(Slo)
Dan, noč + človek = ritem: Antologija slovenske sodobnoplesne publicistike 1918–1960
Uredil in izbral Rok Vevar
DAN, NOČ + ČLOVEK = RITEM, Antologija slovenske sodobnoplesne publicistike 1918−1960 predstavlja izbor teoretskih, zgodovinskih in kritiških člankov o sodobnem plesu, modernem baletu in plesni kulturi, ki so bili v domačem periodičnem tisku objavljeni med obema vojnama in poldrugem desetletju po njej. Raziskava za antologijo je pokazala, kako obsežna in živa je bila domača publicistična produkcija in kako izjemno je bilo zanimanje za tovrstno umetnost in njeno kulturo v obdobju obeh monarhij in prve socialistične Jugoslavije. Kulturni utrip prestolnice ter drugih slovenskih ali večkulturnih mest (Maribor, Celje, Trst) je bil zelo naklonjen umetniškim in kulturnim novitetam, s katerimi sta se nova slovenska umetnost in kultura umeščali v moderni in avantgardni mednarodni prostor, v katerem pretoka idej in umetniških del ni mogla preprečiti nobena tehnična ovira. Kulturni optimizem tega obdobja si slovensko kulturno emancipacijo predstavlja v modernih in avantgardnih umetniških kontekstih, kjer se pretok idej in vizij odvija med različnimi narodi in njihovimi raznolikimi kulturami. Prezence drugih teles so v takšnem kontekstu stvar miselnih in čutnih izzivov, izjemnih kulturnih apetitov in novih umetniških in kulturnih kreacij.
Antologija prve domače publicistične prispevke s področja zgodovine in teorije sodobnega plesa in modernega baleta predstavi po vsebinskih sklopih: prvi poskusi refleksije domače plesne zgodovine (Rado Kregar); vizionarske teoretizacije sodobnega plesa v krogih domačih zgodovinskih avantgard, natančneje, konstruktivistov in tankovcev (Ferdo Delak, Avgust Černigoj); teorija sodobnega plesa in modernega telesa v krogih mladinskega krščansko-socialnega gibanja, t. i. križevcev (Franjo Čibej, Pino Mlakar) ter kulturna zgodovina klasične in moderne plesne umetnosti (Kristina Vrhovec, poročena Brenk). Sledijo kritiški in esejistični prispevki o plesnem delu protagonistov sodobnega plesa in modernega baleta takratnega slovenskega kulturnega prostora (Lidija Wisiak in Vaclav Vlček, Rut Vavpotič, Meta Vidmar, Katja Delak, Pia in Pino Mlakar, Marta Paulin - Brina), ki je od samih začetkov izrazito medkulturen in mednaroden. Med publicisti je vrsta uglednih imen domače kulturne zgodovine, pisateljice in pisatelji, skladatelji, igralke in kulturni publicisti: Fran Govekar, Miljutin Zarnik, Minka Govekar, Emil Adamič, Marij Kogoj, Rado Kregar, Ferdo Delak, Slavko Osterc, Avgust Černigoj, Ludvik Mrzel, Vilko Ukmar, Maša Slavec, Anton Podbevšek, Peter Pajk, Marijan Lipovšek, Marija Vogelnik, Valens Vodušek idr. Nekaj imen je danes zaradi različnih razlogov popolnoma pozabljenih (npr. Franjo Čibej, Peter Pajk in Maša Slavec), četudi so njihovi prispevki za zgodovino domače plesne publicistike ključni. Poglavje Doba plesa in telesa je zelo zožen izbor sicer nepreglednega korpusa plesno-kulturne publicistike med obema vojnama in si prizadeva bralcu predstaviti predvsem širino njenega spektra. Knjigo zaključuje poglavje Vrag na vasi – ples v Sloveniji 1946−1960, v katerem je pretežno z zapisi Pie in Pina Mlakarja dokumentiran poskus institucionalizacije moderne plesne umetnosti v okviru baleta SNG v Ljubljani in vzpostavitve kulturnega projekta novega jugoslovanskega baleta. V nevrotičnem obdobju razvoja jugoslovanske socialistične izjeme, ki je tudi na področju umetnosti in kulture hitro spreminjal svoje možne smeri, se je to ob koncu 50. let 20. stol. zaradi različnih razlogov izkazovalo kot vse bolj nemogoč projekt, o čemer pričata članka Ksenije Hribar v poglavju Epilog.
