(Post)Socialist Dance: A Search for Hidden Legacies

This book sets out to search for the Second World - the (post)socialist context - in dance studies and examines the way it appears and reappears in today’s globalized world. It traces hidden and invisibilized legacies over the span of one century, probing questions that can make viewers, artists, and scholars uncomfortable regarding dance histories, memories, circulations and production modes in and around the (post)socialist world. Our understanding of ’dance’ is broad and inclusive. The contributions delve into a variety of dance practices (folk, traditional, ballet, modern, contemporary), modes of dance production (institutionalization processes, festival-making and market logics), and dance circulations (between centres and peripheries, between different genres and styles). The main focus is Eastern Europe (including Russia) but the book also addresses Cuba and China. The hope is for theoretical developments engendered by this focus on the Second World to be useful when applied to regions outside the book’s scope. Its chapters span a range of lesser-known historical examples from the arts of Yugoslav regions (Magazinovic, Davico and The Legend of Ohrid) to Cuban postrevolutionary artists (Burdsall) and Mongolian Wulmanuqi troupes. The book’s historical examples make the reader aware, too, of the (post)socialist bodies’ influence in today’s dance, including in contemporary dance scenes.
The (post)socialist context promises to be a prosperous laboratory to explore uncomfortable questions of legitimacy. Whose choreographic work is staged as a ’quality’ dance production? Which dance practices are worthy of scholarly study? Which practices are ’valuable enough’ for decent archiving and institutionalization? What are the limits of dance studies’ understanding of what dance is (and what it should be)? In view of reclaiming the Second World through dance, this book thus probes questions that should be asked today but are not easy to answer. We set out to explore questions that dance practitioners, facilitators, critics, and researchers, including ourselves, are often not at ease with either. In raising and discussing these, we intend to restore the role and meaning of dance and to offer necessary utopias for those living in a world torn by multiple crises. Through seeking to answer these questions, the cracks of dance history begin to be sealed, and neglected dance practices are written back into history, provided with the academic recognition that they deserve.

Annelies Van Assche obtained a joint doctoral degree in Art Studies and Social Sciences in 2018 for studying the working conditions of European contemporary dance artists. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies of Ghent University and lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp’s dance department. Her research focuses on the relation between labor and aesthetics in contemporary dance. She is author of Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance. Dancing Precarity (2020) and a member of research group S: PAM, CoDa - European Research Network for Dance Studies and the Young Academy of Flanders.
Dunja Njaradi is an associate professor at the Department of Ethnomusicology (Faculty of Music, Belgrade). She has published a monograph Backstage Economies: Labour and Masculinities in Contemporary European Dance (Chester University Press, 2014) as well as many book chapters, edited collections and monographs in her native Serbian. Her area of expertise includes dance theory, anthropology of dance and ritual performances. She is a member of CoDa - European Research Network for Dance Studies.
Igor Koruga is an independent artist in contemporary dance and choreography working as author, choreographer for stage movement in theatre performances and film, pedagogue and dance dramaturge, and researcher in performing arts theory (published in journals like Maska, Walking theory, Movements, etc.). He performed in various venues in Europe (Dansens Hus, Stockholm; Tanzquartier and Leopold Museum, Vienna; HAU and Uferstudios, Berlin; Kammerspiele, Munich, Bitef Theatre, Belgrade; etc.). Member of the team for archiving performing arts practices of the independent cultural and artistic scene in the Balkan region. Winner of several national awards and international scholarships in dance.
Milica Ivic holds a PhD in Theory of Arts and Media at the University of Arts in Belgrade. She is an independent researcher working in the field of contemporary dance in Serbia, interested in questions of archiving and institutionalization of contemporary dance. Also working as a dance dramaturge. She is a member of a research team for archiving contemporary dance and establishing the first online digital database of contemporary dance practices in former Yugoslavia, in collaboration with Nomad Dance Academy and Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.