Music and Dance Tradition of Multiethnic and Multicultural Serbia

The project aims at presenting characteristics and current transformations of the traditional musics and dances of various ethnic, regional local and other communities in Serbia as vital practices in the articulation of identities. The collection of music and dance folk material we have accumulated during our research is characterized by heterogeneity and uneven availability, while its public and scholarly presentation demands state-of-the-art elaboration of various aspects, such as ethnic, gender, class, generation and other identity markers. The aforesaid reasons impose a need for a research project that will document and interpret traditional music and dance in such a way as to make possible an insight into various phases of their transformation within the communities themselves, and also to offer an overview of the types of co-existence and interchange between distinct music-cultural entities.. The goal of the project is to make a contribution to the revaluation of the historic aspects of the centuries-old intercultural exchange taking place on the territory of Serbia, and at the same time – and primarily – to present the plurality of “living traditions”: the forms of the survival and adaptation of those social practices which play a major role in the fostering of national, ethnic, communal and individual identities of the multicultural Serbia.