 O čednih, naredam je, da bila nam zelo na pridon, ki zašel neko odličenje, ko je nam, da je Ivana Medenica, zvorim, če je stajalj, da se je zelo na Veselje, da se je zašel, da se se je zelo na Veselje, da se je zašel, da se je zašel, da se je zelo na Veselje, da se je zašel, da se je zašel, da se je zašel, da se je zašel. v IETM, da smo v Belgrade organizujali. As many of you know, the first plenary meeting of IETM was in 2005 in Belgrade and it was organized by one very important but organized such a big event, such a big complex of place for exchange in... I don't want to go back to history but just feel it for me. Found in 1967 in a period where the world was divided by the times and it was happening. So it was almost a unique place where artists from East and West could meet and exchange their experiences, their knowledge, their interests. This was the period of Yugoslav history where our former president, Tito, one of the sessions will be held in Marshall's Salon so we have still tribute to Marshall Tito in this very building, which was a house of syndicates in socialistic times so you will see Tito while you are here. So when Marshall Tito launched the non-aligned countries movement with president Nasser of Egypt and Nero of India, that's why Belgrade and Bitev was not only a meeting point between ideologically divided East and West but also between culturally divided let's say North and South. We like to believe in a legend that says that at the first edition of Bitev Jerzy Grotowski met Living Theatre and its founders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck and as you know the rest is history. Grotowski was invited to the states by Malina and Beck and was giving lectures there organizing workshops, et cetera. So it's one of the examples, this legend of the importance of this exchange that Bitev provided for the whole theatre world in the 60s. Of course in the 90s the Berlin Wall disappeared, Europe was unified but Yugoslavia at the same time time was disappearing in a bloody civil war. So the geo-strategic situation, position of this city and this country was completely changed. We stayed completely out of any international exchanges and networks. We were isolated for a few years and after that since the end of 90s I think that I would like to believe that Bitev started regaining the position that it had because unfortunately nowadays we have new walls in Europe and in the whole world. Not only the new iron curtain which is falling in this very moment in Europe but other walls as well. Just to give you one example and then I will finish. As far as I know the first wall that was built in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall was a wire fence that Orban constructed, I don't want to say Hungarians but Orban and his regime constructed on the frontier with Serbia to stop migrants to enter Hungary at the same time European Union. So with all these wire fences and new walls in Europe I think that festivals like Bitev could become once again meeting places of theater makers coming from different parts of the world so that's why I'm so happy to see such a big number of guests coming all around the world at the 56th Bitev. That was all I wanted to tell you. Once again to wish you welcome to Belgrade I hope you will have nice time at our festival many of our programs and now I will leave the floor to Ausa Rikerdotir I hope it was ok as a pronunciation and I would like to thank and the board of ITM for choosing Belgrade once again to be the host of this very important plenary meeting. Thank you. And thank you the whole of the Bitev team it is so great to be back in Belgrade it is wonderful to see you all ITM members and international colleagues from all over the world. This meeting has been long in the making and our one and only Franziska will tell you in the making ever since she came to ITM and that was long before I did. Yet I'm also an oldie in the ITM member sense and I remember very well the Belgrade plenary of 2005 Milan where some of the best ITM dance moves were created and we are expecting no less but in all seriousness we are very grateful to be here and I want to thank the partners that have made this ITM Belgrade plenary possible which is first of all Bitev festival the whole team of Bitev for the trust, friendship and dedication to ITM and our joint course and on that note I want to salute Bitev for their clear stance denouncing the crackdown on the Euro pride march here in Belgrade just a few days ago as well as giving the stage to the artist Marina Davidova at the festival opening where she stated it is very important to understand that on February 24 Russia attacked not only Ukraine but also declared war on its own culture I encourage you to go to the Bitev festival website and read her whole speech We also want to give thanks to Novisat 2022 Capital of Culture for an inspiring, interesting full-on pre-trip trip yesterday which we the group that joined the trip thoroughly enjoyed The theme of this meeting and I love it work hard, live harder does not grow out of nothing It is derived from ITM's focus this year on fairness and working condition which is horribly fitting considering the hellish time we the performing arts have been experiencing lately and which we have not seen the end of This meeting is very, very much the co-creation of Bitev and ITM and moreover we in Brussels have let go we have trusted our partners we have allowed their eukofuturism and their spot on current perspectives lead the process This is very much in line with our network's joint decision during reviring the network which is to engage the membership and enhance the ownership of the members of the ITM content We have really enjoyed being part of this co-creation process