The cycle is composed of two theoretical sessions and three lectures for professionals as well as a wider audience introducing the phenomenon of contemporary dance and the type of knowledge generated by this art.
Contemporary dance today is a multiformat field of aesthetics operating on the intersection of theater, performance, and visual mediums. This understanding is equally relevant within the context of Western art—where dance is well-established on museum territory, inscribed in site specific art and has contributed to the development of socially oriented aesthetic initiatives, and for the Russian one—where it begins to move away from conventional theater performance toward original practices such as dance exhibition projects, fake laboratories, or urban interventions. Critic Anna Kozonina and curators Anastasia Proshutinskaya and Anastasia Mityushina dedicate their education cycle to the kind of dance which is essentially experimental and often times radical, the dance that strives to reconsider its own limits and questions its study object.
The classes will concentrate on novel dance forms successfully evolving in the Russian cultural tradition which is marked, on the one hand, by the emphasize on classical ballet and the lack of investment in contemporary dance, and on the other, by interest toward an interdisciplinary approach and the search of new formats. These parallel trends will be analyzed from two perspectives: dance history and theory, with Anna Kozonina, and curatorial and infrastructural issues, with Anastasia Proshutinskaya. The authors will try to provide answers to the following questions: what is happening to dance today, and how should we approach it? What’s the difference between the Russian and Western European dance scenes? What forms of contemporary art criticism do exist, and can we hope that quality criticism in this field can be produced in Russia?
The theoretical block involving dance professionals will be accompanied by lectures delivered by international thinkers and choreographers who will share their vision of what contemporary dance means today.
