From Dance Manuals to Educational Institutions: Contemporary Dance Education in Slovenia

Abstract

Abstract The article offers a brief survey and description of education in the field of contemporary dance in Slovenia from the beginning of the 20th century until today. Prior to the Second World War, training programmes in the field of contemporary dance were mainly run by private schools, whereas the key problems after the war were their nationalisation and institutionalisation, which Meta Vidmar, the heir and successor of German dance expressionism in Slovenia, resisted in her own peculiar way. Until the 1980s, the field of dance education was mainly represented and cultivated in elementary schools; it was only at the end of the 1990s that a secondary-school programme of contemporary dance was finalised and accredited, and, in 2010, a first-cycle Bologna course at the Dance Academy, followed by a secondcycle Bologna course at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT), were introduced, with which the educational vertical has been finally completed in full (perfected). However, the weak complementarity of individual educational programmes remains a problem to be tackled.