Borisova, Angelina Georgieva, Ani Vasova, Emilian Gatsov â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Elbi. Costume design: Tsvetelina Atanasova. Production: Fourhanded (Ä&#x152;etveroruka) and Brain Store Project. Co-production: Station â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Service for contemporary dance (Stanica â&#x20AC;&#x201C; servis za savremeni ples), Nomad Dance Academy (Nomadska plesna akademija), European project Life Long Burning, residency Ă&#x2030;tape danse (Fabrik Potsdam, CDC Uzès danse, ThÊâtre de NĂŽmes, Bureau du ThÊâtre et de la danse / Institut français Deutschland). Zagreb premiere: 4 November 2015.

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, the space which acts as the internal border of the West and both separates and unites two cultural and geopolitical regions. As such, it is heterogeneous and full of contentions, neither a full-fledged other nor a complete entity, an uncanny space because it ecsapes binary divisions. In such a constellation, Croatia is doubly borderline â&#x20AC;&#x201C; neither the real Balkan, nor the real Europe. It is this Balkan that is indeed a mythical place, mysterious, somewhat wild and weird. Therefore, it is not without a reason why the play is swarming with wondrous creatures, performing The Rite of Spring in a completely understandable fashion: by sitting and looking into the distance, lazily shifting from one hip to the other, changing their minds, stretching and crawling. Crucial for the entire story is the figure of delay â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Rite of Spring was put on stage two years after the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of this work, composed by Igor Stravinsky and choreographed

by Vaclav Nijinsky â&#x20AC;&#x201C; when every self-respecting choreographer had already celebrated its anniversary and put it behind them. It results in a double transfer of meaning, delay as retardation in comparison to the West and delay in the sense of mannerist repetition of repeated elements. Apart from the civilizational delay, the authors dwell on the stereotypes of the Balkan laziness, lack of initiative, intellectual inertia. They are so slow that at a certain point they have to speed up the music played by a tape recorder in order to keep pace with others. Or because they are all too fatigued by all that. In the second part of the performance, the performers transform from helpless toys into inveterate reality show participants. The transfer is clearly denoted by their changing to uniform jeans and white T-shirts with animal prints on the back. The sounds of The Rite of Spring switch to the text of the actual American TV show called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. It all becomes part of the game â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you want the Balkans; fine, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll give it to you just the way you imagine it: backwards, passive, cruel and unsafe. The trick is the choice of material for the show. A hundred years after the first performance, the West is celebrating a piece that subverted the current accomplishments of western art. As Stravinsky dropped the then obligatory symmetry and harmony in music and planted a polyrhythmic structure built out of elements of folklore motifs, exchanging a different number of tacts of different length, Nijinsky sabotaged the rules of ballet: he closed the feet position, introduced mechanical movements, sudden jumps, blank faces. In Balkan Dance Reality Show, rebellion is much more subtle. Stravinsky and Nijinsky loudly undermined the expected image of old Russia, whereas the Balkan Dance team played the

card of the Balkanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hazy status, knowing that it is in fact a product, recognisable only for its attributed defamiliarization, just like a reality show and a contemporary dance performance are also products. In attempting to shed light on the question what remains of art and how it is possible today, delay gives them a chance to fashion out performative styles to oppose dominant, market-oriented tendencies.

Performative deviations nd while we are trying to deduce what contemporary dance today is, more accurately, what is its contemporaneity, the focus shifts on performativity and contemporaneity of performance. Since the mid-1990s, first on the French and Belgian scene and then elsewhere, there have been significant changes in the approach to dance and creating dances, which were later most often united under the name conceptual dance20 . This term too caused quite a controversy, mostly because stressing the determinant conceptual reduced the importance of dance concepts that were not labelled as such and because the term reminds too much of conceptual art, which shares with conceptual dance the abolishment of boundaries between theory and practice and the conceptualisation of methods and media (in the dance body). However, conceptual dance, as a different art, established its own criteria and terms.

After a shift towards intellectualisation of dance, analysis and deconstruction of dance paradigms, many things could no longer be performed as before, unburdened by the consequences of this shift. Often repressed by concept, dancersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; technical skills, choreographic composition and narrative acquired a different use. A path towards distinguishing dance and choreography is set, dance is identified as experience of motion, as movement performing i.e. dancing. Choreography is no longer inherent to dance-making, it is perceived as a means for its dissection, as a superior, externally imposed sequence of elements. Choreography limits and subordinates dancing, i.e. performing, by limiting the way dance is created

A

20 Conceptual dance is considered to be inaugurated in 2001 at the Panacea dance festival in Stockholm, curated by MĂĽrten SpĂĽngberg.

