Under auspices of Mrs Maria Kaczy?ska, the Spouse of the President of the Republic of Poland
Minister of Culture and National Heritage Bogdan Zdrojewski
ON THE SILK ROUTE OF GESTURES:
the metaphysics of movement in the cultures of Asia
Kraków - Poland, 9-15 March 2008
The festival committee of honour
Ewa Wycichowska
prof. Sondra Horton Fraleigh
prof. Krystna Wilkoszewska
Eugenio Barba
prof. Maria Krzysztof Byrski
The Kraków Festival of Anthropology of Dance is an institution run by both artists and scholars who aim at bridging art with academy. The idea is reflected in the programme structure of the event: a university conference, movement workshops and dance performances make up a whole festival day over 5 - day period. It creates a platform of exchange between art theoreticians and performers themselves.
In the upcoming third edition we are not only researching the nature of the aesthetic experience of a performer and a spectator, but the semiotic character of a dance as a kind of a code.This incorporates into a system of movement technique or dance convention the dynamics of a man's life. A creative process elicits self-knowledge. Dance that transcends art becomes a philosophy of life whose main concern is an individual's development, both spiritual and corporeal. Asia, which is believed to be the cradle of the oldest codified dance cultures, has been chosen as a research field of dance related issues. We would like to investigate some instructive and culture-creating senses of tradition in dance within the perspective of cultural traditionalism and transculturalism, in the era of present-day globalizatotion processes.Therefore we open our festival with a dance performance created by a representative of the Western civilization, to establish a necessary point of reference so as to embrace aesthetically and cognitively the phenomenon of the Asian dance cultures.
The broad notion of dance anthropology brings closer many branches of the humanities such as philosophy, dance aesthetics, art critics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, music, dance poetics, choreology, choreography.
The human body as universal sign brings into light anthropological questions in the aspect of the ontology and epistemology of dance in their phenomenological grasp.