The 4th edition of iDANS, which takes place throughout October 2010 in Istanbul, revolves around the theme of “Cosmopolitanism.” iDANS aims to bring into attention the complexity, hybridity and heterogeneity of identities and expose the multiple cultural affiliations of artistic practices. The festival program highlights the “choreographic” as a practice of cultural, political and affective negotiations and probes the relevance of artistic expressions for an agonistic public space. 

As a political, ethical, and cultural notion and as a way of life, cosmopolitanism insinuates a capacity to understand, negotiate and embrace cultural diversity. Under the rubric of contested meanings and different significances of “cosmopolitanism,” iDANS examines the relations between space, place and environment; the tension between local affiliations and universal imperatives; the patterns and conditions of human mobility, settlement and exclusion; the changing meanings of community and belonging; the affinity between cities and cosmopolitan imaginaries; and the transnational space-time of imagination and geography-bound imaginables. 

What might cosmopolitanism in the arts entail? Does the field of live arts take for granted the fact that cultures have always already been hybrid, rendering concerns of boundaries irrelevant? How is cosmopolitanism experienced in everyday life and urban space by diverse social actors? How do “new cosmopolitanisms” depart from and challenge conventional notions of cosmopolitanism espoused by the state and/or market forces?

What modes of belongings and displacements are produced in/by the arts? What is the place of migration and mobility in the production, circulation and reception of transnational forms of performance? Does being part of a metropolis bring about automatically a cosmopolitan outlook in the arts? How does the absence of such an outlook manifest itself? To what extent can contemporary dance operate as a cosmopolitan category––as a particularly dense site for the circulation and reinvention of forms, meanings and bodies?

Proposing the metropolis as a cultural site, and as a symbolic and choreographic engine, iDANS invites a closer attention to the role of the senses, the mundane particulars, legends and myths in creating the urban charisma that Istanbul is. But, before anything else, the festival seeks to provide a platform for artists to confront their own confrontation of the “other.”