See Burrows.

After the Klapstuk #11 festival in Leuven, JĂŠrĂ´me Bel, who curated the festival in 2003 and raised many questions with his selection of entries related to contemporaneity and conceptuality of dance, invited artists, critics, curators and other observers to reflect on the festival and the contemporary context. Some of these interviews and texts were published on Sarma.be website. See What Is Contemporary Dance, 2004, http://sarma.be/pages/Anthology_What_is_contemporary_dance%253F. Some of the alternative names were anti-dans, non-dans, exhausting dance, new dance of the nineties.

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and presented. For that reason, choreography extends to choreographic, authorial or performative practice, which changes both the approach to work and the way a performative event is created. Advantage is given to the development of practice of collaborative research and creativity over a longer period of time, performers are co-authors and share responsibility for the concept and its implementation, the artistic subject is no longer united, but dispersed. Individual works are not the utmost objective of collaborative creativity and are only partly autonomous, seen as a testing point for success of a performative practice and assessment of a material before audience. Importantly, the conceptual deviation in relation to postmodern dance, which analyses the boundaries of danceness, i.e. the boundaries of what can even be called dance, has moved its focus towards â&#x20AC;&#x153;the essence of performingâ&#x20AC;?, delineating the boundaries of action (contrary to inaction), which confirm the performing as action, as activity.21 The consequences of equalling dance (or dancing) and performing an action are mirrored in the fact that the changes occurring in relation to conceptual dance were not termed as postconceptual dance. Rather, the term postdance22 was speculated, since â&#x20AC;&#x153;we find ourselves a little unsure whether we want to dance at all anymoreâ&#x20AC;?2 3 . Following AndrĂŠ Lepecki, contemporary choreographic practice will exhaust movement to either redefine dance or forsake the fundamental relation between dance and movement.24 Lepecki sees the absence of dance as a gesture of resistance to â&#x20AC;&#x153;the general economy of mobility that informs, supports, and reproduces the ideological formations of late capitalist modernityâ&#x20AC;?25 , also resistance to a system making it possible for dance â&#x20AC;&#x153;to constantly be recycled, reproduced, 21 FrĂŠdĂŠric Pouillaude, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Scène and Contemporaneityâ&#x20AC;?, translated from French by NoĂŠmie Solomon, The Drama Review, no. 2, vol. 51, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007, 124â&#x20AC;&#x201C;135, p. 132.

22 In October 2015, Gabriel Smeets, AndrĂŠ Lepecki and Danjel Andersson organised in Stockholm a three-day conference named Postdance â&#x20AC;&#x201C; beyond the kinaesthetic experience and back, discussing the formation of choreographic imagination from the 1960s onwards. http://mdtsthlm.se/sv/archive/464/.

The term postdance was coined by Danjel Andersson, Moderna Dansteterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic director, hinting that the term is in fact bad, but promising to reflect on what the term might point to. See The POSTDANCE Dialogues: Stina Nyberg and Adriano Wilfert Jensen, 18 October 2015, http://www.movementresearch.org/ criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=10415.

23 Burrows, ibid.

24 Cfr. Efrosini Protopapa, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Contemporary Choreographic Practice: From Exhaustion to Possibilisingâ&#x20AC;?, Contemporary Theatre Review, no.

2, vol. 26, Routledge, London, 2016, 168â&#x20AC;&#x201C;182, p. 171.

25 AndrĂŠ Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 7â&#x20AC;&#x201C;8. Cfr. Protopapa, p. 172.

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packaged, distributed, institutionalized, soldâ&#x20AC;?26 , believing that in this way the performative practice will terminate the capitalist enchainment of art work. Naturally, this did not happen, because the extraordinary diversity of conceptual dance, either in Lepeckiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case exhausting dance, or in the sense of perpetual alterations in contemporary dance as a superordinate discipline, favour contemporary capitalist production which affixes to the important traits of performative work, like creativity or exploration.