and I very much want to thank Bitev Content Committee for a very good collaboration A final thought for me We have very many newcomers here in the hall and at this meeting and I welcome you all wholeheartedly Not only do we have the new strong group global connectors with us but also several new members that have joined the network and to all of you older and oldies please, please go out of your way welcome the new members share and give of yourself it will all come back to you I came across a safer space guidelines of Urban Appa which is a Helsinki based anti-racist feminist art community that acts as a platform for art events new ways of doing and discourses on the center of art I like their positive approach and I'm going to leave you with a few quotes from Urban Appa's wise words 1. Let's not assume consent let's ask for it 2. Let's respect the physical, mental and emotional boundaries of others as well of our own 3. Let's not assume the identity, sexuality, gender, health or background of others 4. Let's respect the opinions, beliefs and experiences of others even when they differ from our own 5. Let's be aware of our prejudices, privileges, behaviors and the space we occupy and last but not least 6. Let's strive to act with a positive intent and take care of each other Back to you Ivan for introducing our keynote speaker Thank you all and again it is fantastic to be back in Belgrade Does it work now? Yes it works Also thank you very much for these nice words about BTF and how to say we had some very controversial events in this country Now I have great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker whom I know pretty well at least I know pretty well his work but I would prefer to read some lines from his biography not to make any mistake Our keynote speaker is Tomislav Medak from Zagreb, Croatia and who has just defended his PhD dissertation before that he was a PhD researcher at Coventry University Center for Post-Digital Cultures His PhD thesis was on the political economy of technology and the planetary ecological crisis He is also a member a part of an artistic platform or team for theory and publishing team as well which is a multimedia institute MAMA from Zagreb and he is also a member of the very important platform for contemporary performing arts in Croatia, BEDCO a lot of you have already heard His research interests are in technology, capitalist development and post-capitalist transition with a particular focus on the planetary ecological crisis technoscience and intellectual property So this was briefly an introduction of our speaker We will all enjoy this keynote speech and afterwards before the party we will have time for Q&A Thank you very much Thank you even for this lovely introduction I would also like to thank in advance Karajovic, Marjana Cvetkovic Ksenija Džurović, Francisco Silguero and Yang Maddi who will be also helping me with my slides today I feel a little bit intimidated sitting here on this big stage I can barely discern your faces in the audience I'm not typically in the situation of giving a keynote talk a conference of this size in the room of this size but I see that you are a cheery audience and that gives me a little bit of relief hopefully I will not overstretch your attention and sour your your mood Ok, so my talk is titled As you can see Dance Against Labor Jan, if I could ask you to go to the next slide and start the video This was a fragment from my theater company's 2008 film Time Bombs based on three performances we devised in the period 2007-2009 on the topic of labor To be precise, it is the opening sequence of our 2008 performance A reenactment of workers leading the linear factory film from 1895 The central concern of that performance was on how the representation of industrial labor and the social choreographing of laboring masses evolved and transformed throughout the age of cinema Modernization in the 19th and the 20th century Europe and United States catalyzed historically unprecedented concentration of laboring masses in the cities, whose mobility, movement and motion were organized and choreographed through larger industrial capitalist relations In this talk, I want to reflect on how modern dance as an art form emerged and developed against the historical trajectory of these relations as the structural yet embodied conditions of proletarian labor While providing a speculative theoretical framing of this problematic as a now retired theater maker of using audience's patience with recollections from their formal work I will intersperse my exposition with additional fragments of One Poor and One Zero and which also address the concern of labor by means of dance Next slide, please In this talk, I will firstly situate the emergence of dance as an art form within the emerging industrial capitalist modernity which usherd in both bourgeois nation states as a form of internal social regulation and imperialism as a form of global economic expansion The rapidly maturing early capitalism was characterized by, first, a subjection of bodies to the industrial process of production Second, an abstract mediation of social relations through commodity exchange and third, a gradual exclusion of premodern routines gestures and rituals from the capitalist organization of everyday life My fundamental claim is that modern dance, both in its popular and its artistic form, on which I will focus in this talk, absorbed and reworked that capitalist constitution Modern dance is concerned with freely expressive bodies unfettered from coercion secondly, choreographic composition of collective movement and abstract dance relieved of conventions and pursuit of cultural difference provided at once a representation and a performance of larger social relations that