jubljana, 17/06-21/06 2013 & 21/09-29/09 2013

Contemporary Dance between the market and democracy

We survived the end of the world. And its new beginning. What now?

Last year“€™s CoFestival was created as an answer to the changing and challenging conditions of production and creation. By combining the three autonomous festivals – Modul-dance, Ukrep and Pleskavica – we joined our artistic and production forces. The result was a very rich programme featuring 43 events at 10 different venues. The programme units were mutually informing and fertilizing themselves, questioning and creating the possible frames for long-term collaborations, friendships and commitments.

This year the motto of the festival is The Art of Co-Living, and we continue with the ideas of finding the connection points, establishing of the common space, mutual support and the rise of new questions. We find it very important to endure in this kind of collaborations, knowing that any such collaboration and curating is subjected to big risk; that some positions can remain overseen, that trans- inter- or even non-disciplinarity within a festival like this underline the questions of autonomy and recognisability of contemporary dance. What we want to address is the multitude and diversity of artistic formats and approaches, and the related importance of the transfer of knowledge, trust, duration. We want to put the processuality, which excludes mere representation, at the same level as the finished productions, and by this we want to question both – what is finished and what is not finished. We understand the festival space as the space of knowledge production, and this knowledge is later being transferred to other disciplines, the other projects and geographies.

CoFestival is also addressing the need of establishing a difference between arts and cultural industries, and forewarning of possible negative consequences of the equation between the two. Because arts, and especially live arts are not and cannot be made into sellable products that would circulate in the market, in the same way that material objects do.

What marks our collaboration is a constant questioning of the conditions, reasons and urgencies behind a certain process, and we believe that if there is Forex no such core, then there is almost no reason for action and any kind of result is mere decoration.

In which way and why does contemporary dance move between democracy and the market, and what will remain of it in the end?

Dragana Alfirevič‡ Srhoj and Jasmina Založnik