[announcement] WHAT TO AFFIRM? WHAT TO PERFORM?

dear audience,
dear artists,
dear colleagues,

we are pleased to update you about the ongoing activities in the frame of the two-year project What to affirm? What to perform?, a cooperation between the Allianz Kulturstiftung, CDU Centre for Drama Art Zagreb, CNDB Centrul National al Dansului Bucharest, Maska Ljubljana and Tanzquartier Wien.

While the activities of the partners in Bucharest, Ljubljana and Zagreb focus on documenting the unwritten history of dance in Eastern Europe, the Tanzquartier Wien in a complementary way in a first step set up a research framework for a transmedia definition of dance, taking its starting point in the history of the Western avant-garde and asking about the “inadvertently” ignored in traditional historiography.  

The results of the first working phase are being presented to the public in Bucharest, Ljubljana, Zagreb and Vienna from spring 2008 on and will form the basis for the second project year in 2009. Planned, for example, are the creation of a Dictionary of Choreography, re-enactments of performances by Tomislav Gotovac, the Group of Six Artists, Stere Popescu, Adina Cezar, Gabriel Negri, Mare Bulc and the symposium Parallel Slalom. The Tanzquartier Wien is organising a 14-day programmation  in spring 2009 based on the research project “Versehen” – A  historioclastic avant-garde investigation in the room of manoeuvre of dance and choreography from March 2008.

What to affirm? What to perform? negotiates the question of affirmation as a performative method and political stance. To choose the esthetics of subversive affirmation – in times of neoliberal relativism – means to take a political position – at the same time affirmative and performative.