is an embodied expression of the bourgeois ideology of freedom and spontaneity of dynamic social relations and thus a form of what Andrew Hewitt has termed a social choreography It is within these registers that dances socially reflexive, critical and potentially counter hegemonic capacity resided and maybe still continues to reside However, from this close relation to capitalist modernity follows that in the geohistorical context where capitalist development was stunted by socialist revolutions or was subjected to imperial conditions in the art form did not undergo a comparable process of constitution as it did in the West Obviously there is a lot of geopolitical terms that were thrown around already earlier so we can discuss them maybe in the QA&A So, undergo a comparable process of constitution as it did in the West but rather followed a different formation Using the example of post-socialist semi-periphery of Croatia in this talk I will secondly suggest that even the transfer of organizational forms that define dance as an artistic field in its Western tradition does not lead to uniform development and thus that the modern, postmodern and contemporary dances dominant modes of presentation, techniques and discourse are neither general nor generalizable They are rather provinčally Western or as once Yanisianša claimed Yanisianša the Slovenian performing artist its characteristic of old liberal capitalist democracies Still, the non-Western contexts are not particularly not after 1989 outside of global capitalist relations they operate within them assimilating their forms and being assimilated by their forms Unlike in the heyday of post World War II industrial development, the sphere of employment is no longer a stable foundation of social integration Informality, underemployment and social insecurity are now a shared condition of working classes across societies with various levels of economic affluence Thus, thoroughly, I will claim that stable industrial capitalist relations against which modern dance as an artistic field constituted itself are a thing of the past and that this is reflected in how the field has been transforming over the last 40 years deconstructing and reconstructing its own forms of production, artistic presentation and institutional reproduction I will claim that the crisis of labor relations can be read as and from the crisis of dance Finally, I will invite us all to consider how dance can reflect and intervene in the present restructuring of labor relations and recomposition of laboring masses through platform capitalism Next slide, please. Can you follow me? I heard some voices over there. Thank you First, the situate dance in the capitalist modernity This part is a little bit dense Hopefully, you can bear with me Aesthetic forms stand in a relation of constitution with structures of social relations and institutional forms these relations assume Aesthetic forms are foundational for our orientation and agency as they provide us with a shared scheme of representation of our social reality According to Andrew Hewett, it is dance that holds a position of privilege in crystallizing that shared scheme of representation in the period of early capitalist modernity Dance is a collective and performative practice that both allows spectators to observe the complexity of dynamic social relations and allows participants to experientially integrate that complexity of social interplay by dancing The analysis of Schiller's appreciation of English dances where all social ranks are equally allowed to participate in the choreography and hence equally represent the totality of that movement Hewett detects a historic turning point in the late 18th century where dance acquires a socially general character It stops being either a representation of courtly decorum and becomes a vessel for a spontaneous ideology of bourgeois society driven by norms of social mobility, equality and freedom From that point on, the representation of social dynamic hall and participation in its collective performance that which Hewett calls social choreography acts as an organizing principle of both popular social dances which become subsumed under the commodified logic of entertainment and dance as an art form which slowly develops into an autonomous artistic field concerned with the choreographic exploration of body and movement The separation between the popular and artistic no longer being structured by social stratification but rather by separation between the commodified and non commodified spheres of social production Whilst popular dances will have to remain outside of the scope of the present analysis the privileged position of dance as an art form within capitalist modernity and its performance of bourgeois ideology are in need of further specification There are several other processes that come to define dance nexus to capitalist modernity as they both matured into the 20th century Firstly, modern dance extracts the body and movement from the sphere of industrial production, where these are subsumed under the dictate of industrial machinery and productivity Secondly, it materializes the product that thus operating in analogy with the abstract mediation of social relations through commodity exchange The former finds his expression in modern dances lasting focus on the freely expressive body and movement, the latter in its lasting focus on abstract composition Thirdly, by differentiating itself out from the sphere of productive labour where machinic choreography of industrial production subsumes the body and movement Modern dance starts to constitute its autonomous field around the logic of choreographic exploration of body and movement, their compositional in aesthetic and expressive capacities This