Historic Figures: Introduction to Contemporary Dance, workshop

The workshop Introduction to Contemporary Dance provides the spectator with basic reading and contextual tools with which we enter into the process of »reading« and thinking about contemporary dance. Using crucial historical paradigms and their contexts, we will explore the productive and creative turns of contemporary dance in the twentieth century and how they have changed the way we think about and treat dance bodies, space, time, choreographic structures, the instance of the choreographer, dance spectator, dance institutions, etc. We will present pivotal historic and contextual moments in which turns and shifts in the production and creation of contemporary dance works and their conceptions (from performances to studio practices) have emerged. We will also address the ways in which different contemporary dance publics have responded to dance work, how they were produced, cultivated and changed. Our historic lens will cover the period from the transition between the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the historical avant-gardes, to the post Second World War period and the last decades of the twentieth century; from the early modern dance to the conceptual dance or »post-dance«.

Workshop facilitators

Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik, PhD

Approach

Our work will draw on documentary film footage from the collection of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. The workshop will take the form of lectures and discussions. Participants will have the opportunity to attend performances of the 2023 CoFestival, the international festival of contemporary dance, and other productions of Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia at discounted rates (cultural euro).

Place and Time

The twice monthly workshop will be held on Fridays between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. at the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, 1^st floor. In the event that the workshop will not be held on the scheduled date due to objective circumstances, alternative schedules will be arranged.

13 October 2023

27 October 2023

10 November 2023

8 December 2023

Analysis Of Contemporary Dance, workshop

At the workshop Analysis of Contemporary Dance, we will focus on specific works and practices that are more closely related to contemporary artistic practices of the last decades. To a period when contemporary dance departed from the classical forms of modern dance compositions. When the following were introduced into its practices:

• Different models of proceduralisms (new approaches to choreographic productions, composition principles, scores, tasks, etc.).
• Dance started to inhabit alternative spaces or to transform theatres into unusual architectural configurations or to construct specific settings.
• Choreography of objects or setting choreographies among functional spatial tools.
• The transformation of bodies beyond kinetic compositional configurations and the politicisation of bodies.
• Changing the temporality of dance beyond modern stylistic and compositional dispositifs.
• Transforming different social and cultural spaces into sites of specific bodily traces.
• Transforming ready-made dance and corporeal identities (what is dance?) into questions of fundamental dance gestures (choreographic performatives; what does the dance or the body do?).
• Extending the notion of dance materiality from the body to its other forms.
• Starting to engage with other artistic and media practices, etc.

Workshop facilitators

Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik, PhD

Approach

Each session will be based on a particular dance work or a series of examples, which will be shown using videos from the audio-visual collection of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive at Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. It will be based on lectures and discussions. We will invite guests to specific sessions: choreographers, theorists and curators of our local contemporary dance community. Participants will have the opportunity to attend performances of the 2023 CoFestival, the international festival of contemporary dance, and other productions of Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia at discounted rates (cultural euro).

Place and Time

The twice monthly workshop will be held on Fridays between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. at the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, 1^st floor. In the event that the workshop will not be held on the scheduled date due to objective circumstances, alternative schedules will be arranged.

20 October 2023

3 November 2023

17 November 2023

1 December 2023