NAVERAN, Isabel de (ed.), Hacer historia<\/em>, CdL: Cuerpo de Letra, published by Mercat de les Flors, Institut del Teatre and Centro Coreogr\u00e1fico Galego, 2010<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many experts agree that contemporary dance emerged in Western societies (Europe and the USA) during the second half of the 20th century; reflecting this fact, many agree, that contemporary dance is conditioned by a democratic society. On the other hand, it is commonly accepted that Eastern societies (communist\/socialist) overslept the second half of the 20th century behind the Iron curtain that divided democratic (capitalist) West and totalitarian (communist) East. So it only stands to reason that there was no contemporary dance in the East. Following this teleological view of history as progress, contemporary dance \u00abexpectedly\u00bb appeared in Eastern societies alongside their transition to democracycapitalism in the 90s and 2000s. There is a prevailing consent not only that contemporary dance appears organically in the new social conditions, but that it is proof of the very democracy of the ex-Eastern societies. Naturally this \u00ablate awaking\u00bb of the East results in its always-being-late in its actual attempts to keep step with the contemporary dance scene of the West.ii A lot of experts are in accordance with many things. And when majority agrees on many \u201cfacts\u201d the river of history may flow smoothly, from its spring to its delta, the future clearly caused by the past\u2026 And here we are, in the present where on the international dance scene, one can see contemporary dance from both the ex-East and the ex-West (although the proportion is still not equal) that now belongs to the borderless (although not quite \u00abhistory-less\u00bb) global society\u2026 Good morning, Mr. Columbus My colleague, performer and cultural worker Sa\u0161a Asenti\u0107, and I have spent a lot of time discussing the (hi)story above. At one point, a question flashed up to us: \u201cIsn\u2019t it quite similar to Columbus\u2019 \u2018discovery\u2019 of America \u2013 a land that had existed for centuries under another (its own) name?\u201d With this \u201cGood morning, Mr. Columbus\u201d, we started the research work A Tiger\u2019s Leap into the Past (evacuated genealogy). The work is a part of Sa\u0161a Asenti\u0107\u2019s larger artistic-research project Indigo Dance, started in 2006, which apart from A Tiger\u2019s Leap consists of the installation\/impossible project proposal BalCan-Can Sussie Dance, and the performance-lecture My Private Bio-politics. Each segment of the project deals with a specific aspect of the structure of the local dance scene and its position in the international \u00abdanceworld\u00bb. A Tiger\u2019s Leap, in particular, deals with the history of contemporary dance in Serbia, and here I will only focus on it with regard to its methodology rather than its content.iii Our Own Tiger\u2019s Leap <\/strong>A Tiger\u2019s Leap Into the Past is aimed at articulating the past of the contemporary local dance in historical terms. Its point of departure is the following set of questions: Why don\u2019t we have a local history of contemporary dance (Why was it never written?) How do we use the notion \u201ccontemporary dance\u201d? Should we operate with the notion as universal umbrella term for all artistic and cultural practices of bodily movement, that have certain currency? Are there other names in the local past that signify the same or similar practices? That is, is there a history of contemporary dance in Serbia at all? What can we identify as local dance history? What did we have in place of the contemporary dance in the past? Why wasn\u2019t it called contemporary dance at the time? Can we call it contemporary dance now? Does it have the right to claim contemporaneity? Is it about the state of affairs or about the right to contemporaneity? Departing from these questions A Tiger\u2019s Leap is done as a series of video interviews with actors, participants, and witnesses of the local dance and performance scene in different periods of the 20th century.iv The work is an open long-term research project without a pre-determined list of interviewees. We simply started with the biggest figure in local dance history (of the first decades of the 20th century), Maga Magazinovi\u0107, and then followed the divergent traces that emerged through the interviews themselves. This way, the work is constantly self-broadening and self-(re)defining through new players mentioned\/invited by those already involved. To all of them we posed more or less same questions grouped around three big issues: \u2022 conditions of work (addressing organizational, technical, financial, educational, and infrastructural circumstances of work in the field of dance and performance on the levels of the state\/city cultural policy, institutional positioning, and personal relations and experiences); \u2022 conceptual framework (addressing concepts, terms, names, and notions with which they operated; artistic influences (persons, styles, techniques, and paradigms); references to the history of ballet and dance; and relations to other artistic fields, as well as to the surrounding social and political contexts); \u2022 public reception of the work (addressing reviews and critical reflections in mass media, theoretical approaches, audience, and general public opinion). This rhizomatically-structured history is based on a twofold formula that I took \u2013 and modified to certain extent \u2013 from Foucault\u2019s new historicismv:<\/p>\n\n\n\n ARCHAEOLOGY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n [It is used as a method of researching many segments, facts, names, opinions, experiences, and agencies present in one context and period in the past, without the idea of historical big (majoritarian) narration, i.e. a red thread that connects all segments into a unified story.]; + LINKS THROUGH TIME [They appeared from within this self-regulating structure as various indirect links, reread( ing) connections, and reversible cause-effect lines.]; = GENEALOGY [It is the provisional and particular result of the linkages that offers chronology of the archaeological layers but without teleological progress (that leads one (former) layer clearly toward another (latter) one)]. In this way, we got a vast rhizomatic network