Every artistic work is an engagement of sorts in a broader and weaker sense, an emergence out of the private sphere, an interaction with the broader social community and the public, public advocacy of certain evaluative judgments, etc.
Yet, in a narrower and strong sense, if by socially engaged action we understand not only the emergence out of privacy, a thematic-motivational framework (the mentioning of social motives) or individual participation in public life, but a specific, articulated social demand or appeal, always followed by certain formal or informal group intentions and joint perspectives, and specific socially directed group acts, regardless of concrete outcomes or results of action, the concept of “engagement” becomes more complex.
In this regard, poetry and dance performance can also play a role in social engagement, regardless of the weak or insignificant impact of the outcomes of their “”engagement””. A paradigmatic historical example is the activity of Dadaist groups. Although they didn’t manage to stop the war, nor to weaken its effects in any way, they were engaged in advocating, espousing, and spreading pacifism and ridiculing militarism precisely by means of poetry and poetic performances. The causes of their engagement were literary (radical questioning of poetic canons) as well as social.

In the lecture, we start from two theses:
1) compared to Sartre’s claim on the powerlessness of poetry in the context of social engagement, contemporary literature points at different possibilities – the transformation of the lyrical I into the lyrical We reflects both the necessity of joint perspective as the condition for an engaged public call, as well as the sociality of poetic act.
2) Group dance performatively demonstrates the agency of joint perspective and reflects the necessity of group intentionality and We perspective in pointing out specific social appeals, demands, calls, or value judgments. (Of course, the questions of reach, degree and outcome of poetry and dance performance in the context of social engagement remain open).
These points will be demonstrated on the examples of the poetry of Nenad Glišić and performances of Neda Kovinić.

Aleksandar Milanković graduated philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. For many years he has been publishing his work as part of group artistic projects with composer Dragana S. Jovanović, sculptor and photographer Slobodan Kostadinovski Boka and director and painter Nikola Marčeta. He published seven books of poetry and lyrical notes. He works as a philosophy teacher.