ABSTRACT
It is not quite true that there is no local history of contemporary dance. However, what we can identify as the local dance history is a fringe non-teleological network of past traces of various “body movement practices” in art and culture. It does not lead to the current contemporary dance in Serbia; and it differs from the offi cial dance history, that is, the dance history of Western Europe and the USA. It is rather an archeology of more or less isolated or loosely connected points, lost tracks, ruptures, parallel fl ows, accidents, breaches – a genealogy of the discontinuity of beginnings … Before World War II, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia there were two established paradigms of body movement as cultural-artistic practice in Serbia. One is the work of philosopher and choreographer Maga Magazinović, whose vision of body emancipation was realized through a “new dance” combination of gymnastics, plastics, rhythmics, feminism, and physical culture as education. She combined the dance techniques and poetics of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman, blended with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. In conjunction with this, I must mention the avantgarde dance of Klavdija Isačenko, who, apart from working in the National Theater in Belgrade (1918-1923) after she left post-revolutionary Russia, introduced “body plastics” and made choreographies in Ljubljana (Plastic Ballet) and Belgrade (Sobareva metla – Janitor’s Broom). Her work opens a new chapter in the past of local dance but, unfortunately, after only fi ve years Isačenko left Serbia, and being completely erased from history, she did not exert any infl uence. The other paradigm at the time followed from the work of the Sokoli (Falcons) gymnastics movement. The ideology adopted by Serbian activists of the movement regarded the human body as a tool for building a healthy collective body for the future pan-Slavic nation. Although they made use of similar notions – health, emancipation of the body, physical culture – the ideologies of these two paradigms differed: emancipation of the individual vs.
