Slovak Dance Platform 2025 – in context

The third ever Slovak Dance Platform took place between Bratislava and Banská Bystrica – a city which, since the late 1990s, hosts the country’s only professional theatre for contemporary dance with its own ensemble, Divadlo Štúdio tanca. The goal of a showcase festival like this one seems to be eliminating distances: to bring together local audiences and international actors, different generations of artists, and diverse notions on dance. Yet is the model of the national platform still the most meaningful way to achieve it? In this edition of the biennale, discussions sprouted around the possibility of a future joint platform for all Visegrád countries – Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Poland – which could, among other things, boost the international visibility of their dance communities. A visibility that remains scarce in the large dance capitals and festivals, located almost exclusively in Western Europe. 

Having grown up in Sofia and lived between Vienna and Bratislava for the past four years, I have reflected on the European cultural landscape while repeatedly crossing its elusive borders. More precisely, on the flow of artists from the perceive peripheries to the centres, and the one-way flow of discourses and artistic practices in the other direction. One paradox continues to morph the distance between them: the peripheries and their resources are close and accessible to the centres, yet the centres remain far from and restrictive for the peripheries.

Cultural politics and protest in Slovakia

Despite the optimism and excitement around the idea of a shared platform, its somewhat utopian character, given the current political climate in Central Europe was not lost on the more sober voices. Prime Minister Robert Fico, ousted in 2018 by protests following the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée while uncovering links between Slovak officials and the mafia, was successfully re-elected in 2023. It was Fico himself who gave the start to a smear campaign against Aerowaves artist Soňa Ferienčíková, partner of the opposition leader, by showing a snippet of her performing in the piece BAKKHEIA – dancing on the edge, presented at the 2015 Spring Forward Festival. The short video was used as an example of art that doesn’t deserve state support, in juxtaposition to a recording from a performance by controversial Russian opera singer Anna Netrebko. 

‘It comes down to democracy,’ I am told by Miroslava Kovářová, artistic director of the festival Bratislava in Movement, and Katarína Figula, executive director of the Slovak Dance Platform. ‘Free expression opposes the government’s political goals. On the other hand, these tactics are a smokescreen for the public, to divert attention from their other actions.’ This resonates strongly with what Hungarian artists have voiced regarding Viktor Orbán’s culture war, the main difference being that the changes in Slovakia became immediately palpable. 

The response of the cultural field came with the terminations of the directors of the Slovak National Theatre, Matej Drlička, and of the Slovak National Gallery, Alexandra Kusá. Platform Open Culture (Platforma Otvorená Kultúra) – a civil initiative of artists, cultural workers and institutions from all art fields – was formed in part also as a response to the police interrogations of artist Ilona Németh, after her petition requesting the resignation of the Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová gained more than 186,000 signatures. Open Culture also initiated the symbolic and ongoing Cultural Strike uniting more than 400 cultural organisations throughout the country who have expressed their readiness to take strike action. At the very same time of the Slovak Dance Platform, the Bratislava Declaration was published. Signed among others by organisations such as EDN – European Dance Development Network and Wiener Festwochen, it calls for direct action from the leadership of the European Union to preserve artistic freedom throughout the member states.

The dance community has been one of the main targets of the government’s vaguely defined ‘anti-establishment’ and nationalist cultural politics. After changes to the executive board of the Slovak Arts Council, now effectively comprised of government loyalists, funding has been denied to established dance festivals, organisations, artists, researchers, and educational projects, often with the argument that they have already received support in the past. The organisers of the Slovak Dance Platform were themselves greatly surprised that their application was approved.

Many of the fears expressed by the dance community are existential. In the late 90s and early 00s, a whole generation of artists emigrated amidst the country’s turbulent transition from a socialist to a free-market economy, and the scarce resources at their disposal – a tale which echoes through every post-socialist country in Europe. Many of them returned or started co-producing work in Slovakia in the 2010s. The fears of a new exodus of young artists, or that the already fragile infrastructure, built laboriously over decades, will crumble, don’t seem exaggerated. 

On an unusually cold and rainy 24 April, Slovak dance artists from different generations participated in a 24-hour performative protest action at the doorsteps of the Ministry of Culture in Bratislava, titled Attention, the culture is in collapse (Pozor, padá kultúra). Organised by Yuri Korec and Michaela H. Paštekova, its score was quite simple: a performer standing on the sidewalk, facing the entrance of the institution, falls onto a mat, gets up and falls again, until replaced. The building however, was empty. Minister Šimkovičová ordered the entire staff to work from home. On the second day of the officially permitted protest, the police made a sudden appearance, declaring that the mat obstructed the free passage of pedestrians, as well as the entrance to the empty building. They removed it. The performers continued to fall onto the pavement. 

The Platform

That action was born out of Yuri Korec & Co’s performance PRÍBEH (The Story), also presented at the Slovak Dance Platform. Five performers face the vast backdrop of a shiny fabric, which spreads under their legs onto the entire stage. It reminds me of the aluminium foil from a chewing gum, crumpled and forgotten in a pocket. On the stage it wavers between grandiosity and preposteroussness due to its size and countless creases. The distorted sounds repeat as if from a broken record while one of the performers falls, stands up, and joins the line again. This logic is kept until the end, while the dynamics, order and distance of the fall evolve and shift. The action is indeed exhausted pretty quickly, yet this is what the performance aims to embrace: the physical, mental and social exhaustion of standing up one more time against a monstrous shiny façade. 