Just like contemporaneity, manipulated in the name of art. For, anything that is up-to-date in fact misses contemporaneity. It seems paradoxical, but what moves away from contemporaneity is more contemporary than what is equal to contemporaneity. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said, contemporaneity is â&#x20AC;&#x153;a singular relationship with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own time, the one that joins it and detaches from it at the same timeâ&#x20AC;?27 . If we are too immersed in contemporaneity, our sight is clouded and does not allow us to move back and observe it, to fully understand it. This leads to conclude that contemporaneity is already failed from the very beginning and that it can only be truly perceived when we detach from it. This means that contemporaneity is inscribed in the present, labelling it â&#x20AC;&#x153;first of all as archaicâ&#x20AC;? and, in analogy, that contemporary can only be the one that perceives â&#x20AC;&#x153;indexes and signatures of the archaicâ&#x20AC;? in the up-to-date, because what was once instilled in the code is still present and active28 , either clearly manifestly or latently.

Dance after dance ack to the â&#x20AC;&#x153;essence of performanceâ&#x20AC;?. Contemporaneity in dance, integrated in the very term of the discipline, does not only point to a certain period of time on the timeline, but also on the structural foundation of dance on temporality. Stepping away from the interpretation of contemporaneity as a period, French philosopher FrĂŠdĂŠric Pouillaude links dance inextricably with â&#x20AC;&#x153;a neutral simultaneity, a contingent coexistenceâ&#x20AC;?29 .

It is precisely the possibility for a random coexistence of different entities under the same umbrella signifier (contemporaneity) that is the reason why neutral simultaneity needs to be backed by a common reason for their coexistence; simultaneity needs to be reduced to a content shared by all the coexisting entities or bound by

B

26 Lepecki, p. 126. Cfr. Protopapa, p. 172.

27 Giorgio Agamben, â&#x20AC;&#x17E;Ĺ to je suvremenost?â&#x20AC;? (â&#x20AC;&#x153;What is the Contemporary?â&#x20AC;?), translated by Ivan Molek, GoloÄ&#x2021;a (Nudities), Meandarmedia, Zagreb, 2010, 18â&#x20AC;&#x201C;31, p. 20.

28 Agamben, p. 28.

29 Pouillaude, p. 127, emphasis in original.

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity it. Accordingly, at some point â&#x20AC;&#x153;a genuine communityâ&#x20AC;?3 0 needs to be established. Since dance is, as mentioned many times, heterogeneous and since the components in this heterogeneity are not hierarchized, but there is a certain hybridisation, and body action is highlighted, a dance work cannot survive away from the scene the way, for instance, a drama can, although even drama survives away from the stage only partly. Furthermore, all until a dance piece is performed in front of the audience, it cannot be accomplished as a performative work, i.e. a work of art (oeuvre), because only a targeted and express exchange between a performer and an observer can engender â&#x20AC;&#x153;a third objectâ&#x20AC;?, ensuring prerequisites for a work of art31 . In a genuine community there is no transfer of meaning among its members, a performance is a live tissue that belongs neither to the performer nor to the observer. The community is established by simultaneous being in the space of the performance and the fact that every member of this temporary community is in a situation of unique participation in the performance, but what they read or read into is not mutually shared.

In order to get from a live tissue to a work of art, gesture is key. According to Nancy, it is â&#x20AC;&#x153;something other than significationâ&#x20AC;?, â&#x20AC;&#x153;a sensible dynamism that precedes, accompanies or succeeds meaning or signification, but it is sensible sense [sens sensible]â&#x20AC;?32 , and â&#x20AC;&#x153;at the endless end of the gesture, there is not entirely a pure nothingness of signification, there is a sign, but a sign in the sense of a signal, a signal of somethingâ&#x20AC;?33 . This signal is located outside of the work, that tab that separates the work with a use of its own and art. Also, this signal makes a genuine community possible, not by petrifying the meaning into the ultimate sense, but by stimulating â&#x20AC;&#x153;a free play of signifiersâ&#x20AC;?.

Analysing recent events and artistic preoccupations, it seems as though we are entering a period after dance, a period without dancing, and also possibly without art.

