The Desire to Make a Solid History Will End Up in Failure.

It’s almost a saying in Serbia: we suffer from an excess of history. We long for boredom, we long for a well-organized society, a functioning political system that doesn’t just keep trying to teach us new lessons. The longing is great. It is a longing for a generation not to be plagued by occupation, war, dictatorship or a change from one authoritarian regime to another.

Right at the beginning of 2024, we again saw the images of people “dancing” in the streets: a protest, one of a handful, this time against the election result for President Aleksandar Vučić. It was an uprising, but also an expression of this longing, which is also reflected in a dance piece with the fitting title: “The desire to write a solid history will end in failure”.

Where does this pessimism that underpins the country come from, and where does the need to try again and again to write history itself come from? What is going on in Serbia, a country that was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire without ever enjoying a hint of independence? Isn’t Serbia itself to blame, for example, for the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian crown prince and thus the start of the First World War? Or for the establishment of a kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which later became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War? The ideological collapse of self-governing socialism, better known as communism, officially ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it ended far more bloodily with a war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a nightmare of modern Europe, comparable only to the war in Ukraine. The bombing of Serbia by NATO in 1999, Kosovo’s declaration of independence, the trial at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal and the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic are just as much a topic on the world stage in view of the still unresolved Kosovo issue as Serbia’s accession to the so-called family of European nations as part of the European Union.

As far as dance is concerned, Serbia has always been oriented towards the cultural values of Europe. The development of theater in the 20th century in this country is identical to the development of modernism and modern dance as a whole. Nevertheless, Serbia, which was hit hard by two world wars and overwhelmed by the revolutionary reforms of the socialist system during reconstruction, was never able to compete with the more economically developed countries, its former colonial states.

The Belgrade International Theater Festival, or BITEF for short, played the biggest role for the local stage arts, especially during the Cold War. It was and is a crossroads between two worlds, East and West, an open, avant-garde space that has hosted all the greats of its time: Jerzy Grotowski, Pina Bausch, Samuel Beckett, Susanne Linke, Peter Brook, Otomar Krejca, Tadeusz Kantor, the Living Theatre, the Odin Theatre, DV8 and Lindsay Kemp. BITEF has always been the first authority for all younger theater and dance movements in the region. Despite its enormous influence on generations of artists, on the education and development of audiences and on Serbia’s presence on the map, BITEF has always remained an institution that was never set in stone, but is still made up of real people and events. The history of BITEF has not yet been written, there are few records and hardly anything has been archived. What remains is the desire to write a solid history, even if it ends in failure.

“We are the children of BITEF!” shouted Boris Čakširan, Jelena Jović and Anđelija Todorovic during the round table discussion after the performance of the play “The desire to write a solid story will end in failure”. They shouted it during the 2023 edition of BITEF. “BITEF’s Children” is a phrase coined by Jovan Ćirilov, one of the founders and curators of this major festival program with the subtitle “New Theatre Tendencies”. Together with Tatjana Pajović, Sanja Krsmanović Tasić and Nela Antonović, the three aforementioned form a dream team that has gathered around the dancer, choreographer and anthropologist Igor Koruga. He created “The Desire to Make a Solid History Will End Up in Failure”. It is a dream team because it involves six dancers and choreographers who have each thrown their own historical weight into the history of Serbian dance. Almost all of them have or had their own dance troupes, all of them have had their experiences with the experimental, neo-avant-garde direction represented by companies such as Ister, DAH, MimArt, Hleb, Women in Black or POD, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when their country was plunged into a bloody, fratricidal war.

Here stands the huge monument to Stefan Nemanja, the founder of the Nemanjić dynasty from the 12th century. Monumentally developed in the style of Marvel or DC comic book heroes, it has only recently come to dominate the former station plateau. Belgrade is eager to follow the trend of restoring a medieval, original Serbia with a whole host of newly erected religious buildings. I can’t help but notice that Serbia itself still has the desire to write a solid history.

Marijana Cvetković from the Station for Contemporary Dance Service welcomes me and laughs. Every beginning always feels like an end. The lack of a dance scene and the lack of working spaces makes it particularly difficult to find a beginning at all. It’s no different not only in Belgrade, but also in Novi Sad, the city where I live. Dancers mainly populate alternative spaces, cultural centers and small galleries, but definitely not theaters. There is no dance center in Serbia, only underground. Even Magacin, which is practically on the border of the “Belgrade Waterfront”, separated only by a street, is already counting its days until this warehouse of the former state publishing house owned by the city also becomes a victim of gentrification.