Antologija prve domače publicistične prispevke s področja zgodovine in teorije sodobnega plesa in modernega baleta predstavi po vsebinskih sklopih: prvi poskusi refleksije domače plesne zgodovine (Rado Kregar); vizionarske teoretizacije sodobnega plesa v krogih domačih zgodovinskih avantgard, natančneje, konstruktivistov in tankovcev (Ferdo Delak, Avgust Černigoj); teorija sodobnega plesa in modernega telesa v krogih mladinskega krščansko-socialnega gibanja, t. i. križevcev (Franjo Čibej, Pino Mlakar) ter kulturna zgodovina klasične in moderne plesne umetnosti (Kristina Vrhovec, poročena Brenk). Sledijo kritiški in esejistični prispevki o plesnem delu protagonistov sodobnega plesa in modernega baleta takratnega slovenskega kulturnega prostora (Lidija Wisiak in Vaclav Vlček, Rut Vavpotič, Meta Vidmar, Katja Delak, Pia in Pino Mlakar, Marta Paulin - Brina), ki je od samih začetkov izrazito medkulturen in mednaroden. Med publicisti je vrsta uglednih imen domače kulturne zgodovine, pisateljice in pisatelji, skladatelji, igralke in kulturni publicisti: Fran Govekar, Miljutin Zarnik, Minka Govekar, Emil Adamič, Marij Kogoj, Rado Kregar, Ferdo Delak, Slavko Osterc, Avgust Černigoj, Ludvik Mrzel, Vilko Ukmar, Maša Slavec, Anton Podbevšek, Peter Pajk, Marijan Lipovšek, Marija Vogelnik, Valens Vodušek idr. Nekaj imen je danes zaradi različnih razlogov popolnoma pozabljenih (npr. Franjo Čibej, Peter Pajk in Maša Slavec), četudi so njihovi prispevki za zgodovino domače plesne publicistike ključni. Poglavje Doba plesa in telesa je zelo zožen izbor sicer nepreglednega korpusa plesno-kulturne publicistike med obema vojnama in si prizadeva bralcu predstaviti predvsem širino njenega spektra. Knjigo zaključuje poglavje Vrag na vasi – ples v Sloveniji 1946−1960, v katerem je pretežno z zapisi Pie in Pina Mlakarja dokumentiran poskus institucionalizacije moderne plesne umetnosti v okviru baleta SNG v Ljubljani in vzpostavitve kulturnega projekta novega jugoslovanskega baleta. V nevrotičnem obdobju razvoja jugoslovanske socialistične izjeme, ki je tudi na področju umetnosti in kulture hitro spreminjal svoje možne smeri, se je to ob koncu 50. let 20. stol. zaradi različnih razlogov izkazovalo kot vse bolj nemogoč projekt, o čemer pričata članka Ksenije Hribar v poglavju Epilog.
(En)
Day, night + Man = Rhythm: Anthology of Slovene Contemporary Dance Criticism 1918 – 1960
Edited and selected by Rok Vevar
»Day, night + Man = Rhythm: Anthology of Slovene Contemporary Dance Criticism 1918 - 1960« is a reader of the reviews, theoretical articles and historicizations, avant-garde manifests and writings besides the journalisticand critical attempts on theatre dance and modern choreography in their early stages. With extensive introductions by Rok Vevar and Aldo Milohnić, the collection of texts focuses on the period between the formation of a multicultural state The Monarchy of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the world war I (from 1929 the Monarchy of Yugoslavia and after 1945 The Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia), when the first ballet repertoires and modern dance programmes were being presented in the newly founded National Theatre in Ljubljana and the first change of artistic directors in the same institution (The Ballet of The Slovene National Theatre – Opera Ljubljana) after the war in 1960. The western part of territory of a nowadays Republic of Slovenia was between 1918 and 1943 ruled by The Kingdom of Italy which became a fascist state in 1922.
