The Choreography of Traditional Dance as Intangible Cultural Heritage
Keywords:
Intangible Cultural Heritage, Choreography of Traditional Dance, Modern Dance, UNESCO, SerbiaAbstract
This paper examines the possibilities of defining the choreography of traditional dance as a potential element of intangible cultural heritage in light of the 2003 UNESCO Convention. Although this genre is most often perceived as a staged, artistic, or stylized form that departs from vernacular dance traditions, I argue that it represents a specific mode of articulation, transmission, and institutionalization of dance heritage in contemporary society. By analyzing the historical development of this genre within the framework of cultural policies in socialist Yugoslavia, as well as its subsequent professionalization and amateur institutionalization, I suggest that it constitutes a stabilized genre characterized by developed norms, mechanisms of transmission, and a clearly articulated community of practitioners. The theoretical framework of the paper draws on contemporary heritage and performance studies, while a comparative example – one that also served as the initial inspiration for this research – is provided by German modern dance, inscribed in 2022 on UNESCO’s Representative List of the ICH.
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