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Dance and science

7th scientific conference with international participation All About People: The Future Now! (2019)

7th scientific conference with international participation All About People: The Future Now! (2019)

A message from the Dean of the Dance Academy, organiser and moderator of the dance section

At the 7th scientific conference with international participation All About People: the future now!, on Saturday, 16 March 2019, a dance section was held under the title Tradition and contemporaneity in dance art and education. More than 40 participants took part with 30 papers, a large share of which meet the conditions for publication in full. Quantitatively and qualitatively this represents a considerable step forward compared with the previous year.

The opening address was given by the president of AMEU, Prof. Dr Ludvik Toplak, followed by the Dean of the Dance Academy, Assoc. Prof. Dr Svebor Sečak. The first part of the section, on dance and anthropology, then followed. The keynote speaker was the Minister Plenipotentiary for Foreign Affairs, Dr Anja Fabiani, on the theme “Argentine tango as a country’s soft power”. Further papers followed on tango, flamenco, African dance and similar subjects. At the end of this part of the section, students spoke about the comparative advantages of our programme in this field. After the discussion we concluded:

  1. that the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia does not understand the current moment in the history of dances that originate in the ethnic dances of a particular culture (for example Argentina, or Spain – Andalusia, Africa and so on), which have long since outgrown the frames of their ethnic origins and have become a general cultural good at global level. Unfortunately the Ministry of Culture behaves xenophobically towards ethnic dances originating in other cultures and does not support their development in Slovenia;
  2. that contemporary versions of traditional world ethnic dances have emerged which push boundaries and correspond with contemporary culture;
  3. that representing a particular nation (for example the Spanish) or a continent (for example Africa) in a generic sense is highly problematic, because countries — and continents even more so — are often composed of many cultures and different sub-cultures. This problem can be resolved through the hybridisation of genres, through merging with contemporary dance techniques, social dance, ballet and so on. Such art, originating in different national sources, becomes transnational.

After the break the second part of the section followed, directed towards theoretical-critical and analytical perspectives. We heard about the history of Slovenian dance criticism, about methods of notation and choreology, about dance as part of ideology and about the importance of dance film. The discussion of dance analysis was particularly interesting, from intertextuality to traditional semiotics and finally to a contemporary post-feminist treatment of the ballet tradition. The third part of the section was devoted to education, from a model of learning through artistic experience, via dance in the curriculum in Slovenia and in other countries of the region, to safe practice. Two Dance Academy students, Helena Krieger and Martina Svetina, spoke on dance in the educational vertical in Slovenia, the subject of the theses they are currently writing; a research project on this theme is also planned. After this insight into national situations, work was presented on the transnational context of ballet as an art, on the heritage of classical ballet and on safe teaching practice. After the section closed, some of the participants continued the discussion informally over a shared lunch. The organiser and moderator of the dance section at the conference was the Dean of the Alma Mater Europaea Dance Academy, Assoc. Prof. Dr Svebor Sečak, president of the Croatian association of professional ballet artists.

Conference contributions