29.08. Monday
11.00 – 12.15 → Introduction and context presentation/ Brief introduction on the course presentation of the SKH, OPEN course, and presentation of the participants by Tove Salmgren and Biljana Tanurovska–Kjulavkovski
Bio: Tove Salmgren works as a dancer, choreographer, curator, and educator. Since 2016 she leads, together with the artist Kajsa Wadhia, Köttinspektionen Dans, an artist-driven platform and place for experimental dance and choreography in Uppsala, Sweden. As a choreographer, she explores shifted perspectives and reality, often through tiny interventions, based on the interest in negotiating what art (and non-art) can do and be a place for the emancipatory unknown. Tove has over the last decade been part of various artistic collaborations, such as “The Blob” (initiated by Anna Efraimsson), a curatorial persona exercising and practicing an institutional critique of art, knowledge and beyond, the curatorial collaboration “We happen things” (with Manon Santkin and Moa Franzén) and since 2018, she forms, together with Moa Franzén and Kajsa Wadhia, a performance trio which explores the voice as physical materiality and choreographic tool. Since 2017, she has been employed as a Lecturer in performative practices at SKH, Stockholm University of the Arts.
Bio: Biljana Tanurovska–Kjulavkovski is a curator, researcher, and cultural producer, co-founder of Nomad Dance Academy platform (NDA), Kino Kultura (KK) – project space, and program director of NGO Lokomotiva, Skopje. She currently works on diverse activities as part of the project (Non)Aligned Movements, including research and development of the Archive of Dance and Performance in North Macedonia; she is co-curator of the International School “Curating in Context”, which became part of the course “Curatorial practices and context” at the Stockholm University of Arts as of 2022, where she is a course co-leader; she is co-mentor of the Critical Practice (made in Yu) program, co-researcher and co-curator of the exhibitions “REALIZE! RESIST! REACT! Performance and Politics in the 1990s in the Post-Yugoslav Context” in 2020 at the MOCAM Ljubljana and “Ecstatic Bodies: Archive of Performative Queer Bodies in Macedonia” at the 2022 Skopje Pride Weekend festival. She is a teacher and lecturer, and is the author and editor of numerous articles, journals, and the book “Modeling Art and Cultural Institutions”. She holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. In 2019, she won the ENCATC International Research Award on Cultural Policy and Cultural Management for her doctoral thesis “Modeling Cultural and Art Institutions”, and in 2021 she won the AICA Macedonia “Ladislav Barishic” Award for the research “Political Performance as Extended Field in Macedonia in the 90s”.
Photography album: Introduction and Opening
12.30 – 13.30 → Lecture: Curatorial Pluralities by Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski
Abstract: In this lecture, I will give an overview of curatorial practice as one that enables a plurality of working modes, and which theorizes, problematizes, reflects, and identifies the curating and the curatorial as processes that are related to specificities and problems in certain contexts. Through this perspective, whose development I will analyze historically, we will try to identify how the ‘curatorial turn’, or how through the transformation of the ‘curating’ and ‘curatorial’ this practice entered/enters the field of performing arts. Curatorial practice in this field is still undefined, uncertain, and not institutionally established, thus can be understood as experimental, which works on discovering and inventing new modes of working, and conditions for the production and distribution of works of art. While experimenting, the curatorial practice considers and elaborates critical positions and builds models of curation as 1. Practice which reviews determines, and establishes 2. Critical practice which projects a new horizon and new models and 3. Practice in-between these two models. The one that interests us here is the second one or the one that recognizes, reflects, integrates, and relates the artistic idea that is mediated through the work of art, to artistic and theoretical currents and sociopolitical contexts, and creates conditions towards its further development and sharing. Such settings create an opportunity for a discursive change that generates a plurality of reformations of the institutional, festival models, and other formats of work, collaboration, and display.
Photography album: Lecture: Curatorial Pluralities by Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski
15.30 – 17.00 → Lecture: Collaborative Curating by Marijana Cvetkovic
In 2018 she received the Jelena Santic Award “for consistency in her work and promotion of contemporary dance, continuous advocacy for better working conditions in the field of culture, and for the introduction of innovative practices for the youngest within the project Generator.”
