Kolo Artistic Director Olga Skovran Stages the Serbian Folk

Abstract

I look at Serbian history and the development of the Serbian peasant, and Serbian folk music and dance through the lens of Balkanism, a concept that is related to Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, which can have a demeaning and exoticizing impact on the way in which westerners regard the history of Serbia. Like the other nations of Eastern Europe, Serbia’s history began with the arrival of the Slavs in the sixth and seventh centuries, followed by the flowering of various medieval Balkan kingdoms and the establishment of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Especially powerful in Serbian memory was Kosovo Polje (Field of Blackbirds), where the Ottoman forces destroyed the Serbian nobility, followed by five centuries of Ottoman occupation. This event also had an impact on the specific development of the Serbian peasantry as independent farmers. I follow, too, the slow and laborious reestablishment of the Serbian Kingdom. Following World War I, the First Yugoslavia was established under the Karad̵ord̵ević dynasty, and dissolved in World War II. Josip Broz Tito and his Partisans formed the Second Yugoslavia, which they ruled until 1990, when the Second Yugoslavia collapsed under the weight of ethnic rivalries. In Serbia, music had more impact on the construction of Serbian identity than dance, through the establishment of choral societies in the nineteenth century, popular throughout Eastern Europe, and in the Serbian diaspora, and Serbian rock music, which Serbian youth used as a political tool against the authoritarian rule of Slobodan Milosevic. Olga Skovran, the choreographer and founding artistic of director of Kolo, closely worked with dance researchers Ljubica and Danica Janković, who, beginning in the early twentieth century, created a body of research of Serbian dances, which Skovran utilized to stage the dances of the original repertoire of Kolo, the State Ensemble of Folk Songs and Dances of Serbia, and that are still performed today. The current energetic artistic director Vladimir Dekić, while preserving Skovran’s choreographies, has set Kolo on a new path in the representation of Serbia, which he calls tradicija nova, new tradition, a major departure from the first seventy five years of Kolo.