The period is marked by relatively inclusive, opened and fluid cultural environment in which the art of dance would be a focus of public interest without any greater genre divisions (i. e. modern dance against ballet), the stage dance would be in general matter of an intriguing novelty and the cultural institution of ballet would be thought of as a space for presenting high-quality dance art of different origins (modern and classical ballet, modern dance, rhythmics, Ausdruckstanz, meloplastic, plastic ballet and dance, abstract dance, contemporary dance as defined by Ferdo Delak under Laban’s infuences, namely theatrical dance that transforms different narrative elements into a specific choreographic medium etc.). A the times the media landscape in Slovenia saw some great changes from an increasing number of different printed media in the 1920s and 1930s, an introduction of radio which inflamed the general culture of dance in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the carefully planned socialist media landscape that in the newly found Socialist Yugoslavia started to expand in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, especially with an introduction of the National television.
The book is divided into three major chapters with an epilogue. The first chapter »On the new art of dance« is the most extensive and brings the early Slovene dance writings from the pre-WWII period, systematized in sections from (a) the first theoretical attempts and historicizations from the mid-1920s on, (b) the basic aesthetic paradigms of the stage dance and (c) the dance journalism and criticism on the most important choreographers, working in the Slovene cultural space between 1918 and 1943 (Lidija Wisiak (1906-1993) and Vaclav Vlček (1895-1968), Rut Vavpotič (1908-1996), Meta Vidmar (1899-1975), Katja Delak (Katya Delakova, 1914-1991), Pia (1908-2000) and Pino Mlakar (1907-2006) and Marta Paulin – Brina (1911-2002)).
Under the influence of August Černigoj (1898-1985) and his short study visit to the German constructivist school of Bauhaus (at the time in Weimar), a Slovene avant-garde artist, theatre and film director, playwright and editor of Tank magazine (1927) Ferdo Delak (1905-1968) wrote a manifesto What Is Art? (1926) and two fundamental articles The Modern Stage (1926) and On The New Art of Dance (1929, 1931) in which he thought of dance as an choreographic element of synthetic theatre and visual arts, considering its kinetic manifestation that constructs the space and time, as well as an autonomous artistic practice of an abstract or narrative nature. On The New Art of Dance (1929, 1931) is one of the most analytical and visionary examples of an early modern dance theories.
For the intellectual circles of the Young Slovene Christian-socialist movement the new art of dance was – not without some major influences of German expressionism – considered as an ideal promise of form that harmonized the spiritual, religious and general human existence with its material (physical as well as erotic) life. The contradictions between transcendence and metaphysics on one hand and materialism and nature on the other, would be for the young religious intellectuals perfectly solved in the serious and disciplined physical culture and artistic forms that modern dance represented to them. In his essay On The Essence of Dance (1926) a young philosopher Franjo Čibej (1901-1929) elaborates the art of modern dance with its specific characteristics (form, music, communication, reception etc.) as something fundamentally different and morally superior to dance as an entertainment. Besides Čibej the young dancer and choreographer Pino Mlakar, who became one of the most prominent students of the Laban’s dance school in the late 1920s, in his articles A Tiny Study on Dance (1926), A Man in Balance (1929) and Thoughts on Dance (1933) theorizies dance, combining approaches from the natural sciences (physics) with German expressionist notions of dance art (Laban).
The first cultural history studies on dance in Slovenia were written in the form of the two short essays A Study on Dance (1936) and The Development of Theatre Dance in Europe (1936) by the young dance historian and critic Kristina Vrhovec, who later became one of the most popular authors among children in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia Kristina Brenk. Under the evident influences of the modern cultural anthropology and ethnography and perhaps studies of then newly published Curt Sachs’ monograph Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (The World History of Dance, 1933), Vrhovec provides an overview of the historical data on the development of the stage and folk dances, from the ancient times, the classical dances of the baroque period to the modern dance of the early 20thcentury, in order to analyze the elements of modern and expressionist dance in Slovenia at the time. With a distinct insight into physical practices, she separates the rigorous body discipline of the ballet from the more liberated and sometimes improvised approach to movement in the modern dance forms and the functional aspects of movement in the forms of rituals and folk dances.