20.00 → Informal meeting with Nomad Dance Academy/ short presentation, discussion
The network Nomad Dance Academy was founded in 2005 by dance artists, producers, and theorists from the former Yugoslavia and from Bulgaria. After the turbulent political period following the break-up of the Yugoslav federation, the various dance actors endeavored to create a dynamic and fluid artistic, cultural, and educational space in this part of Europe, to improve the creative and production conditions of dance and choreography, to create new production models, and to overcome the obstacles in regard to local and national, often nationalistic, cultural politics.
Since the beginning, Nomad Dance Academy has been active in the field of dance education, artistic creation, and production, as well as dance promotion and advocacy for dance. Through its cultural activism, it seeks to strengthen the various creative and artistic forces in the local contemporary dance contexts of the Balkan region, in order to achieve the right conditions for professional, high-caliber, and exciting contemporary dance work. The Nomad Dance Academy members understand contemporary choreography as an artistic and social function, methodology, and practice, which cares for good working conditions for artists. It reflects and makes visible various presences, absences, or representations of the human body, individual or collective, as well as its traces, indications, and potentialities in the past, present, and future.
More information is available at: nomaddanceacademy.org/nonaligned- movements
Photography album: Nomad Dance Academy Presentation
30.08. Tuesday
11.00 – 12.30 → Lecture: Policies and Politics of Curating by Jasmina Založnik
Abstract: In this lecture, I will first pay attention to Jacques Rancière’s readings and explanation of politics and of the political, keeping in mind that the mentioned philosopher »does not maintain a strict terminological distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (la politique), he often distinguishes the latter as the meeting ground between politics and the police.« Following Rancière’s thought, I will tackle some of the crucial problems of processes of subjectivization (according to Rancière also the essence of politics) today, thinking through concrete curatorial procedures and strategies as possible and potential navigation and tools in the post-factual, identity-driven and harshly neoliberal society. The provided cases will arrive from my own experiential field (festivals in which I was or am engaged: the City of Women festival, Pleskavica, and CoFestival) while unpacking some of the relevant concepts (vita activa, public sphere, »public« time, community/communitas, the notion of care, etc.). Moreover, in order to do so, I will emphasize the work of the regional performing arts theorists, including Bojana Kunst, Bojana Cvejić, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ana Vujanović, Slavcho Dimitrov, Rok Vevar, etc.
Photography album: Lecture: Policies and Politics of Curating by Jasmina Založnik
12.45 – 14.00 → Lecture: The Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive: Approaches to archiving contemporary dance between detective, archaeological and forensic approaches by Rok Vevar
Abstract: Archiving and historicizing ephemeral artistic practices that generate their products through practices, skills, actions, and conceptualizations of the human body is a particular challenge, as this kind of work is more or less inaccessible to its object of research. These are, so to speak, the proverbial problems concerning the archiving and historicizing of the entire spectrum of the so-called performing arts. In my contribution, I will draw on my own experience and methods of archiving and historicizing contemporary dance and performing arts to present some of my starting points for the reconstruction of individual contemporary dance events and, at the same time, of that which, with its various informational traces, functions in this kind of work as a contextual “notation of dance”, the missing event. This kind of work is (partly figuratively, but in some cases also literally) a combination of detective, archaeological and forensic methods. A cross-examination of the multitude of material and immaterial forms of traces that the contemporary dance practice and its events leave behind. The historiographical reconstruction of contemporary dance events is – in the terminology of structural linguistics – made possible by reconfiguring contexts as precisely as possible, and by gradually moving towards particularised texts, which are always marked (with greater or lesser informational scope) by their fundamental reconstructive de cit. The contemporary notion of dance work, which by no means is merely event products in the form of performances or site-specific /in situ events, but a whole series of production processes, is very helpful in this respect. However, the history of contemporary dance and performing arts is a series of professional and methodological speculations. Their archiving is an “exhibition” of more or less exhaustive or eloquent traces and documentation in a wide variety of media. In this kind of work, a series of meta-objects emerge in cross-examinations, which are not event-objects of the contemporary artwork (performance), but witnesses to the culture produced by this kind of art, while at the same time, in individual cases, different contextual traces allow the actual contemporary dance present to emerge in a moment before us as a trace that we were looking for in the past only a moment before. No archival document is superfluous for this to happen.