autonomy, which will gradually become instituted into a fully fledged artistic field encompassing aspects such as dance techniques choreographic schools, dance ensembles and hierarchical structures of production will enable modern dance to build its own formal language and reflexive structures allowing it to fully emancipate itself from the core of the Italian stage and conventions of ballet Fourthly, with the movements of manufacturing machinery instrumentalized while the movement of manufacturing machinery instrumentalized the movement of the workers the movement of dancing bodies was produced in the creative self-causation It is in that imminent free movement of dancing bodies liberated from the external necessity of labour that the fundamental ideological operation of modern dance unfolds something that Bojan at Svejc has called a vitalist synthesis of the body and movement where either the movement of the body is a singular expression of subjects inner experience or the body is a crystallization of a singular inner impulse to move in Bojna's words movement becomes ontologically bound to the body Fifthly, the exceptionalism of the dancing bodies gives it freedom to assume an exploratory and transformative relation to various existing kinesthetic registers gestural or quotidian comportments that increasingly become governed by the modern organization of life and commodified consumption or ritualistic, spiritual and folkloristic practices that increasingly become suppressed from the modern world as its exotic other Difference and otherness as opposed to uniformity and identity that define capitalist comportments does become modern dance's lasting commitment reacting to the dualism between work and leisure, dependency and freedom form work corporeal and spiritual, manual and intellectual that are characteristic of the process of capitalist modernity modern dance embraces spiritual practices that prime the body and spirit of the dancer to the requirements of artistic expression Finally, whilst modern dance is a critical distance toward the sphere of labor and capitalist modernization work ethics nonetheless finds its way into dance in the form of techniques which subject the dancing body to a strenuous practice disciplining it to achieve mastery and virtuosity of performance In fact, while competition in the labor market requires from the worker to maintain the capacity to labor meaning her strength, her health, her sanity the dancer becomes the epitome of the power to endure and to transform Nowhere is the political unconscious of dance more clearly expressed than in the ableist spectacle of self-transformation achieved through self-disciplining A dancing body is a negation of laboring body but at the same time it's pure as crystallization An ideal laboring body yet withdrawn from the process of production Next slide, please The constitutive withdrawal of the body and movement from the industrial process of production in modern dance sheds light on why the interruption in modern dance's development that was brought about by socialist revolutions is not simply a case of stunted modernization but a different trajectory of development not a derailing or belatedness but then altogether a different formation Socialist revolutions have all taken place in countries where capitalist modernization was in its early stages and the social mass of bodies was still not fully organized by the exigencies of industrial process of production Thus, parallel shock brought about by a rapid socialist modernization that mobilized masses of producers into a collective, programmatic and conscious process of constituting a new society and a constructivist merging of productive and social life precluded dance art from forming as an autonomous field vis-a-vis the sphere of production rather than constituting and instituting itself as an autonomous field of choreographic inquiry dance as an art form developed either in dialogue with ballet, musical theater or more contemporary art forms such as film or performance or as representational forms of collective choreography such as sle In the background you can see a photo from Bedko's 2009 piece The League of Time in which we have reconstructed some of the programmatic socialist efforts to overcome the separation of chorus, laboring and free, leisurely expressive body While dance in socialist societies thus developed as an undercurrent through and in dialogue with other artistic and social forms as proper mostly appeared as a continuation of vestigial forms of rudimentary bourgeois culture in socialism or as a direct borrowing from the capitalist center without grounds for autonomous institutional development Consider post socialist Croatia Over the last 15 years the dance field in Croatia has made huge inroads in the process of achieving what are perceived to be institutional milestones of a fully constituted autonomous artistic field within a national culture It got its national dance center with the opening of Zagreb dance center separate funding under the cultural commission for drama and dance art at the Ministry of Culture and a BA and MA level dance education program In that dance has completed the paradigmatic passage from an unacknowledged and marginalized art form into an institution differentiated field such as it exists across the cultural systems of all liberal capitalist democracies in the West where modern and contemporary dance have after all emerged and evolved in what is assumed to be the paradigmatic form With that, the process of related modernization on the periphery only temporarily interrupted by an alternative socialist modernization would have seemingly reached its completion This schematic developmental path of dance as an artistic field implicitly