The last part of the chapter is devoted to the different journalistic articles and reviwes on the dancers and choreographers that worked, taught and presented their works in Ljubljana, Maribor and Celje as well as toured internationally at the time. Dancer Lidija Wisiak and pedagogue and choreographer of Czech origin Vaclav Vlček presented a series of dance evenings of rhythmics and ballet in the 1920s in the National Theatre and were at some point appointed as artistic directors to the ballet ensemble of Opera. Different newspapers and magazines of the time report also on their engagement as the principal dancers in the Enriquo Prampolini’s Furturist Pantomime Theatre in Paris in May of 1927 as well as on Wisiak’s solo dances that brought Sergei Diaghilev with flowers at the backstage. Rut Vavpotič was a teenager that presented her rhythmic and ballet dances at the very early age in the Opera House in the 1920s and later moved to Paris.
The most important writings of the time are mainly devoted to the disciples of the German expressionist dance schools of Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman in Weimar Germany and Gertrud Kraus in Vienna. Wigman’s student Meta Vidmar presents her first full-length evening of dances in January 1927 in Ljubljana and Maribor, in 1929 opens her dance school in Ljubljana and continuously presents her own works in combination with the school productions throughout the 1930s. Some of her own writings on the natural and folk dances are included in the chapter. Katja Delak (Katya Delakova) moves to Ljubljana, marrying the young avant-garde artists Ferdo Delak in 1931, and opens a dance school in the early 1930s. With the mixture of expressionist and avant-guarde approaches, her work generates the most contradictory reviews of the time. She’s the first choreographer in Slovenia that produces a critical devotee Maša Slavec, educated young feminist activist and author, that emphasizes, how Delak »does not tend to interpret the abstract notions but already uses them as a choreographic material” (1933). As an Austrian Jew Delak has to flee from Slovenia under a Nazi threat and continous her work successful in the US.
Due to the international success (artistic directors of the Zürich Ballet 1935-39 and Bayerische Stattsballet in Münich between 1939-43), respect they manage to gain and their Christian beliefs, Pia and Pino Mlakar are an artistic couple that pushes Slovenian dance criticism to another level as they manage to get an attention simultaneously from the left, liberal and right wing press during the 1930s. Ljubljana’s premiere of Deville in the Villiage in the fall of 1937 and The Bow (a duet premiered in Münich in 1939 and in Ljubljana in 1940) are two works with the record of media attention in the Slovene dance press that won’t be broken until the 1980s.
The chapter closes with an exceptional section, devoted to the Vidmar’s desciple Marta Paulin with her first solo evening of dances in Opera in 1940 and dance performances on the battlefields of the WWII, where she danced as a member of The Cultural Group of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Slovenia bewteen 1942 and 1945. In this part the editorial approach of the Anthology makes an exception and include also the memoir writings of Brina (her partisan name) and her partisan comrades. The documents unfold Brina’s approach under the exceptional historical circumstances in which nothing she had learned in dance does not meet the demands of the momentum. Everything had to be forgotten and reinvented in order to be able to address the truth of the situation, she says. Her comrades report on her dances as the momentous art pieces that gain an enormous amount of appreciation from comrades, most of whom attended an art event for the first time in their lives. The memoirs report also on the freezing and bloody winter of the early 1944 when Brina with the XIV. division marches to the Mid-eastern Slovenia, fights in the battles that kills a big number of her comrades and end up on the liberated territories with the frozen toes that have to be amputated. Thus her dancing path comes to an end.
The second chapter of the book »The age of dance and Physical Culture« is a selection of an endless amount of journalistic reports on dance and physical culture from the period from the 1920s up to the end of the 1930s. Focusing on social dances that made a local economic growth in Ljubljana and other cities and territories of the Slovene people, physical culture, literary forms of writing on the art of dance and theorizing early cartoons as a form of dance as well as discussing »the dance and politics«. Latter gains its actuality in the second half of the 1920s when the fascist Italy prohibits the ballroom dance events in order to prevent the Slovene people to gather in the public spaces which stirs the harsh dispute called »the politics of dance« in the Edinost, a Slovene newspaper published in Trieste.
