At the Contest for financing and co-financing of projects in the field of contemporary creativity, the Ministry of Culture of Serbia supported only one (!) new dance production this year, a third of the funds were allocated to amateur companies and their projects, including fiddling, although it has nothing to do with dance, and one third was intended for civil sector was assigned to the private Game Festival.
These are some of the reasons for the Open Letter of Culture Minister Maja Gojković, which was signed by around 150 actors of the contemporary dance scene.
"Among them are dancers from institutions, from the Ballet of the National Theater, Bitef Dance Company, from schools, which has never happened before," Marijana Cvetković, who founded Stanica - Service for Contemporary Dance, one of the regional and internationally the most active organizations in the field of culture and art, a kind of hub of the domestic contemporary dance scene.
He states that even that one dance production that will receive financial support from the Ministry "is not professional but is a graduation performance of the Institute for Artistic Dance", and emphasizes that "it has never happened that a private festival, the Dance Festival, has received more money from Bitef of a festival that is not a private manifestation".
"I think it is impossible to comment on the fact that the Ministry will finance the fiddler project as part of the contemporary dance competition."
Marijana Cvetković says that "among those who will receive money are five phantom organizations that do not even have a profile on Facebook", and that "the committee was a member of the presidency of the Association of Ballet Artists of Serbia, which was awarded three million dinars".
"This corrupt mechanism jeopardized the competition, and Minister Maja Gojković legitimized it with her signature," says Marijana Cvetković.
In an open letter to Maja Gojković, a review of all the commission's decisions is requested.
"We don't have any contact with the Ministry, nor have we had any, so this time, an Open Letter is the only way for us to be heard," says Marijana Cvetković and recalls that this is precisely why the independent dance scene sued the Ministry of Culture in 2016 when she allocated half of the funding to the Belgrade Dance Festival. After two years, they got the process.
In the Open Letter it is also written that this year's results of the competition are devastating "and indicate that we are in the absence of any systemic cultural policy for dance and contemporary creativity in general, but also the deeply worrying incompetence of the Ministry of Culture and its commissions to deal with such important tasks."
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