Igor Koruga finally arrives. He also immediately complains about the lack of venues: “If we had space, the productions, even the big productions, wouldn’t just run two or three times. The audience is there, but everything is lacking so that artists have the possibility to work continuously.”

The problems are well known. A lack of infrastructure, a lack of funding models, a lack of strategies for a cultural policy that is more well thought out than just making an effort when it comes to tourism. Culture is at the bottom of public budget calculations. According to a recent study from 2019, Serbian cultural expenditure amounts to less than one percent per capita, or in concrete figures: Serbia supports its culture with eleven euros per capita. For comparison, the former Yugoslav country of Slovenia spends 79 euros per capita. This includes all expenditure that is subsumed under culture, including monument protection and the costs of museums. In this construct, dance is listed as a “non-institutional cultural scene” and thus suffers a particularly small budget, one for amateur productions. This situation is intolerable. The dance scene has protested several times under the umbrella of the Association of Independent Cultural Scene of Serbia and negotiated with ministries and city councils. But apart from a series of small concessions, nothing ever came of it.

Igor Koruga shakes his head: “This fight for better economic conditions, for better conditions for artistic production and for a redistribution of economic resources within culture is the same as taking to the streets to fight for better conditions in society in general. But the good thing is that these struggles are what define us as a dance scene in the first place. They continue the story so that we can slowly achieve what we have come together for. As we were able to show in our piece, the struggles for contemporaneity and its art have been flaring up since the moment Yugoslavia fell apart. Our research in the archives proves this.”

Understanding dance as a means of struggle, as a kind of cultural and artistic partisan movement, began in the 1920s and 1930s and reached its first peak during the Second World War. Artists roamed Yugoslavia during the partisan battles and performed on improvised stages for the army. These once included Mira Sanjina, Žorž Skrigin and Marta Paulina Brina, among others. Seen in this light, dance was always part of the struggle for better conditions, for a fairer society. It was never just a beautiful art. The first modern dancer from the region was Maga Magazinović. She graduated from the schools of Max Reinhardt and Isadora Duncan, was inspired by the ideas of Ellen Kay and Clara Zetkin and was enthusiastic about dance as an expression of the unconscious. She was the first to bring a touch of emancipated modernism to Serbia, even if her own attitude was later characterized by more National Socialist ideas. A younger contemporary of Maga Magazinović was Smiljana Mandukić, who was inspired by the great reformer and choreographer Rudolf von Laban and was one of the first to found her own modern dance troupe. Smiljana Mandukić was the guarantor of “The desire to write a solid history will fail”; her dances have now been revived thanks to Nela Antonovi.

Nela Antonovi dances. She dances in front of a projection of old film footage, in black and white and with a note in the top right-hand corner stating that it is an archive program from Belgrade Television.

The outline of the Skull Tower, a monument to the Serbs who died in the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 19th century, can be seen dramatically at the start. The interior of a torch-lit cave is also dramatic, where after the opening scene with a group of male performers, a female solo, then a duo and a group choreography can be seen, full of energetic movements and asymmetrical, unexpected jumps, turns and abrupt stretching of the limbs. Elements of folklore and ballet movements seem to be interspersed. The spectacle seems like a ritual, a kind of rebellion against the gods, who seem trapped in the vocabulary of ancient theater. Parallel to the video projection, Nela Antonović recreates the movements of one of the dancers from the film footage on stage. Antonovi does not imitate her, but rather casually traces with her body in a punk costume what the woman in the sacralized dress seems to be dancing in front of her. Half a century lies between her real action and the recording. In fifty years, the spirit of the times has changed. Radically, in fact. No one would transform a cave into a Holy Grail today. What one senses is a dance like an alchemical substance that wants to work against the corrosion of history. This choreography by Smiljana Mandukić from 1973, which was broadcast on television on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the first Serbian uprising, drew its appeal at the time from placing courageous female figures in the foreground of the traditional folk epic about the heroic fight against the Turks instead of the male fighters. For the dance had always been a battle. A good part of the piece “The desire to write a solid history will end in failure” consists of such juxtapositions of old recordings and contemporary actions.

At the beginning, Anđelija Todorović dances a short solo parallel to a collage of video images of mass movements, battles and assemblies – as if the second half of the 20th century had consisted of nothing other than mobilizing the people and making conditions dance.

Another dialog with the archive material takes place on the video of the popular song “Moja draga voli Kurosavu” by Oliver Mandić, a progressive, queer pop artist who devoted himself to nationalism in the 1990s. The war did not pass him by either.