Bio: Rok Vevar graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana. In the 1990s he attended the Theatre and Puppetry School – Cosmopolitan art workshop (GILŠ KODUM) at the then called, ZKOS (Zveza kulturnih organizacij Slovenije – Union of Cultural Organizations of Slovenia). He is a publicist in the field of contemporary performing arts, and a historian and archivist of contemporary dance. He has published articles and reviews in a number of daily newspapers (Delo, Finance, Večer), in professional journals (Maska, Frakcija), as well as in Slovenian and foreign periodicals. As a dramaturg, he has collaborated with artists from the field of contemporary dance and theatre (Sinja Ožbolt, Jana Menger, Goran Bogdanovski, Andreja Rauch Pozdravnik, Snježana Premuš, Kaja Lorenci, Dejan Srhoj, Oliver Frljić, Ana Vujanović, Saša Asentić). Together with Simona Semenič, he has created three plays: Polna pest praznih rok (Fistful of Empty Hands), 2001, Solo brez talona (Solo Without Talons), 2003, and Kartografija celovečernih slik (Cartography of Full-Length Images), 2005. In the frame of the network of festivals FIT (Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia), as well as at international festivals (Bulgaria, Latvia, Croatia), he taught young critics, dance dramaturgs, and publicists. At the AGRFT academy (Academy of Theatre, Film, and Television) in Ljubljana he taught history, dramaturgy, analysis, theory of contemporary dance, as well as theatre criticism. Since 2010, he is an active member of the Balkan network for dance, Nomad Dance Academy, and its various artistic, educational, and production programs. As part of the Nomad Dance Institute project, he initiated the archiving and historization of choreographic practices in the region and published the findings of this research in two issues of the journal Maska (Premiki sodobnega plesa II/ Movements in Contemporary Dance II, Avtonomija plesu/ Autonomy to Dance). In 2012 he established the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archives in his own apartment, moving it to MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova) in Ljubljana in April 2018. He has also presented his archive at Harvard University, USA. He founded and co-curated with Sinja Ožbolt the festival Ukrep, which was a festival for perspectives in dance in Ljubljana at PTL (Dance Theatre of Ljubljana), from 2008-2010. Since 2012 he co-curates the international dance festival CoFestival (Nomad Dance Academy Slovenija, Kino Šiška). A selection of his reviews and articles was published in the book Rok za oddajo (Deadline), in 2011, and in 2018 edited of the book Dan, noč + človek = Ritem: Antologija slovenske sodobnoplesne publicistike 1918–1960 (Day, night + man = Rhythm: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Journalism 1918-1960), for which he selected materials and wrote accompanying texts. In 2020, his new monograph Ksenija, Xenia: Londonska plesna leta Ksenije Hribar 1960–1978 (Ksenija, Xenia: The London Dance Years of Ksenija Hribar 1960-1978). In 2019, he received the Ksenija Hribar Award for his work, and in 2020, the Vladimir Kralj Award for achievement in the field of theatre criticism and theatre studies for the period 2018-2019. In 2020, as co-curator, he participated in the exhibitions Autography, Uncanniness, Rebellion: the Photography of Božidar Dolenc, and REALIZE! RESIST! REACT! Performance and Politics in the 1990s in the Post-Yugoslav Context at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. In the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/2022 he taught at the Anton Bruckner University (Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität) in Linz, Austria, at the Department of Contemporary Dance and Movement Research. He was a member of several expert panels (Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Maribor) and juries (Maribor Theatre Festival, Gibanica). He is self-employed in the field of culture.
Photography album: The Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive: Approaches to archiving contemporary dance between detective, archaeological and forensic approaches
Bio: elena rose light (they/them) is a choreographer, performer, and writer originally from Southern California (Micqanaqa’n) currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Their creative practice is rooted in the potential of antiracist, queer, and non-binary somatics to reorganize systems of thought and social codes. elena received a BA with honors in French and art history from Yale University and is currently finishing an MA in Choreography and Performance at the ATW Institut Giessen.
