Prompted by the everyday friction of numerous demands that today’s choreographic and artistic activity is supposed to satisfy, we decided to publish a series of interviews/conversations with artists belonging to the younger generation in contemporary dance. Our aim was to come structurally closer to the issue of context in which we all work and the way in which that context could be defined, described, and made visible. Our research also focused on the primary textuality of contemporary dance in younger Croatian authors – regarding the theoretical and archival documentation of our work, as well as the artistic approach to its contextualization. We invited eleven performers and authors involved in contemporary dance and asked them to position their work within the field of dialogue and text, opening up discourses on the fluency of communication through text, the extent to which performance is archived, the theoretical core of performance, and the ways, where they are possible or necessary, of leaving a trace by means of an artistic activity that is porous and immaterial as the movement itself.
When mapping the specificities of recent contemporary dance in Croatia, we may say that it has positioned its activities in the domain of exploring, repositioning, and analyzing the process of artistic production, of creating and procreating the context in which artists find their meaningful reception, as well as the domain of autonomous education of those subjects that are yet to become visible. By shifting the focus of production and development from commonplace strategies, which look at an artwork as a finished product, to questioning the purpose and goal of these strategies, the young generation of authors has opened up an entirely new set of questions in their work, focusing primarily on contemporaneity as such, as well as its hybrids and derivatives. Instead of applying skills, aesthetics, or regular methodologies, this generation of authors has redirected its focus to the forensics of the very purpose (redundancy or potency) of artistic production that takes place in an environment of turbulent social and economic structural rearrangements. Thus, the process of artistic production has reached for and penetrated areas that are far beyond the primary landscape of dance, becoming a sort of swift motor in the evolution of contemporary performing arts, both in the context of cultural production and in that of the civil society as such. In that regard, what is activated through contemporary dance involves both the reflecting subject and the object that is being reflected on – transforming that object and the problem field of choreographic activity into an author in its own right, objectivised through the recipient. Insofar, this research demarcates the field of artistic activity, starting from ideological, thematic, perceptual, methodological, and strategic questions – including the issues related to the methodologies of artistic resistor as provoking artistic survival – and condenses the working area of dialogue on “cognition... that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general.” (Kant)
Marjana Krajač