dominates the self understanding in the field Its actors frequently argue from a perspective of institutional under development of our cultural system and its lagging behind other mostly Western European context There, the dance is truly recognized as an art form holds a position of prominence in the cultural system and has all the support structures needed to achieve significance in the national and international cultural context Yet these actors are frequently confronted with the experience that the introduction of an institutional solution fails to achieve comparable effect it has purportedly achieved in more developed contexts 15 years later the dance center in Zagreb remains captured and marginally important the commission does not have ample funds to help develop the field and the dance program is always struggling with a lack of faculty and resources The experience reflects the fact that the evolutionary process cannot be transplanted from one sociopolitical context to another nor can the introduction of an institutional solution bring the evolution of a certain context from one stage into the other that which we consider as belated and troubled process of catching up with the capitalist center is nothing else but a transfer of institutional forms into a context where the structure of social relations and already existing organizational forms provide different affordances and different resistances to that transplanted form than those that are in its original context For these institutional forms to take hold and adapt in capitalist peripheries cultural workers need to mobilize and organize to reappropriate them giving them a different collectivist mode of operation and they have to continuously struggle collectively to secure their precarious existence Next slide please In the background you can see Steve Paxton and Jerry Overington performing a contact improvisation in the technique or a practice first developed by Paxton in the 1970s I have purposefully selected a video of a reversal of the technique rather than a performance such as after the fall to emphasize the watershed moment that it represents that contact improvisation represents and that we focused on in Bedco's One Poor and One Zero In speculative history which that performance unfolds we have claimed that contact improvisation was a true child of its own age of the age of early post industrialization in the western industrial societies of the 1970s the age of factory closures and the decline of mass industrial labor Its development resonated with some of the most defining shifts of that age the moving away from conflictual forms of social interaction based on class struggle to post conflictual, post conventional forms The interaction in contact improvisation is spontaneous and reciprocal It seeks to avoid all pre-existing social forms gainsmanship and endocrine reactions According to Steve Paxton it is a situation where only two can win There is no master, no student, no authority no technical knowledge pre-given Simply the knowledge acquired in the exercise itself Furthermore, throughout the industrial age the labor remained hidden behind the factory gates but now it started to permeate other segments of social, cognitive and physical life Famously society became the factory and accordingly contact improvisation worked against the dominant understanding of dance that defined dance through a regime of visibility an external representation of what it is that the dancing body should be doing and it worked to reveal the hidden labor of two dancing bodies in contact Next slide, please The post industrialization in western capitalist societies was the first step in the destabilization of industrial class relations Steve Paxton's contact improvisation registers that unsettling as it channels some of the broader shifts in those western capitalist societies the waning of class conflict growing existential fears and a need for post conventional forms of support and interdependence If the sphere of productive labor and labor market provided the integrative mechanism for post industrial capitalism the modern dance built its autonomy vis-a-vis that exact mechanism The post industrial neoliberalization on the other hand unsettled that integrative moment and the post modern dance started to question its own autonomy The demise of two competing regimes within the world system after the fall of socialism has seen the capitalist relation become uncontested the division of labor global the social inequality in large parts of the world grow deeper The flexibilization and proletarianization of the working class across the entire capitalist world today is a second step in the destabilization of industrial class relations The socially integrative role of labor is crumbled away and as it has crumbled away so has the constitutive relation of dance vis-a-vis the sphere of productive labor If flexibility, adaptability and malleability of capacity to labor have become a general requirement for survival in the labor market the border running between the subsumed body and the free body has been suspended Not only is the self-transformative body of a dancer demanded now of everyone but the prevalent condition of precarious employment and multiple careers are more than ever a lot of a growing global dancing community The differentiation between the sphere of labor and the sphere of artistic expression built around the access of heteronomy and autonomy of body and movement no longer seems to obtain The laboring body is increasingly enjoined commanded to be free and enterprising while the dancing body is increasingly demanded to show its laboring to justify its privilege to free exploration and artistic work The crumbling away of the constitutive distance