ABSTRACT
This book focuses on the problematic issue of communitas in relation to contemporary dance as it has developed in post-communist European countries. Although contemporary dance only began to flourish in these countries after the disintegration of their communist governments in 1989, its roots were much older. Isadora Duncan performed widely, introducing modern dance to many European countries in the first decade of the twentieth century, and generating interest in new forms of artistic dancing. Before 1914, young women from many European countries, including ones that subsequently became communist, went to train at Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s school in Hellerau, or in the 1920s and 1930s went to Mary Wigman’s school in Dresden, or to one of the schools set up by Wigman and Laban’s ex-students, before returning to their own countries to set up schools. After 1945, modern dance went underground in Europe as ballet became the dominant theatre dance form in both Western Europe and in the Eastern countries under the Soviet Union’s de facto control. The idea that the development of the contemporary arts in Eastern Europe took place later than in the West and was merely an imitation of western ideas is mistaken. Although contemporary dance had continued under communism, as Bojana Kunst discusses in her chapter, it only did so in a marginalised, unofficial, amateur form that was largely practised by women. It was this that, nevertheless, formed the basis for the developments in dance discussed in this book, and was not something entirely new that was imported after 1989 along with free market capitalism. The social and political context of contemporary dance in post-communist countries, however, was that of the often brutal processes of financial restructuring brought about by globalisation. The social effects of this restructuring made the loss of community cohesion and the problem of communitas an issue. In this Introduction I shall explore the coincidence between the development of contemporary dance and the degrading of community cohesion in post-communist European countries.
