Authors

Discussion

The dance scholar, Bojana Kunst, writes (in ‘Dance and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Dance in the Time of Transition’, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, 2017, 559–574) of a short dance étude, The Dolenjska, performed by Slovenian dancer Jasna Knez in 1989. The choreography, strikingly different from both ballet and folklore, was made by Knez’s teacher, Živa Kraigher, in 1963, as homage to one of the original choreographies by her own teacher, Meta Vidmar, herself a student of Mary Wigman before World War II. Kunst finds this and other recreations of early modern choreography in former socialist countries ‘full of grief’ and ‘deeply melancholic, linked to the disappeared and suppressed history of the teachers who created this movement mostly in the isolation of their private dance schools’. Early modern dance indeed appeared in Eastern Europe under the influence of Western artists such as Mary Wigman and Isadora Duncan. Sharing the values of the free dance and emancipated body, harmony between music and movement, and the dancer’s body and the cosmos, it stood in sharp contrast to ballet, folklore and sport parades favoured under communist rule. Dancers and choreographers, loyal to their teachers and touched by nostalgia and grief about the lost freedom of movement, struggled to preserve their art. In the 1960s, attempts were made to re-establishing continuity with the past. Beside Živa Kraigher in Slovenia, I will mention the recreation of Orchestics—System of Movement of Valéria Dienes in Budapest and the Musical Movement of Stefanida Rudneva in the Soviet Union. In post-communist Eastern Europe, local traditions of modern dance interwove with contemporary dance from the West