of dance to capitalist labor sediments in various other aspects and uses itself As the number of trained dancers has increased apprenticeships under master choreographers have become rarer Stable employment in dance ensembles also rare and fragmentation and competition more expressed Dancers shuffle between mostly performing for others and rarely making their own choreographies and firing the broadest range of techniques and developing their own post technique practices and scraping by by doing odd jobs on the side producing small works, doing workshops and residencies and rarely reaching professional and existential stability As a reflection of this crisis of labor that is also a crisis of dance since the end of the 1990s the contemporary dance primarily in what is known as conceptual dance or choreographic theater has been marked by an upending of conventions of theatrical representation and the suspension of what Bojanets vage has termed the ontological identity between the body and movement The performative formats seek to step outside of the scopic regime of theatrical stage where the totality of choreographic relations is manifested and made visible for the audience and seeks other dispositives of encounter including exhibition gallery and museum Production formats are becoming fluid smaller and transformed into education exhibition or residency Dance seems no longer able or willing to uphold the position of distance as an aesthetic form that provides a representation of the experiential integration of the capitalist social whole Next slide, please With that in mind I move on to the last and most recent work I want to discuss In the background you can see an image from Yes, indeed you can an image from Tomo Savic Getzen's work Untitled Creation Pavilion presented at this year's Venice Biennale of Art a work to which I have contributed dramaturgical assistance and writing for catalog It is an almost imperceptible work performed by five dancers twice a day across different pavilions in the Biennale It is so subtle that it can go unnoticed by exhibition goers as present I took this photo nobody noticed that they were performing But if you happen to notice it or arrive informed about it I have witnessed a choreographed performance What runs under the hood of that mutating performance is a complex concatenation of human and technological processes Every day a computer selects a lead story from among 350 newspapers or portals from 168 different countries and then analyzes this lead story using a natural language processing model to produce parameters for the performance that day This AI model is an animating mechanism instilling permutations, intensity and undecidability into the work beyond the control of human actors The work can thus be read as choreography in a conventional sense people choreographed to perform to dance where five dancers perform a changing sequence of subtle actions across different national pavilions for the duration of the Biennale but also as a choreography in an expanded sense involving abstractions and translations between interconnected socio-technical systems Such socio-technical systems are commonly built these days to sustain the flow of information, labour and goods in the capitalist world of spectacle production and consumption which are characterized by the ubiquity of intelligent devices and computer systems helping capture large sets of data and make inferences to optimize and accelerate those flows Here they are reappropriated to perform in almost imperceptible labour Next slide, please Savage Getzen's untitled Creation Pavilion seems to indicate that we need to consider in the process of how dance is reconfigured through the restructuring of capitalist labour relations The sphere of labour is, over the last decade increasingly subject to a post-digital regime of control that uses ubiquitous computing devices constant data valence and artificial intelligence to extract ever more surplus and already flexibilized and proletarianized workforce Those technological systems can analyze and reassemble the movements and skills of workers into simple controllable tasks creating the foundations for the modes of labour that political economist Ursula Hughes has called log labour where workers log on to platforms to be ordered around by automated systems Workers in delivery services or fulfillment centers follow instructions given to them by mobile devices that track their every movement yet obfuscate the complex sociotechnical processes embedded in equally opaque corporate structures that organize their work While early industrialization concentrated masses of workers to operate increasingly complex machines allowing them to develop a collective technical understanding of the factory system and thus to game and sabotage the apparatus of coercion platformization isolates workers and disables any understanding of the concatenated processes that hide behind the interfaces these workers interact with through their devices The five dancers in Venice are similarly sent through their mobile devices which give them instructions and cues based on the daily analysis performed by an AI This is in the back a schema created by Vlad Anjolar an artist from Novi Sad just analyzing that concatenated sociotechnical chain processes These dancers seemingly share a lot with log labourers However, and despite the numerous precise directives they are given where to go, at what time and how long and what actions to perform their capacity to relate to the spaces in which they perform to each other, to visitors, to their own bodies is purposefully heightened in the choreography giving them a fleeting intelligence and interpretation of their collective endeavor While the instructions and cues