November 2023 – DO-PO-DO

In partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, with which Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia has been creating the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archives since 2018, we organised the seminar Dance Histories in Practice – Selected Aspects of Archiving and Historicization of Dance. This seminar aimed to share good practices, standardized and innovative methodologies, and approaches to dance archiving with our collaborators, as well as various multi- and trans-disciplinary derivatives through which archival documentation was historicized, recorded, and transformed (covering visible and invisible aspects of dance work from the studio to education and completed stage works). The seminar sought to address dance works, problems, issues, and solutions that dance archiving and historicizing confront us with, focusing on their temporal and material aspects. At the seminar, we shared our internal working problems and evolving decisions with the public, opening up our work to further questions.

The production “Desire to make a solid history will end up in failure” by choreographer Igor Koruga premiered at the 2023 edition of its annual Kondenz Contemporary Dance and Performance Festival in Belgrade.

The starting point for the project was the question: ‘How can archiving dance become an artistic practice?’ Koruga’s explorations led to a transgenerational exchange with six former dancers and performers, who now primarily work as choreographers and directors in the local independent dance scene: Nela Antonović, Anđelija Todorović, Jelena Jović, Tanja Pajović, Boris Čakširan and Sanja Krsmanović Tasić. Together, these six artists create an “archive in motion”, embodying movements, experiences, memories and oral histories from the many artistic works they created during their long careers, which remain insufficiently documented and are in danger of being forgotten – especially at a time when there is no official institutional framework for archiving the local dance scene.

By questioning the physical, social, emotional, economic, ideological, and other (mostly invisible) vulnerabilities behind their cultural and artistic work, they also re-examine the tactics, principles, (re)positioning, and contradictions of their survival and resilience as a form of resistance, criticism, and solidarity amidst the turbulent socio-political circumstances of the past forty years.

What do their bodies reveal and conceal? How does the impermanence of the archive reflect the impermanence of the dance itself? How does independent dance endure as a relevant social, cultural, and political tool for reshaping the social body? The attempt to create a definitive history will undoubtedly fail. The only question is, for whom?

Read the publication here.

Month: November 2023

Dance Histories in Practice
Seminar on Archiving and Historicization of Dance

Desire to make a solid history will end up in failure by Igor Koruga