The books finishes with the chapter »Devil in the Villiage – The Dance in Slovenia between 1946 and 1960« which documents the writings of Pia and Pino Mlakar, artistic directors of the ballet ensemble of the Opera of the Slovene National Theatre Ljubljana, on the ballet repertoire and its press coverage. In 1946 Mlakars return from Münich to Ljubljana and get immediately appointed to the artistic direction of the National Ballet with the ambitious plan to establish Slovene or rather Yugoslavian ballet as a modern dance system of cultural production which includes education, artistic work, ballet institution, touring possibilities and audience development in Ljubljana and throughout Yugoslavia. The theatre programmes of the time are the workbooks on dance history and journalism, introductions to the different spectator’s dilemmas and historic dance styles, information on the development of modern dance and ballet throughout the world and the pages of the public disputes. Their dance repertoire cannot hide the tendency to modernize the ballet institution and choreography and at the same time expand the notion of the ballet into the wide range of different forms and approaches to the art of dance (for Mlakar ballet is a generic term of a high-quality art of dance of all possible genres). In the period from 1946 to 1953 their choreographic work focuses on ethno-choreologic approaches that tries to modernize the motifs and elements of Yugoslavian folk dances, when socialist modernism breaks the politics of agit-prop after 1953 their repertoire gets extremely modernized, abstract and daring which generates dissatisfactions on the side of authorities and dance critics. The chapter closes with Epilogue which brings two critical texts of Ksenija Hribar (Xenia Hribar, 1938-1999), a corps de ballet dancer that had at the time some significant international experiences from Marie Rambert School of Ballet in London, written in the late 1964 and early 1965 after Mlakars already left the institution. Her delicate critical massacre is one of the first examples of a (ballet) dancer gaining her critical voice and having the courage to publish its articulations that bring about a very detailed insights into a ballet institution as well as a competent vision of what a dance could become. Neither artistic directors nor dance critics or decision makers manage to escape her critical analysis which promises the new period for contemporary dance that she was going to bring about back to Ljubljana in the 1980s after years of dancing in the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and living in London.
The period is marked by relatively inclusive, opened and fluid cultural environment in which the art of dance would be a focus of public interest without any greater genre divisions (i. e. modern dance against ballet), the stage dance would be in general matter of an intriguing novelty and the cultural institution of ballet would be thought of as a space for presenting high-quality dance art of different origins (modern and classical ballet, modern dance, rhythmics, Ausdruckstanz, meloplastic, plastic ballet and dance, abstract dance, contemporary dance as defined by Ferdo Delak under Laban’s infuences, namely theatrical dance that transforms different narrative elements into a specific choreographic medium etc.). A the times the media landscape in Slovenia saw some great changes from an increasing number of different printed media in the 1920s and 1930s, an introduction of radio which inflamed the general culture of dance in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the carefully planned socialist media landscape that in the newly found Socialist Yugoslavia started to expand in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, especially with an introduction of the National television.
The book is divided into three major chapters with an epilogue. The first chapter »On the new art of dance« is the most extensive and brings the early Slovene dance writings from the pre-WWII period, systematized in sections from (a) the first theoretical attempts and historicizations from the mid-1920s on, (b) the basic aesthetic paradigms of the stage dance and (c) the dance journalism and criticism on the most important choreographers, working in the Slovene cultural space between 1918 and 1943 (Lidija Wisiak (1906-1993) and Vaclav Vlček (1895-1968), Rut Vavpotič (1908-1996), Meta Vidmar (1899-1975), Katja Delak (Katya Delakova, 1914-1991), Pia (1908-2000) and Pino Mlakar (1907-2006) and Marta Paulin – Brina (1911-2002)).
Under the influence of August Černigoj (1898-1985) and his short study visit to the German constructivist school of Bauhaus (at the time in Weimar), a Slovene avant-garde artist, theatre and film director, playwright and editor of Tank magazine (1927) Ferdo Delak (1905-1968) wrote a manifesto What Is Art? (1926) and two fundamental articles The Modern Stage (1926) and On The New Art of Dance (1929, 1931) in which he thought of dance as an choreographic element of synthetic theatre and visual arts, considering its kinetic manifestation that constructs the space and time, as well as an autonomous artistic practice of an abstract or narrative nature. On The New Art of Dance (1929, 1931) is one of the most analytical and visionary examples of an early modern dance theories.
