Maska - Volume 29, Issue 163-164, 2014

The themed section of this issue of Maska - Movements in Contemporary Dance II - is based on a very specific event: in mid-2012, the then Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia led by Minister Žiga Turk - following the instructions of the right-wing Prime Minister Janez Janša and under strong pressures from the Minister of Finance, Janez Šušteršič, and the newly passed Fiscal Balance Act - abolished the Centre of Contemporary Dance Arts, the first public institute in the field of contemporary dance in Slovenia, established after a long struggle under the previous, liberal government in 2011. The frustration faced by the Slovenian contemporary dance scene raised several issues, including that of the historisation of contemporary dance in Slovenia. What are the specific materials, stories, records and evidence that contemporary dance in Slovenia can present to decision makers whose policies choreograph very sensitive artistic and cultural microorganisms in a context where artistic practices cannot be implemented without public support? What can contemporary dance use to prove its existence?

Following the discovery and exploitation of oil, from the 1930s onwards Kuwait City became an architectural playground. Originally designed mainly by Western visionaries in order to implant into and impose onto this part of the Gulf region what they understood by modernity and the modern craft of architecture. In 2012 Kuwait participated at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition for the first time. Under the curatorship of Zahra Ali Baba, a team of architects, sound designers and visual artists developed a contribution that was not only quite experimental but also very political. Their work sought to illustrate the multiplicity of Kuwait and soon developed into a critical investigation and re-appropriation of the ambivalent history of Kuwait City as well as the whole country in the 20th century.

Attempting to think about the future of Slovene contemporary dance, Maska's forum took as its starting point the document prepared in 1994 by the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia (CDAS), which states the goals and the annual plan of the association. The aim and the purpose of the forum and the follow-up discussion was to critically examine and reflect upon what points in the programme, written two decades ago, have been realised and to delineate how to think about the "future" of the abolished Center of Contemporary Dance Arts (CCDA) as the first public institution in the contemporary dance area in Slovenia - a future that never came to exist. The forum looked carefully into which plans from the 1994 document are still topical as well as ways in which to think about the future of the field that would go beyond the existing frames of cultural politics and institutional regulation of the sector. The forum enabled artists and theoreticians who have left an indelible imprint on the contemporary dance field in Slovenia to present their proposals, views and to provide insight and commentary.

The public institute Centre of Contemporary Dance Arts (CCDA) was established in Slovenia in 2011, whose purpose was the strategic expanding of rehearsal infrastructure, the final institutionalisation of contemporary dance and the promotion of its international visibility. Despite noble work from Igor Teršinar and Matjaž Farič as acting managers, the CCDA struggled to address the multitude of problems facing contemporary dance in Slovenia. In 2012, the right-wing government led by Janez Janša abolished CCDA on the grounds of the reducing budgetary expenses. Nevertheless, hope still remains for the revival of the Centre of Contemporary Dance Arts in Slovenia, and the preservation of Slovenia's cultural history.

The article consists of two parts: the first part attempts to demonstrate how the inability to cooperate and the conflicted atmosphere between Pia and Pino Mlakar and the circle of Meta Vidmar and her students was imported to Slovenia from the German dance space and is the legacy of the dissent between Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, who had strongly differing views on the relationship between contemporary dance and dance institutions; and the second part describes the career path of Ksenija Hribar, her work in Great Britain and the experience she gained at LCDS and LCDT, as a basis for the deviation from joint efforts in the establishment of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia.

The article offers a brief survey and description of education in the field of contemporary dance in Slovenia from the beginning of the 20th century until today. Prior to the Second World War, training programmes in the field of contemporary dance were mainly run by private schools, whereas the key problems after the war were their nationalisation and institutionalisation, which Meta Vidmar, the heir and successor of German dance expressionism in Slovenia, resisted in her own peculiar way. Until the 1980s, the field of dance education was mainly represented and cultivated in elementary schools; it was only at the end of the 1990s that a secondary-school programme of contemporary dance was finalised and accredited, and, in 2010, a first-cycle Bologna course at the Dance Academy, followed by a secondcycle Bologna course at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT), were introduced, with which the educational vertical has been finally completed in full (perfected). However, the weak complementarity of individual educational programmes remains a problem to be tackled.

The article examines different genres of dance journalism from the period before the Second World War and after it. It records the proliferation of dance theory and the introduction of new concepts and methods since the 1970s, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and follows the increase in writing about dance through 2005.

The article, drawing from a limited set of data, briefly summarises the changes in the status of the precarious worker in the field of contemporary dance over the last 50 years, starting with the early 1960s, when the first Slovenian dancer was granted the status of "freelance artist". From 1979 and 1989 and after Slovenia's independence, we witness an extraordinary growth of statuses of freelance artists in all fields of art; parallel with this growth, the name of the status of precarious workers in the field of art and culture constantly changes in accordance with the ruling ideology.

The article follows the genealogy of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia, whose establishment took almost 10 years (1985-1994). It draws from the documents and materials available in order to stress the changes in the thinking on contemporary dance, detect the need for the professionalisation of the field in the 1980s and observe that the circle of creators of Dance Theatre Ljubljana established the Association in 1994 without the participation of the creators of expressive dance in Slovenia.

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.

Both the jury and audience of the 6th Slovenian Contemporary Dance Festival Gibanica 2013 were most impressed by the productions that the official selectors included in their programme, "A Revolt of Details". This positive reception testifies that the programming of art-even in extremely "curatorial times"-does not necessarily lead to mass ennui in its reception or effect. The article treats upon very different performances from the festival: they move on the edge of minimalism (Are Made of This, The Very Delicious Piece), through ascetic multimedia (Double), or they devote themselves to the body, addressing it through dance (Transland, Awaiting Resonance), revolt (Ballet of Revolt), personal reflection (Eden) or the leaving behind of civilization (The Other At The Same Time).

Using various approaches, this article attempts to explicate the phenomenon of the performance Tulkudream by Tanja Zgonc, its unique intertwinement of Tibetan Buddhism and the method of butoh; drawing on its specificity, the text offers a review of the contemporary position of butoh and its topicality, while it also investigates whether or not it is possible to use butoh to actualise some theories of dance. In so doing so, the article relies especially on the application of the "autonomous body of dance", the concept with a longstanding tradition in the history of dance theory.

This review of the book Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity (a compilation of lectures given by prominent theorists at an international symposium at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen in 2010) tries to outline correlations and differences between the heterogeneous essays in this anthology. The contributions discuss and re-think the political potential of modern and contemporary dance as well as of social movements and choreographies in the age of Post-Fordism. They mark out the disrupting effects of specific choreographic methods and performances and describe the transformative potentiality of certain movements in the current sociopolitical fabric so desperately absorbed by economic paradigms.

With an approach that strictly distinguishes between collective and individual operation in a public space, Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović open the discussion of public sphere performative acts and test the connections between ideological performative acts by group formations and individuals with social order and the possibility of changing them. The broadly set starting points also expose the loosely addressed issuesthat can be used as guidelines in further research: the application of theses in the field of collective operation upon the individualistic social system and a precise confrontation with the pluralism found in the neo-liberal democracy, the intertwining operation of ideology in performative acts with the power that mobilises the performative acts, and the connection between the individualistic and group tendencies in designing and redesigning the public sphere.