CoFestival 2021 – International Festival of Contemporary Dance

Date 25.11.2021 - 02.12.2021

Location Ljubljana

With the abundance of non-contact time that has occupied our lives in the last year and a half, the CoFestival 2021 organisers decided to focus this year’s edition on a particular contact and relational time, which in contemporary dance was named Movement Research about half a century ago. These interests did not arise out of thin air during the mentioned period but were for various reasons already studied by kinesiology from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards as we entered the modern era. Primarily for health reasons, to reduce the number of injuries and treat them appropriately, or to optimise the physical work of manual industrial production with insights into the motor skills of the body. But very soon, contemporary dance art and kinesiology started to make pacts, to (un)officially meet, inspire each other and assemble their different knowledge and competences in order to benefit each other. The time of experiences could not be accelerated, it required duration and in some cases even outpaced the development of technology, which could only confirm the analysis of such bodily experiences.

Of all that is scheduled to take place at CoFestival 2021, the festival organizers are most excited to be hosting compelling, fascinating, viewable and successful performances, which perhaps have in common the fact that the gaze and dance meet on stage as well as in the auditorium. What has been constitutive for movement research in the history of contemporary dance is that the gaze and dance have taken a common, inseparable place: that each dancer is also a precise spectator of her own doing, of her own experience, and that the experience of the spectator is at a crucial moment in the midst of dancing or choreographing of the aesthetic experience. This is where the story of the emancipated spectator begins in dance.

For more information and the full programme please visit: https://cofestival.si/2021/en/program/