For the intellectual circles of the Young Slovene Christian-socialist movement the new art of dance was – not without some major influences of German expressionism – considered as an ideal promise of form that harmonized the spiritual, religious and general human existence with its material (physical as well as erotic) life. The contradictions between transcendence and metaphysics on one hand and materialism and nature on the other, would be for the young religious intellectuals perfectly solved in the serious and disciplined physical culture and artistic forms that modern dance represented to them. In his essay On The Essence of Dance (1926) a young philosopher Franjo Čibej (1901-1929) elaborates the art of modern dance with its specific characteristics (form, music, communication, reception etc.) as something fundamentally different and morally superior to dance as an entertainment. Besides Čibej the young dancer and choreographer Pino Mlakar, who became one of the most prominent students of the Laban’s dance school in the late 1920s, in his articles A Tiny Study on Dance (1926), A Man in Balance (1929) and Thoughts on Dance (1933) theorizies dance, combining approaches from the natural sciences (physics) with German expressionist notions of dance art (Laban).
The first cultural history studies on dance in Slovenia were written in the form of the two short essays A Study on Dance (1936) and The Development of Theatre Dance in Europe (1936) by the young dance historian and critic Kristina Vrhovec, who later became one of the most popular authors among children in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia Kristina Brenk. Under the evident influences of the modern cultural anthropology and ethnography and perhaps studies of then newly published Curt Sachs’ monograph Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (The World History of Dance, 1933), Vrhovec provides an overview of the historical data on the development of the stage and folk dances, from the ancient times, the classical dances of the baroque period to the modern dance of the early 20thcentury, in order to analyze the elements of modern and expressionist dance in Slovenia at the time. With a distinct insight into physical practices, she separates the rigorous body discipline of the ballet from the more liberated and sometimes improvised approach to movement in the modern dance forms and the functional aspects of movement in the forms of rituals and folk dances.
The last part of the chapter is devoted to the different journalistic articles and reviwes on the dancers and choreographers that worked, taught and presented their works in Ljubljana, Maribor and Celje as well as toured internationally at the time. Dancer Lidija Wisiak and pedagogue and choreographer of Czech origin Vaclav Vlček presented a series of dance evenings of rhythmics and ballet in the 1920s in the National Theatre and were at some point appointed as artistic directors to the ballet ensemble of Opera. Different newspapers and magazines of the time report also on their engagement as the principal dancers in the Enriquo Prampolini’s Furturist Pantomime Theatre in Paris in May of 1927 as well as on Wisiak’s solo dances that brought Sergei Diaghilev with flowers at the backstage. Rut Vavpotič was a teenager that presented her rhythmic and ballet dances at the very early age in the Opera House in the 1920s and later moved to Paris.
The most important writings of the time are mainly devoted to the disciples of the German expressionist dance schools of Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman in Weimar Germany and Gertrud Kraus in Vienna. Wigman’s student Meta Vidmar presents her first full-length evening of dances in January 1927 in Ljubljana and Maribor, in 1929 opens her dance school in Ljubljana and continuously presents her own works in combination with the school productions throughout the 1930s. Some of her own writings on the natural and folk dances are included in the chapter. Katja Delak (Katya Delakova) moves to Ljubljana, marrying the young avant-garde artists Ferdo Delak in 1931, and opens a dance school in the early 1930s. With the mixture of expressionist and avant-guarde approaches, her work generates the most contradictory reviews of the time. She’s the first choreographer in Slovenia that produces a critical devotee Maša Slavec, educated young feminist activist and author, that emphasizes, how Delak »does not tend to interpret the abstract notions but already uses them as a choreographic material” (1933). As an Austrian Jew Delak has to flee from Slovenia under a Nazi threat and continous her work successful in the US.