can have virtually endless permutations the dancers help develop and in the end hold the reins, control the performative capacity of that concatenation of sociotechnical systems This will be the sedimented and embodied knowledge of how they can control and modulate the systems intervention into the world Those who design the system will largely remain deprived of this arcane embodied knowledge Dance, and on this I finish Dance thus points to a sensorium of collective embodied intelligence that desagregated labouring masses might sediment and accumulate against opaque AI systems coordinating their labour The question is, how can those labouring masses come together to communicate that intimate knowledge and turn it against that system of control And if the dance no longer can or should uphold its distance to the sphere of labour something that I've claimed has lost in the process of post-industrialization What can the dancing collectivity such as that one in Venice convey from its experience to a collectivity of logged labourers Without offering any definitive answers I want to leave us with that open question I want to invite you to a discussion on what is dance in the age of platform work Thank you I know I'm standing between you and the reception so we can take maybe a couple of questions I guess there are people with mic going around, oh yeah, there so place your hand and ask the question or comments whatever you like If you have a question remark, or you're all so thirsty go to Tomka over there No, but please, come on use the mic Sorry for keeping you a bit longer Thanks for the intellectual gymnastics and what I was wondering is there is this big debate in post-capitalist circles is it post-capitalism or anti-capitalism or beyond-capitalism, which are very interesting and then I would similarly maybe ask what do you see as a difference between dancing against labor and dancing after labor Yeah, thank you for the question it's a difficult one obviously here in this talk has an ambivalent meaning so it means vis-a-vis the fundamental claim is that modern dance as a field has emerged against the coercion of bodies in the capitalist system of production encapsulating the abstractness of the capitalist world so that's one against and then obviously the other against is that dance can be counter-hegemonic and it has been in many ways the work of Steve Paxton in that sense has been counter-hegemonic against war against alienation the domination of the visual of of the eye over dancing and trying to bring dance back to interaction between bodies so in that sense dance I think also has a trajectory of being against sometimes and obviously in the town of stable employment in the western post-industrial societies one could discuss that this is the current condition of labor is in some big sense after labor after the society of work and their dancers share the lot of the working population but also working population has come under the same pressures as dancers to be able to self-transform through their working life and live in many aspects precarious existence as artists typically did and do and there it's evident that dance after labor is really dance of hardship as well outside of that Western purview I feel that the dance constitutes out of collective endeavors in different fields than dance itself more than as modern dance particularly in the socialist world but I guess also I mean I come from socialist country this country that used to be Yugoslavia a number of independent nation states I feel that there the separation between leisure and work was very different or was meant to be very different and that dance in that sense encapsulates something else usually it's sled sled is this collective choreography that was politically performed but also other collective performances and non-labor and I think it continues to persist through the collective efforts being part of or formally being part of the dancing in Croatia it's always a struggle there will never be something that people would say is a normal stable artistic field I don't feel that's possible for various reasons so I feel that there is no dance after labor because we are still not after labor one way from post socialist post capitalist or communist perspective to understand labor is that communities collectively deliberate on the socially necessary labor that goes into reproducing the community and all the members of the community which leaves a lot of time for self determination or dancing so one could read it in that kind of way that dance after labor that free time once we have collectively assumed the decision making about what's necessary how do we split that work I guess from everyone according to their ability and then to everyone according to their needs so I don't know there is another way to take dance after labor we have done a show in 2007 called changes and there it was the fable of the ant and the grasshopper so obviously it's clear what the dance is in that fable so you are a starving dancer after labor over there please Azam, I think please introduce yourself Hello, thank you very much for your presentation and for your discussion this is Azam Haider from Egypt one of global connectors members and yeah well it's completely different if we compare dancing and labor we are way far from that because of a lot of other circumstances that are happening in the Egyptian society which is being missed a little bit in the European and Western countries at the same time because in our society we don't consider dance as a job at all, it's not the only job in dance is belly dance and this is a lot of people even consider it as a prostitute it's a long history back to the 50s but this reason or the culture over there it's also a dancing