of ideas, concepts, images, stories, experiences, and remembrances (Benjamin\u2019s Eingedenken), offered to the audience\u2019s interpretations depending on their own historical moments, contexts, and subjectivities. This also explains why we did interviews and did not proceed by collecting solid historiographic data \u2013 we both simply do not believe in pure data, the \u00abobjective facts\u00bb, the objects found in the past \u201cas they were\u201d. Thus we foster the subjective perspectives that give meaning to the facts from the position of here and now of the singular historical subjects; therein the facts (e.g. documents, video recordings etc.) are illustrative or demonstrative material added to the history constructed this way. This idea is firmly connected to Walter Benjamin\u2019s conception of history that I proposed as the general political-theoretical methodology of the work. As it is a more complex and more broadly useful issue, I\u2019ll explain it later, after some concrete descriptions of the research work A Tiger\u2019s Leap into the Past. History (of dance) is not given, it should be constructed In the first round we made interviews with Katalin Ladik, poet, actress and performer; Svenka Savi\u0107, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and dance critic; Dubravka Maleti\u0107, choreographer; Sonja Vuki\u0107evi\u0107, choreographer and dancer; Nela Antonovi\u0107, choreo-director; Jovan \u0106irilov, theater scholar and art director of the Bitef festival; Vladimir Kopicl, writer and cultural critic; and Boris Kova\u010d, composer and multi-media artist. To these interviews, we added a video exploration of the book My Life written by Maga Magazinovi\u0107 (philosopher and choreographer), which is an autobiography in a style close to (self-)interview.vi The first public display of the work took place in February 2007 in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad. The video archive had an important interactive element; we placed a big sheet of canvas on the wall that was supposed to be used by the visitors\/spectators of the video archive to draw a map of the history of the contemporary local dance. There was an invitation at the blank canvas: \u201cHistory of dance is not given, it should be constructed\u201d. This was another way (apart from the position we took while interviewing) to invite the actors on the local scene to construct their own history, and because of this we appropriated the representation method of Irwin\u2019s project East Art Mapvii as the highlight of the event. Accordingly, we also included my own self-interview as a live performance in the video exhibition, wherein I served as a guide and gave an introductory word to the exhibition, and also served as a witness and participant in the current dance scene. However, my self-interview is not included permanently in the archive, as I am not \u201cinvited\u201d by the interviewees themselves. As we didn\u2019t close the circle of the possibilities and streams open through the interviews, the work is still ongoing. The art space is not only determined by what it includes, but also, or even more so, by what it excludes For the second round we made \u2013 together with video artist Marta Popivoda \u2013 a cluster of interviews about unrealized local dance and performance projects in the last few decades. This work connected A Tiger\u2019s Leap with another work that Marta Popivoda, Bojana Cveji\u0107, and I made in Graz in 2006 (within Steirischer Herbst): Archiving Performances at the Edge of the Void. We used the principles of the former work (making the invisible visible, including the excluded, affirming the negation) and combined them with the procedures of A Tiger\u2019s Leap (interview, remembrance, storytelling). This time we focused on the incubating period and early years (from the 70s to nowadays), when the contemporary dance scene in Serbia had emerged and been recognized as such. It was displayed as the video installation Recycle Bin \u2013 Archiving Performances at the Edge of the Void in March 2008 in the Magacin u Kraljevica Marka in Belgrade. The interviewees were Jovan \u0106irilov; Vladimir Kopicl; Sonja Vuki\u0107evi\u0107; Katalin Ladik; Nela Antonovi\u0107; Miroslav Benka, theather director; Bojana Cveji\u0107, theorist and dramaturge; Olivera Kova\u010devi\u0107- Crnjanski, dancer and choreographer; Dragana Alfirevi\u0107, performer; and Du\u0161an Muri\u0107, performer and cultural activist. This work aims to show the \u201cother scene\u201d of the positive history written through A Tiger\u2019s Leap. It speaks about non-existing, erased, rejected, impossible or unrealized dance and performance projects, pieces, festivals, venues, educational projects, and networks. These works-to-be\/not-done are situated \u00abon the edge of the void\u00bb of the current situation in the local danceworld. For these proposals, concepts, and models for potential works, their membership to the local dance scene is ambiguous and undecidable, thus concentrating the \u201chistoricity\u201d of the current situation.viii A Public Domain Net Archive The third aspect of the work A Tiger\u2019s Leap is the creation of a free and openaccess online archive, with help of Marta Popivoda.ix Together with the interviews that we already put on the net, it is going to bring video recordings, documents, as well as the interactive provisional\/changeable historical map(s). This part of the project began in October 2008, and its aims are twofold. The first, and more simple, one is to share publicly and for free what we did and obtained as cultural workers. The second, more complex, one is to intervene into those things which \u00abmany agree\u00bb upon, by making the archive as visible as possible through internet browsers. Walter Benjamin\u2019s Political Theory of History I would close the text with some explanations of the political-historical methodology that lies behind this work. A Tiger\u2019s Leap into the Past (evacuated genealogy) is based on and its title directly taken from the last text of intriguing Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, \u00dcber den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History).x This reference shifts our approach from neutral archiving or objective historicizing of the past of the local contemporary dance scene toward critically illuminating aspects of the past that were invisible then, and are still not visible from the perspective of predominant historicization of dance at the global scale. According to Benjamin: \u201cTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it \u2018the way it really was\u2019. \u2026 It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.