(Non-)Institution(alization), Emotional Economies and the Undercommons of Slovenian Contemporary Dance

In this article, I thematize how the incomplete institutionalization of contemporary dance in Slovenia pushes this art field to a marginal and precarious position and how the lack of recognition affectively charges the scene’s actors and impacts their making of choreographic work. By interviewing four choreographers, I trace these emotional economies and delineate two effects they have – defeatism and hopeful action. Furthermore, I detect an ‘undercommons’ (Moten and Harney, 2013) of the contemporary dance scene in Slovenia, which has the capacity to reimagine the usual function of institutions that serve the needs of state capitalism.