Footsteps of Resilience

Implementation period of project:
July 2023 — June 2024

Description:
The main concept of the project is  an investigation into how dance and dance professionals in Central and Eastern Europe worked and produced works of dance during the period of communist totalitarianism in the 20th century, as well as during the subsequent transformation and the emergence of democracy and capitalism. The second project line will be their own aging and how it influenced them in their work.

The first line of our project aims to investigate how dance professionals managed to create new art pieces during the previous regime in Central and Eastern Europe. Thanks to this project, we could collect, through oral history, as much information as possible. We can bring those personal stories to the public a better understanding of the current situation of dance in Slovakia, but also to remind ourselves of the lack of freedom during the previous regime, which was a big obstacle in creative processes.

We will do research together with local experts and researchers. The output will be recordings in audio or video form with stories presented to the general public. Based on the research, we would organize a discussion for the public and a panel discussion for an expert audience of dance professionals not only from the Slovak environment.

The second line that we would like to follow within our project is aging. We consider the topic of aging to be one of the key ones in the dance community. At the same time, it is a topic that a wide audience can identify with from their own experience.

At the heart of our project there will be the dance performance Figuring Age (Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm), which covers these topics from Hungarian perspective. We would like to complement this view with performances and expert views from neighbouring countries with similar experience. We will invite dancers and other experts from these countries to the program to share their experiences with us.