Nostalgia In Dance

1. Main objective and summary of the project

The proposed PhD project engages the concepts of nostalgia and utopia expressed through the body and dance in the context of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. I would like to broaden the scope of my Master’s research, which investigated the social aspects of dancing and singing through a case study of the song Jugoslavijo . The standpoint from where this proposal departs is built on the belief that nostalgia provoked by the songs and popular dances related to the SFRY, performed in the present time, should be seen as a dynamic arena of interactions between the feelings, memories and imagination. The research explores the cultural construction of collective memory from a transnational

I believe that remote utopian forms can be successfully articulated through abstract ones. Therefore, music and dance present fruitful platform to create meanings, and to express them in a different fashion than more conventional sign systems would do. Not necessarily, but one of the illustrative functions of music and other arts consist of their capability to reflect upon the era in which they were created or at least they remain connected to them. I would argue that music and dance as the art forms, predominately idiosyncratic and metaphorical phenomena, are capable of conveying emotions and meanings. I want to stress that memories and visions channel past and future, guide and shift meanings that are changed during that process. By discerning how new meanings in the societies are added or how some are seized, furthermore, what kind of value those meanings and beliefs have in the society now and then, what became appropriate and what did not, points out substantial knowledge how memory production function in the case study of the re-adopted popular SFRY songs and

This aspect of Yugonostalgia is very significant for challenging approaches of lived and non-lived experience of the Yugoslav past which are dominant in the examination of the discourse of the post-Yugoslav memory productions. This study is situated in understanding the dynamics of public memories which invoke certain nostalgia and its impact on dance. The research question is how music and dance mediate a sense of a shared Yugoslav experience? Furthermore, it will be interesting to examine and identify why and how music and dances matters for post-Yugoslav memory practices, what kind of forces motivates people to revive the popular songs and dances of the SFRY era, why do they sing and dance to them after so many years, how nostalgia is bodily expressed, what kind of meanings these songs have now, and to which past(s) do they refer