Small Arts Platform
16 - 19 August 2022, Ljubljana, SIovenia
This project is a one-day discursive and artistic event for the advocacy in the marginal and urban performing genres in Slovenia that will take place in the frame of Emanat's annual festival "Small Arts" Platform.
Its goal is to pull those genres and underlying subcultures out from the margins, to make use of their socially relevant potential and find them an adequate space in the city of Ljubljana. Unlike in the western metropoles where the value of genres such as new burlesque, cabaret and queer contemporary performance is recognised within cultural policies, tourism, urban planning and the economy already decades ago, they still do not have visibility and recognition in Slovenian and South-Eastern European context.
The main focus of this event is thereby the contextualisation of practices and its protagonists in Slovenia, scanning the mechanisms for their affirmation and professionalisation and analysing the potentiality of social questions they expose (position of women and LGBTQ+ community in contemporary performing arts, position of artists working in off repertoire theater scene leading to precarious work). We believe in their impact for building new alliances and creating strategic placement of such venues in urban regions.
The event includes a round table led by young academics Maša Radi Bug and Metod Zupan, and artistic program with Ljubljana based collective that creates Technoburlesque Image Snatchers, with which we would like to affirm the relevance of small arts/marginal and urban genres in Ljubljana and expose them to a possible location for further development.
A collaboration with Cukrarna Bar, a space with a stage and bar, that can host an audience of 200, is also part of this proposal and will be the host of the event. It is an adequate space in which we aim to host such performances in the future.
