Over a two-year period, today's four most important dance centers in Middle Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe explored the question of affirmation as a performative method and political positioning. Choosing the aesthetics of a subversive affirmation therefore also meant giving one's opinion politically—at the same time in the affirmative and performative sense.

At the center of the research activities of the partners in Bucharest, Ljubljana, and Zagreb was documenting the untold history of dance in Eastern Europe. The focus lied on reconstructing the historical avant-garde movement since the early 1960s. The Tanzquartier Wien offered a complementary exploration of the inter-medial definition of dance based on the history of the avant-garde in the West. Interest was also directed at choreographic endeavors as well as in other artistic and philosophical schools of thought. One of the greatest social-critical chances of dance is that it sees itself as the permanent practice of redefinition and not as a hermetically sealed discipline.

The project comprised different practical and theoretical work formats and processes. Even historical reappraisals in the form of archive work and reconstructed art projects pointed to one's own submerged tradition.

Above and beyond this, surpassing the purely aesthetic field, dance and choreography were transported into our consciousness as a cultural and mental paradigm. At the same time, the cultural, political and economic contexts of dance-and-performance production were analyzed.

The project results have been thoroughly documented with the publication of an anthology on contemporary dance and performance art in Central and Eastern Europe.

As part of "What to affirm? What to perform?" the Tanzquartier Wien staged on March 8th, 2008, a research lab in collaboration with CORPUS. On this occasion, CORPUS and Tanzquartier Wien invited guests from various art and theoretical fields to a shared reflecting process, methodically launched with investigations on the use of improvised impulses and reaching as far as the rigidity of formalism, at the same time revealing an exciting area of study in which cinematic, musical, theatrical, visual, and architectural applications can be read as expressions of dance and choreography.

Franz Anton Cramer (Germany), dance scientist and honorary professor at the "Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin", discussed the importance of the artistic reconstruction and re-enactment for the rehabilitation of European's dance history with the Slovenian director, performer and theoretician Janez Jansa.

Project venue: Middle Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe

Project framework: 2008 - 2009