\u201dxi Therefore we use the form of interview that gives word to subjective perspectives that are not supposed to notify the past the way it really was. On the contrary: they blast the past they speak about out of the continuum of the regular history into the present that is supposed to be changed, transformed, revolutionized through them \u2013 as a legacy for future. It is Benjamin\u2019s \u201ctiger\u2019s leap\u201d that, in his conception of history, reorientates history entirely toward the future. Another important influence that comes from Benjamin\u2019s text is his re-reading of history as \u201cmemory-scene\u201d (Ged\u00e4chtnisszene), wherein actuality becomes the precondition of readability of the historical images. Thus, what we address and challenge here is, above all, the very \u00abactuality\u00bb to which A Tiger\u2019s Leap functions as a reality-check, staging its political structures, power hierarchy, and ownership, not only over products and material infrastructures but also over the concepts, names, and paradigms \u2013 history itself. What is crucial for us here is Benjamin\u2019s notion Eingedenken, often translated as \u201cremembrance\u201d or \u201cmemory\u201d. However, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek assertsxii that Eingedenken cannot be translated simply as remembrance or reminiscence, since with Benjamin Eingedenken is an interested taking over of the past from the position of the oppressed and exploited class and for the sake of its benefit. Reading the oppressed and exploited class as the local dance practice and discourse in global history, the past that A Tiger\u2019s Leap constructs mostly consists of specific and particular memories of the interviewees, who \u00abhere and now\u00bb write the \u00abthere and then\u00bb in a genealogy that is evacuated from the regular history of the contemporary dance scene. It is about re-actualizing \u201cthe depository of historical knowledge\u201d embedded in the memories of those who have been overlooked, erased, rejected, and forgotten. The third important influence to our work was Benjamin\u2019s \u201ctheoretical approach to history\u201d. According to Benjamin\u2019s On the Concept of History, the tiger\u2019s leap is the leap of the present into the past that was already waiting for it, waiting, according to \u017di\u017eek, in order to be established through it. \u017di\u017eek notes that Benjamin was a unique Marxist thinker of that time who considered history as text, as for him the meaning and historical dimension of the events would be decided only afterwards, through their inscriptions into the symbolic network \u2013 into the story of history, I would stress. It is not about a trendy historical relativism, that claims we can never know the past because our understanding always depends on our current knowledge\/position. Benjamin\u2019s key theoretical insight, for \u017di\u017eek, is that it is the present, not the past, which is relativized and remains open for future rewriting through this procedure. The present is, hopefully, a \u201cretroactive force\u201d; it not only re-reads but also writes the past, and thus breaks the homogenous continual time of the official history.xiii (Instead a conclusion): The Tiger is Leaping Around At the very end I would like to take the described methodology and procedure of historization outside the work A Tiger\u2019s Leap into the Past. For me, it is mere an explicit example of them, while the method of tiger\u2019s leap itself has wider scope of usage, both outside this work and outside the specific context of Eastern European dance scene. According to this, I would emphasis the similarities it shares with the works and projects such as: already mentioned East Art Map by Slovenian art group Irwin, which (re)constructs the history of visual arts in Eastern Europe after the WWII; Swedish Dance History by Marten Spangberg, which departures from the statement: \u201cHistory must be written, and those who write it define the future\u201d;xiv What\u2019s Welsh for Performance? by Heike Roms, which explores a constructive character of history of performance art, confronting its history in Welsh with an already accepted canonized history;xv East Dance Academy platform (as well as its specific projects such as Maska\u2019s platform ARTCHIVE \u2013 Contaminated with History, series of re-enactment performances in Ljubljana and Zagreb etc); etc. The differences between those projects are notable, from their topics to their contexts, but an important similarity which I would like to stress by connecting them is in their attempt at problematization of big, smooth, majoritarian histories. This problematization is realized through similar political orientations, where the tiger\u2019s leap appears as a method of intervention by minoritarian subjects, whose concern is to render another future. In that sense, the tiger\u2019s leap in the mentioned works shouldn\u2019t be considered a historical revisionism, but a futurist intervention into the present that will become the past of another and different future. The one in which the historical univocalism will be impossible and replaced with multiple voices that will be heard all around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n a method of reloading history of local scenes. Ana Vujanovi\u0107, 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":561,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[58,92,360,13,60],"class_list":["post-9146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-texts-en","tag-ficcion","tag-historia","tag-historia-de-la-danza","tag-memoria","tag-realidad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/561"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9147,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9146\/revisions\/9147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Happy Consensual Tribe<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Notas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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