Voice of Dance

This issue is a certain continuation of the reflection opened by Bojana Kunst’s article titled Glas plešočega telesa (The Voice of the Dancing Body, 2009) published 12 years ago in our sister journal Frakcija. The article is a unique upgrade of Mladen Dolar’s O glasu (Analecta, 2003; published in English as A Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006) through a specific position of a dancing body. Along with the rapid development of studies on voice that followed the publication of Dolar’s book, the exploration of the voice in choreographic and dance practices began developing, too. Of course, this does not mean that in the past dance had no voice – merely that in recent years, we have seen a specific orientation of certain researchers of contemporary dance towards studying voice and its positioning in the field of dance and choreography.

The texts in this issue explore the ambivalent nature of voice since “to get a voice”, as explained by Kunst, is extremely emancipatory on the one hand, but on the other, the voice speaking from us is always something unfamiliar, something that stands out and destabilizes the image of the subject. The topic of this issue focuses on writings based on practice and, in multiple cases, also on direct experience.

The articles prove how heterogenous the approaches are in this field of research and art. With their convincing entries, they offer themselves as an encouragement for further exploration. The “writing voices” are: Urban Belina, Dejan Srhoj, Evelin Bizjak, Rok Vevar and Irena Z. Tomažin, Igor Dobričić, Ana Dubljević, Jonathan Burrows, Elina Pirinen, Guy Cools, Bojana Piškur, Jule Flierl, Luka T. Zagoričnik and Edka Jarząb. Their editors are: guest editor and member of the CoFestivala curating team Jasmina Založnik, and the two Maska editors Pia Brezavšček and Rok Bozovičar.