2020

Dear friends, colleagues, dancers,

At times isolating, craving, full of improvisation and experiments, new sort of encounters - that's how we could describe choreography of the year 2020.
May 2021 be a year of safety for all of you, and again full of touching, embraces and freedom of movement and international cooperation!

About the situation
Due to the pandemic situation, like many smaller national art scenes, we've also found lack of institutions and unclear professional status of a freelance dance artist as the main weaknesses of the Slovak dance scene. Besides usual partners such as independent cultural centres around Slovakia, we build new partnerships and are very grateful to Slovak Arts Council, Ministry of Culture of Slovak Republic and Bratislava Self-governing Region who gave substantial and flexible support to dancers in the hard times.

Creating synergies, co-operations and communication with institutions and policy makers has become an equally important part of endeavours as creation of new art work.

We are also very proud of all our members who came with a lot of new formats, adaptations, but also informal collaborations in order to make encounters with the audience possible.

Who are we and what we do?
PlaST (Slovak acronym of Slovak Contemporary Dance Platform) is an umbrella organization for the independent dancers in Slovakia, created in 2016 as an attempt to give contemporary dance a stronger voice. It currently brings together over 50 members.

This year the emphasis was on education and cross field inspiration. We organized several webinars with guest lecturers and speakers from different fields Re/branding Contemporary Dance to talk about new perspectives in promotion and marketing (with a special emphasis on the current situation). Pandemics was also the right time to open themes such as what are the usual limits or clichés in the field of contemporary art, can we attract a larger young audience and how can an independent artist position work internationally (with guest lecturer Anikó Racz).

Talking about and understanding dance art work is as equally important as promoting it. We are glad that the project of analyzing and discussing performances Dance Season by a circle of theoreticians of different generations and background, which was launched the previous season continued - in spite of scarce public showings.

In collaboration with Bratislava Self-governing Region and cultural centre Nová Cvernovka in Bratislava, PlaST is intensely working on developing an international dance residence centre Telocvičňa which should open new international programmes Residance from 2021. We are also looking forward to the new co-operations with Bazaar Festival from Prague in preparing formats of coachings for artists involved in residencies.

And last but not least, preparations for the Slovak Dance Platform are continuing. Together with Bratislava in Movement association as the main organizer of the showcase we had to postpone it from November 2020 to the end of May 2021 but hoping to meet with you soon in Bratislava.