The Birth of Festivals out of the Spirit of the Alternative Scenes of the 1980s: International Programmes and Festivals (from the field of Contemporary Dance and Performing Arts)

The article briefly describes the festival landscape in the field of performing arts and contemporary dance in Slovenia since World War II. The beginnings of contemporary dance festivals reach back to the mid-1970s, when the Kinetikon Cultural Association establishes Ljubljana Dance Days, although foreign dance companies had come to Ljubljana before that (José Limón, 1957, and a range of European and American dance companies at the turn of 1960s and 1970s). After Slovenia's independence, we witness the first wave of festival foundings in the mid-1990s, and the other after 2000. The article also attempts to outline the reasons for the increased volume of production in the field of contemporary dance art in the 1980s.