Dance

Average project titles: Life Long Burning – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe”, “Performing Gender - Dancing In Your Shoes”, DIS-OTHERING - beyond Afropolitan & other labels”. Dance, perhaps the most spontaneous, expressive and cultural of all art forms, can easily be used to mediate political issues to large and heterogeneous audiences.

The spontaneous expressive quality of dance is also capitalised in the "DANCEOPOLITICS" project: “The political cannot be reduced to the painstaking management of emotionally safe spaces and shared atmospheres. Radical agency is not about the sharing of boundaries. It is about deborderisation” […]., says the project. Than it elaborates further: “Insofar as to be human is to open oneself up to the possibility alwaysalready there of becoming (an)other, such a conception of self and identity is by definition antihuman […][1]. The non-sensical reasoning of DANSEOPOLITICS is continued in the “Performing Gender - Dancing In Your Shoes” project: It seeks to “bring marginalised voices to foreground and share new stories on gender, with relevance with new dance audiences. The goal is to develop co-design practices for a democratisation of cultural production by way of audience development”. It stresses that “gender equality and audience development in the arts are nowadays growing priorities for European countries living through turbulent times of political unrest”. Its ultimate aim is “to offer policy makers an exchange with international peers and cultural professionals, to deepen a discussion on gender in the European dance system” [2].

Another project on contemporary dance, called ´AFROPOLITAN’[3], defines itself an “international live laboratory and workshop on political activism bringing together artists, experts, authors, activists and policy makers, combining artistic with discursive programmes and reaching new audiences outside the dance and performance field”. The project culminated in the exhibition: „Ecstatic Bodies: Archive of Performative Queer Bodies in Macedonia“.

As it reads, the dance cluster's statements remind a Dadaist manifesto of politically correct vocabulary that doesn't even pretend to articulate a comprehensible meaning.

Terminology and idioms:

• Deborderisation
• Dis-othering
• Individual and collective processes of overcoming the alienation and dispossession of dancing bodies
• Archive of Performative Queer Bodies in Macedonia