The exhausting dance seems to have faced us against a wall, but the power of transformation of dance as its permanent quality should be borne in mind. Instead of exhausting movement, we should lean on â&#x20AC;&#x153;possibilising danceâ&#x20AC;?, an idea explored by choreographer and dance researcher Efrosini Protopapa through Steve Connorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concept of â&#x20AC;&#x153;chronic fatigueâ&#x20AC;?. Choreographers/authors, as well as dancers/authors, feel saturated by a certain type of dance or movement, but saturation does not lead to

the abandonment of movement, chronic fatigue does not exhaust the possibilities of dancing, but rather opens new options.3 4 Possibilising dance defies contemporary (or still modernist) demand of the new, which is credited both by labelling and by categorising dance according to its relation to movement. The space of the possibilities proposed by possibilising dance â&#x20AC;&#x153;is in a constant process of renewal by its very nature, and therefore does not allow for trends or tendencies to be fixed and then replaced by new onesâ&#x20AC;?35 .

Accordingly, the contemporaneity of contemporary dance is upheld by performances or performative events that cut to the core of dance, those focusing on the structure of its temporality, on the existence of movement in the moment and on sharing this moment with a genuine community. In the recent Croatian production, the first such prominent piece was the performative event Glacier (GleÄ?er)3 6 by Pavle Heidler, Ana Horvat, Silvia Marchig and Sonja Pregrad, labelled by the authors as a performance, i.e. performances, denying representation, rejecting conceptuality and predetermined content, dropping the choreographic formation of movement or space, at the same time underlining the importance of coexisting in the space of the performance. Embarking on the project, they immediately entered the performance, perceiving every rehearsal as a performance, performing it without even agreeing on what are performing.

Then they filtered out which materials were important for each particular performance and performativity in general. Day in and day out, coming into each new performance with information and experience from the previous performance. Embracing the fact that movement is elusive in time, just like time itself, the authors disjoint the performance by depicting the micro-level of its internal mechanism. They extend the moment, stressing its equivocation, its potentiality, on the possibility for something yet to happen and define the future course of events. But choreographic framing is not even then activated; the events run according to an internal logic of performance, an internal principle deriving from spatial relations of the bodies and from the sense of the other.

In the performance there are no more or less important elements, everything is translated into sensory information, everything is good enough to be persisted on and acknowledged performatively â&#x20AC;&#x201C; piling up found objects, imaginary phone calls, unfinished sentences, random

30 31 32 33

34 Protopapa, p. 180.

35 Protopapa, p. 181.

36 Light design: SaĹĄa FistriÄ&#x2021;. Executive production: Nina KriĹžan.

Production: Kik Melone. Co-production: Zagreb Youth Theatre.

Premiere: 16 September 2015 at Zagreb Youth Theatre.

Pouillaude, ibid.

Pouillaude, ibid.

Nancy, p. 97.

Nancy, p. 98.

Movements 25 _ 45

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of

Our Contemporaneity

sequences, accidental touches. All the while the observer choses what to watch and how to respond and how to adopt an experience that makes sense to him.

Also, Pavle Heidlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s performative practices, based on sharing performative strategies and know-how and opposing the ephemerality of movement by the longevity of the process and stressing the act of transformation. Explorations in principle consist of a repetition of a movement, word, sound or action until its original content is depleted and its meaning is changed. Here we shall take a second to observe two practices performed in our country, The Sun Practice (SunÄ?eva praksa), part of the event called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Behind the Sunâ&#x20AC;?, he repeated, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Where Everything is Everything Elseâ&#x20AC;?37 and The Cosmic Dust Practice (Praksa kozmiÄ?ke praĹĄine)3 8 . In parallel, Heidler worked

37 Concept author: Pavle Heidler. Performed by: Pavle Heidler and Bruno IsakoviÄ&#x2021;. The performance was made in association with Eleanor Campbell, with whom Heidler originally performed it on 12 May 2012 at the Monty Theatre in Antwerp, as part of the PARTSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ninth generation student graduation tour. The second part of the Behind the Sun Series project had an encore on 2 June 2013 at the 30 th Dance Week Festival.

38 Premiere: 22 September 2015 at Ganz New Festival (Ganz novi festival), &TD Theatre.

< Kik Melone, Glacier. In the photo: Sonja Pregrad and Pavle Heidler. Photo: Ivana Slunjski >

46 _ Kretanja 25

on The Moon Practice (MjeseÄ?eva praksa)39 . It is relevant for performative practices that they are at some point performed in front of the audience in order to be artistically acknowledged as a particular work. Otherwise they would remain forever confined by the limits of the intimate experience of the ensemble performing the practice, captured in a zone of self-sufficiency of their own. The Sun Practice is a sound, or more accurately a verbal practice. It originates from uttering a word whose meaning changes in relation to the sound and in relation to language, from the performerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s minimal to maximal level of involvement.

