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. 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 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? What are the limits of dance studies’ understanding of what dance is or 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; questions that dance practitioners, facilitators, critics, and researchers, including ourselves, are often not at ease with either. In doing so, 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 Associate professor at the Department for Ethnomusicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade. She is a dance anthropologist interested in traditional dances, social dances and religious performances and has extensive teaching experience in drama, theatre, dance and anthropology.

Igor Koruga is a freelance artist working within contemporary dance and choreography. He teaches choreography in Belgrade, provides choreographic assistance to theater directors and works as a dance dramaturge. He is part of a research team for archiving contemporary dance by Nomad Dance Academy and Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.

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 institutionalisation of contemporary dance. She is part of a research team for archiving contemporary dance in collaboration with Nomad Dance Academy and Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.