Afterwards, Jelena Jović takes on folk diva Zorica Brunclik by delightfully denouncing her dance interludes. Not only artists such as Maga Magazinović or Oliver Mandić once changed sides ideologically, the later artists were also never spared and show this, not without self-irony. Igor Koruga talks about the normal life as a dancer in Serbia. “Even if you’re employed at a theater to perform in a musical, for example, you usually have a second job in television or in the cast for singers in popular or pop culture. Other jobs are of course also possible. But you can also found a company yourself. The first dance theater in Serbia was called Signum. Anđelija Todorovic and Tatjana Pajović were part of it. They rehearsed at the theater on Terazije in the mornings and danced at Signum in the afternoons. In the 1980s, the prize for the best play in Yugoslavia was shared. One of the two plays was won by the Terazije Theater, the other by the Signum company. Anđelija and Tatjana had to go on stage twice to receive the two halves of the prize.”

It is not unimportant to restore some kind of knowledge in order to develop at least a certain or approximate understanding of what these artists once did and what history they and we live or lived in. It is a history that cannot be mythologized as easily as the heroic history of resistance, the heroic history of socialism or the heroic history of war. All these histories are not over, but continue to exist side by side and next door to the histories of corruption, neoliberalism and world history. That is why there is no linear structure in this play. Instead, there is a wild mixture of dramaturgical statements, physical actions and music videos. Igor Koruga talks about how much the work process itself fell into segments. He had put questions to the contemporary witnesses of Serbian dance so that they could position themselves in relation to the documents they had selected themselves. Their answers sometimes referred to their upbringing, sometimes to their professional situation, sometimes to their political stance, sometimes to their gender or their aesthetic judgment – for the audience, it is precisely this abundance of points of contact that invites identification. The performers only hasten to break this agreement at any time by making loud comments or pushing each other off the stage.

It’s also a lot about glamor and camp, i.e. self-irony. There are pop uniforms, the revival of old hits to synthetic sounds, the fashion and design of the 1980s, then the sudden collapse in the middle section of the play. The horrors of the 1990s are revealed, when the deafening noise of automatic weapons, cannons, mortars and explosions took over in Yugoslavia. Personally, I felt a strange pang of nostalgic resentment because I am very close in age to the phenomena and events described.

This feeling intensified when the historical narratives met the spinning Sanja Krsmanović Tasić. Interviews can be heard from the loudspeakers, another element of this production, to which this dancer keeps spinning like a dervish of the Melvevlian Order.

While the interviews – the voices of the performers, who are not visible at this moment – focus on the circumstances of the 1990s in Serbia, the war and the growing protests against Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, Sanja transcends herself and everyone around her. As if a kind of spirituality suddenly wanted to prevail. After twelve minutes and despite all the statements about war crimes and all the glorification of Serbia, the character of Sanja Krsmanović Tasić spins out a greater power than all this glorifying post-war talk, culminating in the unspeakable sentence: “If we had known that we were fighting for a wolf in sheep’s clothing – capitalism – we wouldn’t have fought like this.” Of course, history always has two faces – success and failure. But it is the dance that goes on and on, with no end and no beginning.

Igor Koruga asks a typical question at the very beginning of the play: “Are you stars?”. This question is mainly about the fact that we have no stars in Serbia, no dance personalities who are known throughout the country or even Europe. But is that a shortcoming?

Koruga says: “We have no stars. We don’t have artistic public figures who perform at public events and from time to time express their personal views or opinions that others might share. But for me, the people in our show are all stars because they are contemporary witnesses, because in their heyday, often at the beginning of their careers in the 1980s, they worked with the major cultural figures of the time. They worked closely with choreographers and directors such as Petar Slaj, Nada Kokotović, Ljubiša Ristić … They also worked for the stars of folk and pop culture, for Lepa Brena, Usnija Redžepova, Vesna Zmijanac, Zdravko Čolić, Josipa Lisac … At that time, there was still recognition, they won prizes and the Signum dance company was even given a military plane by the presidency to fly them to Mexico to show their award-winning piece ‘Bernarda Alba’s House’. They played in Russia in front of Gorbachev, and it wasn’t just a pop star like Lepa Brena who was able to do this.” Koruga is on fire at this point, his enthusiasm is huge. He wants to give dance, the art of movement, the same dignity that is otherwise only given to actors, directors, writers, painters and athletes. Why is the dance scene in the background at all? Koruga sees one reason in the way dance was perceived by other artistic disciplines. In Serbia, the highest form of dance education until 2014 was the secondary ballet school, a secondary school diploma. Even today, there is still no state higher education institution for dance.