Photography album: “Trans Practices for Everyday Life”
16.30 – 17.30 → Workshop/ Discussion: Accessibility and Accountability as Generative Practice by Frida Laux
Abstract: In a common inquiry of what we need if we choose a kinder way of making it possible for each other, this practice-sharing invites us to feel out ways of relating across differences. Scarcity and the accompanying lack of access have their origins in the extractivist acting and unjust distribution of resources. While exhaustion has become the new normal, the pressure for productivity remains unabated. Which accesses have we lost? And which ones do we need? How do we learn to deal more respectfully with the vulnerabilities of bodies and land? By touch and text, we will take a small dive into exploring the technologies of our togetherness.
Bio: Frida Laux works as an artist, organizer, and mediator in the field of the performing arts. Through engaging in different collective and (con)textual practices, she investigates together with human and more than human collaborators how we can become a wider ecology of knowledge. She researches Accessibility and Accountability as relational and generative practices and is involved in the organization of the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme (France) as a side of experimenting with structures of self-organization. She holds an MA in Choreography and Performance from the Institute of Applied Theatre Science in Gießen and is alumni of the German National Academic Foundation. Her collaborative works have been invited and shown at festivals and venues such as Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Teatro Il Lavatoio Santarcangelo, Dance in Response Hamburg, Queer Zagreb Festival, MOT Festival Skopje, Act Festival Bulgaria, Hessische Theatertage, Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, Festival Implantieren Frankfurt.
Photography album: “Accessibility and Accountability as Generative Practice”
31.08. Wednesday
11.00 – 12.30 → Discussion led by Critical Practice Group
A conceptual and sociocultural framework led by the students of the Critical Practice programme.
The Critical Practice programme is oriented towards empowering discursive reflections on contemporary performing arts while enabling their breakthrough into the larger public. In contextual terms, it is focused on, but not restricted to, the post-Yugoslav region. Among the reasons for such an orientation are, on the one hand, a lack of continual and publicly visible critical writing about contemporary performances and performing arts events in the region and, on the other, the strong recent development in performing arts theory coming from this context.
Photography album: Workshop PUBLICING: Curation as a frame for constructing public space and time
13.00 – 14.3 → Discussion with the local independent artistic and cultural scene in Struga moderated by Kristina Todoroska–Petreska
International Poetry Festival: Struga Poetry Evenings svp.org.mk/en
facebook.com/inkastruga and festival portfolio (can be sent to those interested)
Drim Short drimshortfestival.mk
Photography album: Discussion with the local independent artistic and cultural scene in Struga
19.00 – 21.00 → Public Lecture: Thinking and Making beyond the Project: Making temporal kinships by Bojana Kunst
Bio: Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturg, and performance theoretician. She works as a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she is leading an international master's program in Choreography and Performance. She worked as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana and the University of Antwerp (till 2009), and later as a guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2009 – 2012). She lectured and organized seminars, workshops, and laboratories in different academic institutions, theaters, and artistic organizations across Europe, and worked with artistic initiatives, artists, groups and activists. Her research interest is contemporary performance and dance, arts theory, and philosophy of contemporary art. She published Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Zero Books, Winchester, London, 2015, and The Life of Art. Transversal Lines of Care, Ljubljana, 2021 (in Slovenian language).
Photography album: "Thinking and Making beyond the project: Making temporal kinships"
01.09. Thursday
11.00 – 13.30 and 15.00 – 16.30 → Workshop: PUBLICING: Curation as a Frame for Constructing Public Space and Time, facilitated by Danae Theodoridou
Abstract: Through a series of individual and group tasks made of moving, reading, writing, discussing, questioning, designing, and testing, this workshop will involve participants in a critical process that aims to reflect on the relation between curatorial practices and the emergence of social alternatives to capitalism. In this frame, the design of a curatorial project will be approached as a frame for the creation of social imaginaries different than the capitalist ones, through the (re)construction of public space and “public time”.
The act of curating will, thus, be worked as a practice that moves away from established norms and social habits. Curation here will be seen as the crafting of social encounters that move away from capitalist demands striving for the “groundbreaking” controllable, popular, profitable, effective product, towards more caring, imaginative, unknown directions.
Key terms in our exploration will be the notions of “social imaginary” and “public time” (as discussed by C. Castoriadis), “dramaturgy as a working on actions” and “publicing” (as discussed in the books co-authored by the workshop’s facilitator) and “commoning” (as a practice related to commons). Participants will be asked to read in advance two texts related to such issues, which will be further discussed in the workshop. In the same frame, participants will also be asked to design and, at least partly, test different models for social exchange that could act as artificial social imaginaries, through which they will attempt to detect the processes and working principles involved in such acts.