In a fusion of dance theatre, video, and a lecture, Petra Fornayová’s SEVENTH DAY sets out to lay a finger on the pulse of the crisis of political expression through an activist gesture. It’s homage to Slovak composer Martin Burlas’s piece The Seventh Day Record, treating the social-political crises of the 90s, is felt through an ongoing state of urgency, but still remains remote for an outsider. Its aesthetics hint at a perhaps bygone time of activist performing art. Is building and waving a flag on stage today charged with real subversive energy? Yet again, history and its Gestus do seem to be repeating themselves. The performance is followed by a lecture by Slovak painter and performer Robo Švarc titled ‘Revolt and the Body’. By being rooted exclusively in Western European and North American post-colonial gaze and citations, the lecture unwittingly also referred to a broader ongoing struggle of Eastern European political art – the search for vocabularies that can bear its own shaky realities. 

In the course of IHOPEIWILL by threeiscompany & Jaro Viňarský, also presented at the Spring Forward Festival 2025, Soňa Ferienčíková builds an intricate web of past and future entanglements by unwinding a long elastic rope wrapped around her body. Accompanied by a sound installation and the multilingual voices of interviewees reflecting on intergenerational family lineage, her body morphs between a container holding onto the ghosts of her past movements and a perpetual force weaving traces yet to be imagined. The work is rooted as much in visual art and the installation object, born in the time we share, as it is in the shivering of her muscles and twists of her limbs while she makes her way through states of tension, release, struggle, longing and acceptance. 

Not all performances were tainted by political melancholy. Many were veiled in poetry, rather than politics. re-memberby artistic duo Andrej Kalinka & Milan Kozánek from the artist collective Med a prach (Honey and Dust) tackles a world in a state of universal amnesia. Although its storytelling inhabits the very edge of ambiguity, I was time and again brought back to it by the mastery of its stagecraft. It’s captivating yet bare aesthetics, musical arrangements and fine-tuned rhythm make for a compelling piece of dance theatre which treats the stage with just the right amount of belief in magic. It seems like the state of being lost in the mist, shielding the outlines of something distant yet essential, and abruptly losing one’s orientation for countless times is an experience which resonates far beyond this performance.  

With his torso hanging suspended to a belt attached to the ceiling and legs lying on the ground, Lukáš Bobalik begins his exploration of a space where the borders of movement, installation and text gradually become fluid and somewhat irrelevant. Light Work by performer Bobalik, dramaturg Maja Hriešik and visual artist Dana Tomečková, explores fragility and uncertainty both as a human condition and a state perpetuated by an unstable environment. The long cardboard tubes roll, fall, stay put, or refuse to be bent by the performer’s intention, transforming his coexistence with them into a game of constant renegotiations and short-lived wobbly solutions. The persistent longing for balance saturates this aesthetically neat, clever and universally human piece.

In his solo piece I am Placebo, Michal Heriban immerses himself in a game of doppelgangers and what seems to be the shifting spaces of one’s inner dialogues. A rigorous score tests the borders of the vitality of his proficient body and the inevitable over-exhaustion, which feels foreshadowed from the very beginning. He subjects himself to a non-forgiving system, to which he stays true from the beginning till the end. A projection of himself moving synchronically to the very same score accompanies him, until it doesn’t. The large studio space from the recording stays empty for a moment, yet the doppelganger reappears with newfound, but limited autonomy. The score may be different, yet the spirit of the fast-paced, large and airy movements is quite the same. The relationship between the digital persona, or for that matter to the live body or the reflections in the mirror upstage, remains vague. There is pleasure in experiencing the dance as such, but the questions surrounding the setting of the performance pile up. I am Placebo stays largely hermeneutically closed in the pursuit of something quite abstract through the literal grind of the body through challenging movement material. I was left curious about what nuances may appear if the piece were expanded beyond its 30 minutes.

The casual costumes in Tomas Danielis’s Sehr langsam are where every notion of the everyday in the piece begins and ends. Yet again, it does refer to something quite familiar: a male and female performer who explore the ever-changing intensity of the intimacy their bodies allow. In their repeated attempts, the two bridge this void very slowly but never completely overcome it. It is the quiet tension brought to life by the artifice of these physical sculptures, which either refuse or are unable to eradicate the distance between the two, that defines the piece. One can experience the care behind the subtle touch, but the grand finale of the found love and the happy-ever-after is denied. Could this be a take on the tragedy of romantic ballet in the age of dating apps? Or perhaps an exploration of an undefined close relationship spent predominantly apart, and the consequences this bears for the people in it? A certain hint towards time travel is delivered by the musical score: Gustav Mahler opens and closes the work, but in the meantime he fades into electronic music by Tomer Avraham. It makes me dwell on what role we assign to music in contemporary dance performances today. In this work, it feels like a stage element that speaks as much through its absence in the moments of silence as it does when heard. The simple, yet nuanced dramaturgy of the performance successfully composes one minimalist, formal and short work, which comes across as somewhat eerie but just open enough for it to be relatable.

The unfortunate situation in which the Slovak dance community finds itself didn’t manage to spoil the extraordinary hospitality of the hosts or the spirits of the artists present. Fighting for the chance to exist as a contemporary artist is not exactly a novel experience in the countries that once found themselves behind the Iron Curtain. The discussions organised during the Platform also granted a chance for artists from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland not only to present their work but also their respective dance fields, institutions and festivals, and to open a broader conversation regarding the future of contemporary dance beyond the Slovak borders. The spirit remains optimistic, and the hope for larger international collaborations and action as a response to the crises that don’t only plague Central Europe but also reach into the very core of European democracy is inspiring. Yet now, more than ever, solidarity is threatened to become a hollow cliché if practised only in words. ●