PRE-EVENTS

East Dance Academy – Pre-events

28 October, Cankarjev dom, M3/4 Hall
19.00
Ana Vujanović, A Tiger’s Leap
Lecture and presentation of interviews with choreographers from Serbia

The lecture will be opened with an explanation of the methodological principles employed in the research work "A Tiger’s Leap into the Past" (evacuated genealogy) by Saša Asentić and Ana Vujanović. A Tiger’s Leap is aimed at historically articulating the past of contemporary local dance. Its point of departure is the following set of questions: Why don’t we have a local history of contemporary dance? How do we use the notion “contemporary dance”? Is it a universal umbrella term for all artistic and cultural practices of bodily movement of a certain currency or not? Are there other names in the local past that signify the same or similar practices? What can we identify as local dance history? Why wasn’t it called contemporary dance at the time? Can we call it contemporary dance now?... Through interviews with participants, actors, and observers of the scene, the authors offer a vast rhizomatic network of ideas, concepts, images, stories, experiences, and remembrances for the audience’s interpretations – depending on their own historical moments, contexts, and subjectivities.

The second part of the lecture will use the network of the past and construct a provisional theoretically-based history of contemporary dance in Serbia. The task is to identify what was in the place of contemporary dance in the past and how it was socially-conditioned in the specific context of a socialist country. This part of the lecture will start with Maga Magazinović's eurhythmics and SOKOLI's “slets”, and then go through their transformations in the age of socialism, through amateur dance, folklore dance, communist “slets” and parades, body art and performance art, modern ballet of "small scenes", choreo-drama, physical theatre, to nowadays when – alongside the transition towards a capitalist democratic country – we have contemporary dance as a particular artistic discipline and art world.

Ana Vujanović is performance theoretician and editor of the magazine Walking Theory.


12 November, Cankarjev dom, M3/M4 Hall
19.00
Valerie Briginshaw and Ramsay Burt; History, Memory, and the Dancing Body

Through exploring contemporary dance works and dance film from the last decade that engage with memory in different ways, we consider ways of rethinking history and temporality. We are concerned with how certain experiences of the dancing body, read in conjunction with concepts from the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, can suggest ways of thinking about temporality as we experience or sense it as duration, and consequently about rethinking history. This means focusing on the process of dancing and understanding movement, not as something that happens at instants in time, but in the intervals between, where affects, intensities, and sensations -- triggered by memories – fluctuate. In this sense, the dancing body can function as a site of cultural memory. Understanding dancing in this processual way foregrounds its openness and immanent dynamism, force, or energy – its potential for action – allowing us to think of these in-between spaces as sites of resistance. Through focusing on the openness of certain dance experiences, we identify interdependencies between dancers, and between dancers and beholders, which we suggest can point towards ethical relations with others and a politics to come. The lecture and workshops will be illustrated with video excerpts from the dances and dance films we discuss.

Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University.
Valerie Briginshaw was a lecturer at the Dance Department at the University of Chichester and choreographer.


12 – 14 November, Cankarjev dom, M3/M4 Hall
Valerie Briginshaw and Ramsay Burt, Exploring History, Memory, and Repetition Through Recent Dance Examples (workshop)

The workshop will  focus around viewing complete dances and excerpts from key works, these may include: Ellis Island (Meredith Monk 1981), Three (Isaac Julien 1999), Once (Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker 2002), Both Sitting Duet (Jonathan Burrows and Mateo Fargion 2002), Remember to Forget (Emilyn Claid 2003),Yippeee!!! (Lea Anderson 2006), and Small Boats (Isaac Julien 2007).
Viewing these works – and, in some cases, their source material –  in conjunction with readings from selected theoretical extracts, independent research tasks, and student presentations will allow us to:
provide tools for rethinking temporality experienced as duration by dancers and beholders.
find new ways of positioning ourselves in relation to history and memories.
investigate the sensations, affects, and intensities involved in the process of experiencing dancing.
see how choreographers use repetition productively to reveal differences and the potential for either action or change.
identify interdependencies involved in the dance experience that can suggest ethical relations with others.


19 November
Maska, performing arts journal, no. 117–118 (autumn 2008),  “history – experience – archive”

The last issue of Maska for 2008 deals with questions of history, archive, and related artistic strategies and actions. The authors, which include Marta Verginella, Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, Nataša Peteršin-Bachelez, Ana Vujanović, Heike Roms,  Franz Anton Kramer and Andre Lepecki, analyze the status of history of contemporary art in the context of Eastern Europe and the problems with its construction and writing; they reflect on methods of exploring and archiving the history of artistic practices and focus on, both, the subject of archiving in contemporary art as well as on the constructions and manipulations of history through various artistic procedures.