Bio: Danae Theodoridou is a performance maker and researcher based in Brussels. She studied literature and linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and acting in the National Theatre of Northern Greece. She completed her Ph.D. in dramaturgy of contemporary theatre and dance at Roehampton University in London. In the last years, her artistic work focuses on the notion of social imaginaries, the practice of democracy and the way art can contribute to the emergence of social and political alternatives. At the same time, Danae teaches at Fontys University of Applied Sciences (NL) and at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR), curates practice-led research projects, and presents and publishes her research work internationally. She has been the co-creator of Dramaturgy at Work (2013-2016), the co-author of The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017), and the author of PUBLICING: Practicing Democracy Through Performance (Nissos, 2022).
For more information: www.danaetheodoridou.com
Photography album: Workshop PUBLICING: Curation as a frame for constructing public space and time
02.09. Friday
11.00 – 12.30 → Lecture: An-archic Bodies: The Political, the Performative and Corporeality
Abstract: Presenting and discussing how theoretical notions of political, body, and queer are part of the curatorial strategies of the Pride Weekend festival – queer arts & culture festival which creates spaces of non-normative forms of worldmaking that have been marked, by the heteronormative, nationalistic and neoliberal capitalist context, as queer failures.
Bio: Slavcho Dimitrov had his Bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature at St. Cyril and Methodius University. He got his first Master’s degree in Gender Studies and Philosophy at the Euro-Balkan Institute in Skopje, and his second Master’s degree from the Department of Multidisciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge University. Currently, he is working on his doctoral thesis “An-archic Bodies: Corporeal Materialism, Affects and the Political” at the Department for Transdisciplinary Studies of Contemporary Arts and Media at the Faculty of Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade. He has worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Law and Political Sciences at FON University. He was also a teaching assistant at the postgraduate Gender and Cultural Studies at the Euro-Balkan University, and at the undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Faculty for Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade, teaching courses on Contemporary Cultural Theories, Critical Theory, Embodiment, Gender and Culture, Queer Theory and others. He is the founder of the international Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics in Belgrade, and is one of the founders of IPAK. Center – Research Center for Identities, Cultures and Politics in Belgrade. Slavcho Dimitrov has curated several art and cultural projects, and many conferences in North Macedonia. He has been curating for seven years now the Skopje Pride Weekend, interdisciplinary queer art, culture, and theory festival. Dimitrov has published many papers in the field of cultural studies, political philosophy, performance studies, embodiment and affects, and queer theory in regional and international journals and books. He is also the author of the book Impossible Confession: Subjectivity, Power and Ethics (2014). In his theoretical and research practice his focus is set on post-foundational political philosophy, cultural, critical, and gender and queer theory, embodiment and affects, aesthetics, social choreography, and performance studies. In 2022 he conducted and published his collaborative research “The Everyday and Emotional Life of Oppression” together with Ana Blazeva. He is a recipient of AICA Macedonia – Ladislav Leshnikov Award – 2018 and the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory – Grant – 2020.
Photography album: Lecture: An-archic Bodies: The Political, the Performative and Corporeality
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The Summer School “Curating in Context” is part of (Non)Aligned Movements project, www. nomaddanceacademy.org/ which is supported by the program of Creative Europe/European Cooperation Western Balkans, Ministry of Culture of North Macedonia, Goethe Institute-Skopje and Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH).
The (Non)Aligned Movements project is developed in partnership between STANICA Service for Contemporary dance, Belgrade; Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Ljubljana; Nomad Dance Academy Bulgaria, Sofia; Tanzfabrik, Berlin and LOKOMOTIVA Center for new initiatives in art and culture, Skopje.
Lokomotiva team and collaborators of the school:
Core Team: Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski – programme director, Blagica Petrova – programme and financial manager, Zorica Zafirovska – programme and project coordinator, Gjurgjica Hristovska administrator; Collaborators: Kristina Todoroska-Petreska – local coordination and PR, Hristijan Tomanoski, Milko Nestoroski – local technical support and Aleksandra Nestoroska – photographer.
