First Seminar: Performing Arts and/in Community
Master class with Dr. NaumPanovski, Fulbright professor, SAD
31.03 – 01.04.2012 (weekend lectures and group discussions)

The seminar acquaints the students/participants with major movements and models of contemporary theatre and performing arts throughout the world, which are focused and being engaged in changing the societies and communities through their cultural/performing acts and aesthetics. These models and movements have created a radical change in the way we perceive and receive the theatre as a creative art, alongside with our definitions for engaged theatre practices and understanding of their larger social context. From Shakespeare to Ibsen, Piscator and Brecht; from San Francisco’s MIME Troupe, El TheatroCampesino to Bread and Puppet Theatre, this part of the seminar comprises the leading performing ideas representing the intersections amongst arts, culture and social changes. The seminar will emphasize the artists and movements that influenced the contemporary theatre practices; there critic approaches have enlightened the nowadays-performing arts and cultures we live in.

Second Seminar: Dance in the century of movements: Two still lectures
Master class with RokVevar, Theoretician and dance critique, Slovenia
07-08.04.2012 (weekend lectures and group discussions)

Beside providing some basic insight into the main artistic formations in the 20th century dance, the seminar will focus on two interesting chapters from the modern dance history. The first story called »Ausdrucktanz and the Forms of Body Culture in the Weimar Republic and Beyond« will try to provide some cultural and political backgrounds to illuminate phases of the development of the German Expressionist Dance between 1914 and 1928, its peek at the time of Weimar Republic in 1920s and its short love affair with Third Reich as well as some examples of so called »degenerate art« and artists (entarteteKunst; the exhibition with the same name, opened by Nazis in Munich in 1937) of 1920s and 1930s. Artistic references: Wilhelm Prager, Mary Wigman, GretPalucca, Rudolf Laban, Kurt Jooss, Leni Riefenstahl, Pina Bausch. The second story »(Post)modern dance and American Art of 1960s« will focus on the group of artists that Susan Sontag called »neo-duchampian choreographers« and that came to work together after attending Robert Dunn's workshop on musical/dance compostion in Merce Cunningham's studios in New York City from 1960-62. One of the most prominent artists from that group is Yvonne Rainer who called the collective »John Cage's Children« and labeled their work as »postmodern dance« in order to distance themselves from the forms of american modern dance of the time. After giving the first »dance concert« on the 6th of July 1962 in the Judson Church at Wahsington Square, they started to called themselves Judson Dance Theatre. Series of performances, events, happenings, manifestos and methodologies that they had created until 1968 and continued to create in the impro-collective called Grand Union in 1970s, were exactly the main inspiration for the choreographers/dancers that gathered in Paris around JérômeBel, after he had decided that he got enough of Decouflé's dance craze. Artistic references: Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Fred Herko, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, davidGordon,. Deborah Hay, Lucinda childs, Meredith Monk, Kenneth King. Douglas Dunn, CaroleeSchneemann, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris etc.

Third Seminar: Geometric tools for generating motion
Master class with professor IskraShukarova, Dancer and choreographer, Macedonia
(the exact date of the seminar will be further defined)

The seminar is dedicated to postgraduate and graduate students, professional performers in the filed of human science, theatre, performing and visual arts.

* * *

The seminar provides 4 credits according to European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS).

The seminar will be held at Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities “Euro-Balkan”