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Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum / TANZTAGE BERLIN 2016

DRAGANA BULUT and the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum will celebrate the anniversary of legendary Serbian choreographer and dancer Kokana Šanić Koka. With a background in folk dance, cabaret and magic, she has developed a performative practice that has been acclaimed and deeply appreciated in her local context and has strongly influenced a number of young Balkan choreographers. She has performed for Meg Stuart, Tino Sehgal, Sent M’Ahesa, Ivo Dimchev, among others, and together with writer Ana Vujanović, she ran a small travelling shop selling Balkan theoretical and artistic souvenirs. This will be the first occasion to gain insight into her seminal work up-close in Berlin. She will be accompanied by her long-standing musical collaborator Milenko Trifković.

The JULIUS-HANS-SPIEGEL-ZENTRUM is an itinerant research center, which investigates the interweaving of dance cultures since modernity. In residencies of four weeks, five choreographers from Berlin and Frankfurt have developed critical perspectives on the exoticisms of modern dance. First results of their research are now being shown in short archive works during Tanztage Berlin. Starting point of their investigation was an archive box from the photo collection of the Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek in Berlin: Kasten Nr. 942n Exotischer Tanz. The classification logic of this archive box, which strongly discriminates between modern and traditional, foreign and familiar, makes the mechanisms of exclusion in modern dance visible that still are at work in contemporary dance.