culture so everybody is dancing but it's not a job no one is taking it seriously so if I go and you say that I work in dance they laugh so what do you do else but this leave the dancers in Egypt and I think mostly in Middle East as well hungry actually for dance hungry for what they're creating and they put a lot of a lot of their souls and their emotions in what they're doing on the country of what sometimes what I've seen in the European dancers is more as job than as an art performance or a dance performance because it's fast, it's happening, the production over there they have to produce a lot and we don't have this we have the opportunity to what we actually love with all the obstacles and this is opening this opportunity how actually in this situations which is completely different societies how this kind of topic could transfer the Egyptian society into something that bring back the dancing culture and to take it a little bit seriously than it is right now trying to reach to the level what you're talking about right now which is dance against labor which is not really there yet Thank you Hassan Thank you I can only comment, I agree fully even in Croatia that has embraced in artistic field for a couple of decades now it's still child of love and constant struggle of people who are dance artists, choreographers to keep it going and I have no recipe I can't really comment on other places I just wanted to say how really constrained certain development of modern postmodern contemporary dances to a very limited geography of the world and how it has emerged there against specific coercion of laboring bodies but obviously we could discuss how dance persists against forms of coercion that are outside of the capitalist core that were brought about by colonial, imperial work and endogenous forces so I think there is a lot to say about popular dances and its capacity to resist but also its capacity to conform so I feel that's a huge topic, I can't really do justice to it, I'm not really researcher of that, I was in a way generously talked into giving this talk by Mariana whom I thank greatly so hopefully somebody else can answer that in the crowd I'm sure there are people who are just as knowledgeable as I am We have three days to continue the conversation so it's just the beginning of our conversation Do we have any more further comments from the group questions It's hard to see, oh there's a hand up there Thank you Tom I'm Xenia Jurovich from the beat of team and one of the content committee members I'm really sorry that I'm kind of tuning our own horn but for me this talk was a brilliant beginning in this meeting and I just wanted to kind of briefly ask a practical question because I think we've seen throughout the pandemic but even earlier with some artists who decided to let's say have a more sustainable working life or working processes I just am thinking about this platform work that has been very present or at least that I've noticed far more in the IT industry I've not seen it a lot in hours but would you say that a mode of platform working is exactly how people did or how these sustainable people do rehearsals or do their processes with dancers through actually zoom meetings that are happening with I don't know 3,000 miles apart where the choreographer is providing instructions for the material to the dancers that's a fairly strict structure and if anything is surveillance I would say that is in a way so I'm just curious about this it kind of ignited something in my mind I guess well thank you for that question it's something worth spending a bit of time on which I won't now I think one should really reflect on that experience from the point of view of people who are doing that my intent is once it finishes to talk to the dancers what is the tacit knowledge that you have acquired what is it that other people can't see happening here and how do you reflect on that how do you understand your being in this disaggregated performance commanded by a technological system mostly that provides no rational explanation for what it is that you are doing and I feel that we should also do the same with our zoom time which is always also a privilege that you could stay at home and not have to go work during the pandemic something that noniquine has called screen you deal some are forced to go out and provide the essentials for the rest and some have the privilege or again forced to stay at home and work behind the screen so I think we need to reflect on that primarily on the low res of the image and the regime of visibility that the screen sets that's so different than what dancing in space typically is and yet we record and use recordings it's nothing unusual in rehearsals so I think we need to reflect on how that is changing our understanding of what we are doing is it something that it's beyond good and bad what it is that with increased digitization is implied for society at large what is the transformation happening to broad aspects of society through digital work and then we can maybe start from there with interesting inquiries I think there will be a lot of work that will emulate that but I think we need to go beyond emulating what's the performance vis-a-vis the screen that would be maybe just ground level starting point for a more interesting inquiry I think we should continue the conversation out in the hall I know there is a lovely set of table with lots of beautiful looking drinks waiting for us but let's not lose the conversation and on behalf of all of us I want to thank you Tomislav for this top provoking full on ideas that you have given us here at the beginning of this meeting and thanks a lot and let's keep the thoughts going and develop further in the next three days thank you so much