Due to the international success (artistic directors of the Zürich Ballet 1935-39 and Bayerische Stattsballet in Münich between 1939-43), respect they manage to gain and their Christian beliefs, Pia and Pino Mlakar are an artistic couple that pushes Slovenian dance criticism to another level as they manage to get an attention simultaneously from the left, liberal and right wing press during the 1930s. Ljubljana’s premiere of Deville in the Villiage in the fall of 1937 and The Bow (a duet premiered in Münich in 1939 and in Ljubljana in 1940) are two works with the record of media attention in the Slovene dance press that won’t be broken until the 1980s.
The chapter closes with an exceptional section, devoted to the Vidmar’s desciple Marta Paulin with her first solo evening of dances in Opera in 1940 and dance performances on the battlefields of the WWII, where she danced as a member of The Cultural Group of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Slovenia bewteen 1942 and 1945. In this part the editorial approach of the Anthology makes an exception and include also the memoir writings of Brina (her partisan name) and her partisan comrades. The documents unfold Brina’s approach under the exceptional historical circumstances in which nothing she had learned in dance does not meet the demands of the momentum. Everything had to be forgotten and reinvented in order to be able to address the truth of the situation, she says. Her comrades report on her dances as the momentous art pieces that gain an enormous amount of appreciation from comrades, most of whom attended an art event for the first time in their lives. The memoirs report also on the freezing and bloody winter of the early 1944 when Brina with the XIV. division marches to the Mid-eastern Slovenia, fights in the battles that kills a big number of her comrades and end up on the liberated territories with the frozen toes that have to be amputated. Thus her dancing path comes to an end.
The second chapter of the book »The age of dance and Physical Culture« is a selection of an endless amount of journalistic reports on dance and physical culture from the period from the 1920s up to the end of the 1930s. Focusing on social dances that made a local economic growth in Ljubljana and other cities and territories of the Slovene people, physical culture, literary forms of writing on the art of dance and theorizing early cartoons as a form of dance as well as discussing »the dance and politics«. Latter gains its actuality in the second half of the 1920s when the fascist Italy prohibits the ballroom dance events in order to prevent the Slovene people to gather in the public spaces which stirs the harsh dispute called »the politics of dance« in the Edinost, a Slovene newspaper published in Trieste.
The books finishes with the chapter »Devil in the Villiage – The Dance in Slovenia between 1946 and 1960« which documents the writings of Pia and Pino Mlakar, artistic directors of the ballet ensemble of the Opera of the Slovene National Theatre Ljubljana, on the ballet repertoire and its press coverage. In 1946 Mlakars return from Münich to Ljubljana and get immediately appointed to the artistic direction of the National Ballet with the ambitious plan to establish Slovene or rather Yugoslavian ballet as a modern dance system of cultural production which includes education, artistic work, ballet institution, touring possibilities and audience development in Ljubljana and throughout Yugoslavia. The theatre programmes of the time are the workbooks on dance history and journalism, introductions to the different spectator’s dilemmas and historic dance styles, information on the development of modern dance and ballet throughout the world and the pages of the public disputes. Their dance repertoire cannot hide the tendency to modernize the ballet institution and choreography and at the same time expand the notion of the ballet into the wide range of different forms and approaches to the art of dance (for Mlakar ballet is a generic term of a high-quality art of dance of all possible genres). In the period from 1946 to 1953 their choreographic work focuses on ethno-choreologic approaches that tries to modernize the motifs and elements of Yugoslavian folk dances, when socialist modernism breaks the politics of agit-prop after 1953 their repertoire gets extremely modernized, abstract and daring which generates dissatisfactions on the side of authorities and dance critics. The chapter closes with Epilogue which brings two critical texts of Ksenija Hribar (Xenia Hribar, 1938-1999), a corps de ballet dancer that had at the time some significant international experiences from Marie Rambert School of Ballet in London, written in the late 1964 and early 1965 after Mlakars already left the institution. Her delicate critical massacre is one of the first examples of a (ballet) dancer gaining her critical voice and having the courage to publish its articulations that bring about a very detailed insights into a ballet institution as well as a competent vision of what a dance could become. Neither artistic directors nor dance critics or decision makers manage to escape her critical analysis which promises the new period for contemporary dance that she was going to bring about back to Ljubljana in the 1980s after years of dancing in the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and living in London.