Contemporary Dance Festivals in the Former Yugoslav Space (in)dependent Scenes

<p>This book expands the understanding of conditions defining the creation and circulation of contemporary dance that differ across Europe. It focuses on festival-making connected with the Balkan regional project ‘Nomad Dance Academy’ (NDA), and highlights collective approaches to sustain a theorisation of festivals using the concepts of dissensus and imperceptible politics. Drawing from anthropological methods, three festivals <i>PLESkavica</i>, Slovenia; <i>Kondenz</i>, Serbia and <i>LocoMotion</i>, North Macedonia, are explored through social, political and historical currents affecting curatorial practice. This book closely follows how festival-makers navigate the values of international development that during and after the Yugoslav wars looked to art as part of peacekeeping and nation-building processes. This coincided with increasing discourse and practices of contemporary dance that gained momentum in the 1980s alongside European festivalisation. I show how contemporary dance acts as an agent for transformation, but also a carrier of older forms of social organisation, reflecting methods and values of Yugoslav Worker Self-management that are deployed by the groups creating the festivals.</p><p>This book will be of interest to dance scholars as well as researchers tracing the long-term effects of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. </p>