Garage curator Anastasia Mityushina and independent contemporary dance curator Anastasia Proshutinskaya will discuss with Anna Kozonina her book on contemporary dance in Russia.
The book Strange Dance, so long-awaited by Russian dance lovers, dance artists, choreography researchers, and curators, is finally coming out. The publication by the young researcher of contemporary dance, Anna Kozonina, addresses the unconventional “new” Russian dance of the 2010s. This is the first such attempt to describe and analyze its “origins, values, methods, and institutional situation; to feel its connection with the Western history of dance, while also revealing its specificity.” Although contemporary dance is often associated with “an art in which professional dancers move expressively, conveying thoughts and feelings through movement,” works of contemporary dance artists, created at the intersection of somatic practices and socio-cultural critique, have long transgressed this definition. The book explains in an accessible language the foundations of this “new stage” and provides tools for the analysis of contemporary dance performances.
Strange Dance generates a branched system of coordinates using the terms and events of contemporary dance that will allow the reader to navigate through recent dance practices and understand how the “strange Russian dance” is profoundly different from “conventional” contemporary dance. The consultant-editor of the book is contemporary dance curator Anastasia Proshutinskaya, who has had a hand in the emergence of many “strange dance” productions in 2010s’ Moscow.
During the presentation, Anastasia Mityushina and Anastasia Proshutinskaya will discuss with Anna Kozonina particular dance pieces that have been the most difficult to analyze and the development of “big narratives” dealing with creative strategies, the interpretation space of which is only beginning to form. The speakers will also resume a conversation, begun two years ago, about Russian-language resources on contemporary dance and the vicissitudes of shaping a new language.
