Maska - Volume 28, Issue 159-160, 2014

The current editorial board of Maska first raised the issue of the concerns of contemporary dance already in March 2012; almost exactly a year ago, this was followed by the first drafts for the present issue and finally by the decision that the contemporary dance issue should be addressed thoroughly and systematically. The long and highly inspiring discussions with editorial board members gradually provided the focus for our contemplation, understanding and reading of dance through social contexts. We set an ambitious task of drawing the views of contemporary dance from different perspectives: historical, educational, infrastructural, performative, curatorial, production, theoretical, conceptual, interpretational… that are rhizomatically embedded within inter-genre and international transitions. Our broadly defined topic about the movements in contemporary dance will spill over into the next issue of Maska to be published in Spring 2014.

Starting point for this article is William Gibson's image of locative art in his two books Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010). Gibson creates a very clear and comprehensive picture of the term 'locative art'. The article compares this purely fictional image with the appearance of locative art and poetry in reality. It reviews projects like 'Objects of Desire' (2008) by Ludic Society, 'AndOrDada' (2008) and 'Sniff_jazzbox' (2008) by AND-OR and the very constricting project 'Constraint City. The Pain of Everyday Life' (2008) by Gordan Savicic. The project 'Before the Satellite Detects You' (2010) by AND-OR works with similar premises and makes the player aware of being constantly tracked: He has to hide in house entrances, under bridges, roofs and in the signal-shade of bigger buildings on his path through town. These projects show the dangers of an electronic data space that offers possibilities to amass personal data and set up a tight control via satellite- and other networks.

This article distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Evelien Lohbeck's artwork noteboek (2008). Reversed remediation is an aesthetic strategy that subverts media critics Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's notion of 'remediation' in their eponymous article, which serves a historical desire for immediacy. Countering media theorist Marshall McLuhan's fear, in Understanding Media ([1964] 2003), of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium, reversed remediation creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one's perception of the world.

The beginnings of ballet as theatrical dance coincide with the beginnings of recording movement, at first in the form of notational systems, which reach their peak at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it is becoming increasingly evident that dance notation systematization is a utopian task. Each recording of movement proves to be a unique analytical system allowing insights both in movement representations of a certain time and at the same time in the problematic of movement as such. The recording of contemporary dance outside the ballet institution is thus defined primarily with the particularity of own (auto)biographical writing and with education and the establishment of dance schools that see to the preservation of dance languages. Both these moments are important for the development of Slovene contemporary dance; whereas the present recording of dance is entirely subjected to particular patterns of seeing and intellectualisation of the seen.

Dancer, choreographer and dance pedagogue Ingo Diehl gives an interview about the network project Tanzplan Deutschland, which, between 2005 and 2010, connected dance schools, universities, academies, artists and local communities. The German Federal Cultural Foundation has approved funds of EUR 12.5 million for the project for a period of five years: the result was the participation of 70 internationally renowned artists, 70 universities, 180 participants. How to address politicians, the broader public and the local community? Ingo Diehl talks about networking, solidarity and the common good. And about how contemporary dance can contribute to all this.

One question is becoming more and more necessary nowadays: to what extent are there alternatives to the given relations of production? In what sense can the forces of artistic production escape an encompassing appropriation of their potential, albeit always only particularly and temporarily? Dealing with the recent crisis of financial capital does not necessarily mean, as some exponents of former postoperaism put it, a revolutionary exodus of living labor away from capital absolutely, but rather hints at the potential of post-Fordist virtuosity itself and its alternative modes of production – its potential to reconfigure their relations instead of overthrowing them.

The article approaches the topic of artistic practices and research by providing an overview of the basic terms (practice, research, autonomy, laboratory, process, result, product) associated with such form of artistic creation. Through this and the three focuses - (1) reasons for the popularisation of such artistic activities, (2) their possible definitions and (3) the question of their value - the author comes to the conclusion that artistic practices and research are not opposed to 'final' artworks, but that the (creative) process and the result likewise constitute different aspects of the same phenomenon - creation.

The article examines the project 'Musée de la danse'/'Brouillon - An exhibition in motion' as an experiment on the innovative forms that our 'new institutions' could have according to Paolo Virno. It argues that through its 'sketches' of movement and the spatial and temporal qualities involved in them, Brouillon ('sketch' in English) constructed forms that remained constantly open and on the move, while registering a pass from the utopian togetherness of the united 'we' that 'moves together freely' of the 1960s, to today's ethics of 'doing a project with others' (Laermans). In this way the project constituted an insightful proposition of dance regarding alternative production and curation models, and the way we can meet, work and move with others today.

This article tries to rethink the ways in which the bundle of audio–video documentation and written material entitled A Choreographer’s Score approaches the early dance and choreographic practice of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her contemporary dance group Rosas. As I wish to propose, this hybrid bundle, which came about as a dialogical meeting between the aforementioned choreographer and the theoretician Bojana Cvejić, remains ‘faithful' to the materiality of dance by not inscribing it in normative registers of writing on dance and dance-writing, but by attempting the rethinking of the contextual redefinitions of both – and other – dance-specific concepts precisely through the practice of writing on dance.

With its initial desire to articulate contemporary dance history in Eastern Europe, the collection Parallel Slalom steps directly into the moment of the encounter between history and the present, the East and the West, and it touches upon numerous ideological categories that appear in these encounters as a consequence of the hierarchical matrix of the western narrative. It explores dance in its emancipatory and transformative potential as a constant articulation and re-articulation; it emphasizes the potentiality of heterogeneity of local practices, contexts, principles and criteria; and it directs mental efforts towards the possibilities of creating one's own, specific and potentially rebellious or innovative forms of life and work.