This exhibition represents long-term research on the development of a digital archive of contemporary dance and performing arts of the post-Yugoslavian region. As that is an ongoing process, we do not think of this manifestation as a final act or actualization of the material, but as a step towards sharing the relations we are building with the materials. We are showing it as a(n) (un)working material, as a research space that is in its potentiality, not being there yet, or finished.
We consider the archive as a living and developing temporality that is (can be) performed as an intersection of pluralities of space(s), memory, working materials, body of knowledge, history, presence, future, friends(hips), policies, politics, resistance, resilience, love, enemies, silence, protests, dissonances, socialities, togethering, and much more that dance preserves, holds, produces as imagination and perspective.
Therefore, the exhibition is one way of (un)working, reading, and sharing those intersections which are in front of us, with us at the moment. We think through this archive of the art of dance that the realm of aesthetics separates our dance contexts and reduces them mostly to theater products and kinetic differences which have never been our case of common interests. Our collaboration and interest have always been in the dance field which informs us about the arts, culture, society, and politics.
Besides aesthetics, we find the realm of dance work (as labor) more inclusive, broader, solidary, common, and challenging. Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Socialist Yugoslavia and After proposes the topics of (1) choreographing feminism, gender and desires, (2) formations, relations, and interventions, and (3) bordering and transgressing dance.
Through what we have presented here, we explore the extended notion of dance (and choreography). However, we also tackle the problematics of unworking, proposing it as the socio-political ontology of dance practices. Bodies’ movements, presentations, relations, and configurations become a locus of resistance that undermines and undoes the logic of operativity, that is to say, the production of planned, calculated, measured, final product/meaning/narrative, or the scored choreographies of bodies in accordance to the logic of origin/destiny, nature/necessity, essence/telos. In this way, dance bodies become means without ends, ongoing processes, and gestures that signify not a hidden or transcendent sense, but their own ongoing reconfigurations, becomings, resistances, excesses, and rematerializations, and the worlds they enact performatively and relationally. Dancing bodies thus shatter the political regimes and logics of operativity in (post-)Yugoslav contexts, by crossing borders, traveling through geopolitically marked territories, pushing the boundaries of bodily and gendered norms, moving with the unruly pulses of desire, materializing new collective forms of co-existence, and challenging the codes of aesthetics and its divisions.
With this exhibition we are interested in communicating a contemporary dance that engages with the potentiality of the body and its materiality, stemming from its interactions with the political, social, economic, environmental, and other realms. The body exists in a state of continuous potentiality, it is an agonistic body that redefines and redevelops through relations (including with itself).
The exhibition's chief curators are Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski and Rok Vevar and researchers are Slavcho Dimitrov, Milica Ivić, Tea Kantoci, Igor Koruga, Iva Nerina Sibila, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Rok Vevar, Jasmina Založnik. Curatorial support: Jasna Jakšić, MSU.
Within the exhibition frame, we will present the (Non)Aligned Dance Archive - NADA, the first digital archive of dance and performing arts in the post-Yugoslav region, open and accessible to researchers, artists, and writers at www.nada.nomaddanceacademy.si
The exhibition is accompanied by the book "Bodies of Dance: Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After" edited by Jasmina Založnik and Nika Arhar. It is supposed to articulate, through its historical-theoretical position, the political, cultural, and artistic framing in which dance practices in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia emerged in the previous 100 years.
The exibition and the book are the conclusion of the long-term project (Non)Aligned Movements, carried by the NOmad Dance Academy partners: Staion Service for contemporary dance, Lokomotiva, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Nomad Dance Academy Croatia, Object of Dance, and Tanzfabrik Berlin.
A massive thank you to all the artists, collectives, organizations, and colleagues from across the ex-Yugoslav region who selflessly shared with us their precious archive material!
Thank you to all who supported this project: the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of North Macedonia, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the City of Ljubljana, the Ministry of Public Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia, the City of Skopje, Goethe Institute, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC, Culture for Democracy and Hartefakt Fund, the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia.
