Traversing the Contemporary (pl)

Located at the intersection of Anglo-American, European, and Indian dance studies, and postcolonial and gender studies, this project will strive for a nuanced examination of Anglo-American theoretical models and approaches to dance, postcolonial and gender studies. The aim is translating them into the particular context of contemporary dance in continental Northern Europe through a theoretical, historical and empirical analysis of the works of three contemporary European choreographers. This combination approaches - theoretical, historical and empirical - corresponds with the particular profile of the dance department at the University of Salzburg with its unique interaction with the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives, its commitment to bridging theory and practice, and contemporary and historical research. Postcolonial historical approaches articulate that the "now," and therefore, by extension also the notion of the contemporary, is contested while cultural difference is re-coded into a time difference. This indicates that there are criteria that limit the aesthetic category of "the contemporary" and consequently create an "other" thereof. This contested status of "the contemporary" in current dance practices in Europe will be parsed out by way of three case studies, the works of choreographers, Johanna Lanzaro, Rani Nair, and Kalpana Raghuraman. The three choreographers are trained in contemporary dance and classical Indian dance and produce choreographic articulations that may not, it is argued, easily fit the category of "the contemporary" in European dance. In its theoretical analysis, this project will therefore parse out Anglo-American, Indian and postcolonial approaches for the European context. In its historical analysis, this study will strive to make visible the "shared" histories of Indian and contemporary European dance, particularly in the 20th century, by tracing "kinesthetic connections" by way of encounters of individual protagonists of the dance forms. In its empirical analysis, the project will further consider the aesthetic consequences of these shared histories in an empirical analysis of contemporary European choreographic examples that straddle both worlds. The aim of this study is to contribute to a global perspective in European dance studies by analyzing contemporary European dance from a cross-cultural perspective and critically interrogating and evaluating Anglo-American and Indian approaches to dance studies, as well as postcolonial approaches for the Northern European cultural context.

The goal of this research project was to critically investigate the idea of the contemporary in the context of continental European concert dance from a postcolonial perspective. This perspective sees cultural contexts as informed by colonial processes (of representation), even if some countries (seemingly) do not have prominent colonial histories, because postcolonial views are not restricted to questions of material (economic, political, territorial) colonialism. Instead they engage e.g. critically with surviving cultural asymmetries that implicitly consider the West more advanced and thereby legitimate colonial power relationships. The project asked in what ways the aesthetic notion of the contemporary in contemporary European dance still functions within this colonial paradigm? This question was approached from three angles. 1) The theoretical angle articulated a critical working definition of contemporary dance and translated postcolonial theoretical approaches (often originating in Anglophone contexts) for continental European dance. 2) The historical angle worked on historical entanglements between European and Indian dance. 3) The analytical documentation of choreographic works centred on three contemporary choreographers who are trained in - among other dance techniques - and actively use classical Indian dance in their choreographic work: Johanna Devi (Berlin), Rani Nair (Lund) and Kalpana Raghuraman (Brussels/Den Haag, Korzo Theater), alongside comparative or contrasting works from other choreographers. The most important outcomes of this project can be summarized as: 1) Documentation and analyses of hybrid European practices of contemporary dance, which lay the foundation for theorizing European aesthetic pluralities, thus gesturing towards possibilities of challenging Eurocentric perspectives of contemporary European dance. 2) Differentiation between notions of the historical and the traditional in terms of a conceptual incompatibility between an artistic engagement with the historical (themes from European history) which has access to the now and an engagement with cultural elements marked as Indian that are received as traditional which even in the present remain trapped in the past. 3) Articulation of a critical working definition of contemporary dance in Europe, revealing the ways in which contemporary dance is a contradictory category, which though thus far rarely explicitly marked as European is based on implicit Euro-American aesthetic trajectories. Further research questions and designs towards a critique of the contemporary have been articulated. 4) Contributing to closing a gap between aesthetically-oriented dance (studies) and cultural studies approaches to migration and postcoloniality in Europe.