In continental Eruope contemporary dance has been a generic term for different aesthetic paradigms in the art of dance that were developed as an opposition to the ballet in the United States, Europe, Japan from the end of the 19th century through the 20th century (modern dance, (German) expressionist dance, butoh (butō), postmodern dance, dance theater, physical theater, conceptual dance etc.) and became global from the 1970s on. - In the United States the term is used differently and signifies a shift in technical approaches to physical training in opposition to modern dance. - In the last thee decades some paradigms of contemporary dance entered the realm of contemporary art and became part of the contemporary art systems, which does not mean that all contemporary dance works or paradigms could be automatically considered contemporary art. - In the region of former Yugoslavia contemporary dance developed mostly after the WWI and entered the local stages mostly with the paradigm of expressionst dance and via different Mid-European schools of dance, popular at the time. The first traces of contemporary dance appeared on the regional stages at the beginning of the 1890s, when some imitators of American dancer Loie Fuller toured the region. (R.V., 9.4.2026)

In the 1950s, long before he became globally popular author, Italian medievalist, philosopher and semiotician Umbert Eco (1932-2016) was busy studying literary texts which were for him more fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning; he understood them as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. That was also the period of aleatoric music, happenings and events in the art world, experimental cinema and dance. All those artistic tendencies started to consider their works differently and tried to activate the role of artistic reception. Eco’s book The Open Work (Opera aperta, 1962) was an attempt to understand modern artworks which can be rendered open by their author, and further completed by the performer, viewer, reader or audience. That notion legitimated the variety of interpretations one work may give us. - The Open Work (1962) might not have resonated in the dance circles at the time but later became useful reference for articulation of aesthetic tendencies that organize choreographies with the procedural tools in a way which equalizes the authorship of artists in the singular work and emancipates the reception of spectatorship. - In the republics of the former Yugoslavia the first examples of the open works may have been some performances of Croatian ensemble KASP and its choreographer Milana Broš, not without influences of the modern music that Broš got acquainted with through the Zagreb Music Biennial (John Cage, Pierre Boulez etc.). Open choreographic approaches started increasingly to appear in the region after the 2000s. - An extensive attempt to configure the notion of an open work in dance and art was an issue of Maska Journal, Year XX. no. 94–95 (autumn-winter 2005), edited by Bojana Cvejić. (R.V., 9.4.2026)