The development of sound is monitored on the physical level, from the tension of the vocal chords, to muscle tone and exhale, and change in the meaning is caused by an error, which is then persisted on and which develops the performance further. In The Cosmic Dust Practice a relationship is being built between the performer and the audience by re-enacting the performerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal history of tiny, rejected or repressed memories. The performer 39 In line with the rule of the practice, the Tras collective performed the event Of People at the Improspections festival (Improspekcije) at &TD Theatre in 2014, but the practice was to a large extent abandoned. With participation of: Petra Chelfi, Martina NevistiÄ&#x2021;, Ivana PavloviÄ&#x2021;, Nina SakiÄ&#x2021;, Karolina Ĺ uĹĄa, Ilse Ghekiere and Pavle Heidler.

Ivana Slunjski: Dance of Our Contemporaneity is standing in front of the audience with his heritage, connects awareness with the body and builds his practice by storytelling, reading and narrating, assuming the risky situation of remaining on the scene because he is only offering the audience a performative frame and a blank page of the performative event.

In a doubly labelled event, an exhibition and a performance, The Carnival Tent Rusts on the Evening Breeze â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Un/packing the Objecthood (Karnevalski ĹĄator hrÄ&#x2018;a na veÄ?ernjem povjetarcu â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ras/pakiranje predmetnosti)4 0 , Sonja Pregrad is exploring the materiality of performance, defining herself and audience as objects of the exhibition/performance. Presence, time, relationships, emotions, actions, movement, voice are also objects.

This kind of objects opposes real objects â&#x20AC;&#x201C; objects borrowed from audience members, the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childhood diary, sugar cubes, clothes from the bankrupt Kamensko factory etc. Treating specific objects and abstract objects like real objects, The Carnival Tent endorses ontological flatness as a chance to compensate for the difference.

40 Created and performed by: Sonja Pregrad. Graphic design: Dora Ä?urkesac. Project associates: Nicole Hewitt, Nives SertiÄ&#x2021;, Marina PetkoviÄ&#x2021; Liker. Zagreb premiere: 14 July 2015 at Miros lav KraljeviÄ&#x2021; Gallery.

Objects are not expendable, there is always a surplus which triggers transformation into anot her object, another process, another context. Dance as the most abstract object of The Carnival Tent, the most visible in translating a narrative object, writing down a sentence on the wall with ordinary movement in time into physical movement in space, combines different perceptions of time and space.

Another one to mention is an almost three-hour piece Variations on Sensitive (Varijacije o osjetnom)41 by Marjana KrajaÄ?, in which duration indeed becomes sensory, tactile, the performance is slowed down to the level of non-action, time condenses down to a point. After a break from the implacable beat of time, Marjana KrajaÄ? takes us back to a visible choreographic principle and aestheticized danceness.

Knowing the current variability of contemporary dance, a strive towards performing an often non-dance action, i.e. separating dancing and choreography, regardless of whether we ascribe such a state of dance after conceptual to trend, to a response to capitalist economy, to dance resistance to choreographic subjection or to yet incomprehensible reasons, could really be interpreted as a short interlude or as a new chance for a swing that will revitalise the movement and henceforth open the door to choreographic aspirations and re-evaluation of their relations. Regardless of how we perceive changes in dance, dance and dancing, essentially anchored in movement, movement in space and movement with time, do not languish, always conquering new spaces of the possible.

English translation: Ivana OstojÄ?iÄ&#x2021;

< Kik Melone, Glacier. In the photo: Silvia Marchig and Sonja Pregrad. Photo: Ivana Slunjski >

41 Created and choreographed by: Marjana KrajaÄ?. Performed by: Lana Hosni, Irena Mikec, Katarina RiloviÄ&#x2021;, Irena TomaĹĄiÄ&#x2021;, Mia Zalukar. Production: Sodaberg Choreography Laboratory. Premiere: 18 October 2014 at BaÄ?va Gallery of Croatian Association of Visual Artists in Zagreb.

Movements 25 _ 47