Koruga believes that “dance has not been recognized as a relevant artistic field at all. In the ballet schools in Novi Sad, Belgrade and Panevo, we have teachers who invest a lot in their students so that they learn the necessary techniques and styles. But of course, these schools, some of which are private, do not offer any means of familiarizing them with the art of choreography, for example. This requires a higher level of education. These people either go abroad after graduating, especially if they are very talented, or they try to find the necessary conditions and possibilities here even if there are no or very few spaces in which to work. Without an institutional framework, it is impossible for dance to develop or even become visible. This is a consequence of poor cultural policy, but also of a lack of strategies for a physically emancipated society.”

The danger comes above all from the institutions themselves. Somewhat better developed areas of education, such as the faculties for dramatic arts, very often reduce dance and choreography to the level of a service. Dance has hardly any significance for directing and is far less important than the acting aspects of a play. Dance is reduced to a serving, decorative level. “We have a song, so give us a few moves to dance to while we sing it.”

Igor Koruga laughs as he talks about how many actors, as soon as they are asked to work on their movement, drag a doctor’s note with them so that they don’t have to, as they put it, jump around. In their minds, there is no artistically valid image of dance. It was therefore all the more important for Koruga to show that there is a history of dance, a very lively one at that, even if it is a history that fails. Perhaps it has to fail, perhaps it wants to fail.

Igor Koruga belongs to a generation that grew up with contemporary European dance trends. His temporary company – Tanja, Sanja, Anđa, Jelena, Boris, Nela – grew up in Yugoslavia, in the neighborhood of classical ballet, and only saw what was coming to them from the world at BITEF. Igor Koruga, on the other hand, belonged to the first generation of artists in Serbia who actually grew up in the world and not just in Serbia.

In the 1990s, Serbia was internationally sanctioned. A passport was worth nothing, it was no longer valid almost anywhere. Koruga, on the other hand, familiarized himself with the contemporary works of Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, whom he followed with great interest, learned from them and attended their workshops.

Igor Koruga’s collaboration with the historical corpus of Serbian modernism, the dance artists of recent Serbian history, his “dream team”, is for him the logical continuation of a cross-generational legacy. But it was also a collision, a clash of generations with Boris Čakširan, Jelena Jović and Anđelija Todorovic, with Tatjana Pajović, Sanja Krsmanović Tasić and Nela Antonović. For them, it was an honor to land in the main BITEF program once again. I would rather ask Igor Koruga why he sees this attempt to write a solid story as a failure in the very title of his play.

“Because failure forces you to discover something new and try something new,” Koruga replies: “But failure also has a political side. Neoliberalism demands that we succeed in everything we do. If we look at the history of dance, then, according to this narrative, it would only be a matter of telling the story of the foundations and successes of dance. But how can we do that when our history, including our political history, consists of fragments and is characterized by a huge discontinuity, as a constant struggle against the regimes imposed on us? Failure has something to do with vulnerability, and we are beings who live and work in these circumstances in a very vulnerable and very fragile way. We are trying to get out of this situation, we are trying to fight for change. We want to influence the infrastructure and at the same time we are dependent on it. But it is precisely this vulnerability – and not the supposed strength of success – that is a wonderful means of resistance. This struggle brings the body into play, the vulnerable. This vulnerability is not a matter for individuals. The fragility, uncertainty, discontinuity is not at all individual, but is felt socially and collectively. Hence the need, in this situation, to define dance itself as a driving force for the struggle for dance, as a cultural value in its own right. I don’t want to archive dance in order to invent a more stable foundation for it, but I want to make its creators proud of the struggle they have put up so far.”

If you look at the practices and the zeitgeist of twenty or thirty years ago, it’s not really a question of establishing today what was going on in the world back then or what paradigmatic changes have influenced the history of dance since then. On the contrary. It is a confrontation with history that the performance “The Desire to Make a Solid History Will End Up in Failure” is primarily aimed at, a confrontation with the living knowledge of bodies, literally a knowledge in motion, instead of the merely emphatic transience of history, of which at best only the factual hoopla remains. Igor Koruga and Station – Service for contemporary dance in Belgrade believe in a struggle for dance, not as a history of once glorious events, but as a constantly changing memory – like dance itself – which, like history, does not repeat itself, but is created anew each time, with each piece. It is said that history is written by the victors. But what would happen, I think as I travel back to Novi Sad, if history were to be written by the artists themselves from now on?