The term classical is to describe everything from classical music to classical dance, and is often used in everyday speech when defining something as a "classic" Norwegian dish. What does the term mean and can it be challenged? How do we really understand what is classical and are terms such as traditional and folkloric interpreted differently? Has the West "trade marked" the term to only apply Eurocentric and largely continental art forms?
The panel discussion is about genre history and why classical is often understood as high culture, while other traditional, non-Western and folkloric art is often defined as experimental or "world". Can the fact that the Western tradition has been used as a global reference be seen as a form of colonisation of the arts?
Professor of history of ideas, Christine Amadou, meets professor of musicology, Egil Bakka, for a conversation, moderated by Thomas Talawa Prestø, artistic director of Tabanka and diversity developer at Dansens Hus.
The discussion is in Norwegian.
Practical information:
Date: 03.09.22
Time: 17:00-18:00
Place: The studio stage
Panel: Christine Amadou and Egil Bakka
Moderator: Thomas Prestø
Egil Bakka was a Norwegian professor of dance science at the Department of Music, NTNU in Trondheim. In 1973, Bakka completed his master's degree at the Department of Folklife Research, University of Oslo, with a master's thesis on older Norwegian folk dance traditions. He is now professor emeritus at NTNU. He has published many books and articles on Norwegian folk dance, on dance analysis and on European dance history. In later works, he has also written about dance and art, about decolonization and about the political dimensions of dance.
Christine Amadou is a Norwegian fiction translator and professor of the history of ideas at the University of Oslo. Amadou has particularly worked with antiquity and with antique reception, that is, the later use of antiquity. In 2017, she published an introductory book about antiquity in Universitetsforlaget's hva er series, the book did not deal with antiquity as a historical period, but about antiquity as an idea and how this idea has changed and been used to legitimize both artistic and political expressions and ideologies, also Today.