Choreographic Captures Competition 2011 - Deadline April 30
Dear colleagues,
We are happy to announce the Deadline for the Fourth International Choreographic Captures Competition: April 30, 2011!
We invite filmmakers, media artists, directors, choreographers and dancers from all over the world to create short choreographic art films in the format of an advertising clip (max. 60 sec) and submit them to JOINT ADVENTURES. The films should deal with choreography and movement in the broadest sense.
The winners can look forward to monetary and cinema prizes awarded by an international and independent jury of experts. The winners of 2011 will be presented during the commercial break in numerous cinemas in Germany and abroad – themed “Art for those who didn’t ask for it!”
We would appreciate it very much if you could forward this information to interested colleagues, artists and partners.
Besides that we want to offer you the possibility to enhance the program of your festivals or events by showing 35 of the excellent short films submitted to the Choreographic Captures Competition in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The price for this DVD would amount to € 50. Please find the fax form for ordering attached.
Thank you very much and warm regards from Munich
Walter Heun Artistic & Executive Director JOINT ADVENTURES Choreographic Captures: now on and join us or follow us now! ______________________________
JOINT ADVENTURES - Walter Heun, Inhaber: Walter Heun, Gewerbeanmeldung: Kreisverwaltungsreferat München, Betriebs-Nr.: A 91047629, Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer: DE 130424642
coming events: 17. & 18. Mai 2011, 20.30 Uhr Muffathalle: ZOO / Thomas Hauert "You've changed" 7.-10. Juni 2011: THINK BIG - Tanz und Performance Festival für Junges Publikum 3.-13. August 2011: TWE (TANZWERKSTATT EUROPA)
World premiere: 17.-19.10.2008 @ 19:30 Dom im Berg, Graz
In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.
From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.
Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?
1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.
Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković Stage: Slaven Tolj Costume design: Silvio Vujičić Video: Ana Hušman Light design: Alan Vukelić Sound design: Ivan Marušić-Klif Sound technician: Jasmin Dasović
Company manager: Lovro Rumiha
Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumiere, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.
Coproducers: Steirischer Herbst, University of Zagreb – Student center – Theatre &TD
Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all. – Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983
Little by little we are replaced … by uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another, each image at its place, as each of us, at our place, in the chain of events on which we have lost all power. – Dziga Vertov Group, Here And Elsewhere, 1972
This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor.
– Johnathan Beller, Cinema, Capital of the 20th Century, 1994
The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind… In the Lumière film of 1895 it is possible to discover that the workers were assembled behind the gates and surged out at the camera operator’s command. Before the film direction stepped in to condense the subject, it was the industrial order which synchronized the lives of the many individuals.
– Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 2001
Interview with vana Ivković and Tomislav Medak at the Balkan Dance Platform 2009, Novi Sad, Serbia
Brunel Performance Seminar Series
March 30, 4 pm GMT
The role of the person with creative responsibility for lighting in theatre performance has traditionally been conceptualised as ‘designer’ – someone who makes a prior imaginary act before the moment of performance, which is then replayed in performance through an essentially procedural, non-creative, process. I want to propose a partial reinvention of theatre lighting as an arts practice, emphasising the live operation or ‘performance’ of lighting, rather than its design prior to the performance event, and conflating the existing roles of the lighting designer and the lighting operator into the lighting artist. In this seminar, I trace the historical origins of the professional role of the lighting designer and how it is structured, and suggest some strategies for making the shift from designer to performer. As well as describing changes to rehearsal room practices to include lighting, I demonstrate a custom lighting control interface conceptually structured in terms of lighting affects and temporal dynamics,that provides a playable, expressive instrument for the performance of theatre lighting.
Nick graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering before deciding that theatre was more interesting than thermodynamics. After ten years as a professional lighting technician and designer, he started teaching at Rose Bruford College, where – some thirteen years later – he is currently Head of the School of Design, Management and Technical Arts. Nick’s principal research interest at present is the performative potential of light and the lighting artist as performer. Nick’s other research interests include digital scenography and digital performance, the history of theatre lighting, and the roles and status of the various personnel involved in performance-making.
Brunel Seminars!
WATCH here!
http://www.dance-tech.net/profiles/blogs/dancetechtvlive-1Read more…
We have received an overwhelming response by artists in Greece, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, USA, Canada, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Spain and more! As a result we have decided to extend the submissions deadline to April 10th, 2011 to allow more artists more time to send us their work. Keep the submissions coming, there’s extraordinary material and we’re so excited to find out about it! The call for submissions is here.
Critic and culture writer Claudia LaRocco speaks with choreographer Stephen Petronio about his monumental work Underland, with music by Nick Cave, soon to be presented in New York, at the Joyce Theater. To celebrate the occasion, LaRocco and Classical TV present Petronio’s exciting 2010 work, Ghostown.
10 years after: Today is the 28th of March, 2011, exactly 10 years after the first Ballettikka Internettikka live Internet performance by Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman Photo: TV Slovenia (Saša Šavel) reports about the first Ballettikka Internettikka from Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, 28 March 2001.
http://bit.ly/9rpqGJhttp://www.intim...a.org/bi
Artists: Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac and BADco.
Curators: What, How and for Whom/WHW
Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac and performative collective BADco. will represent Croatia at the 54th Biennale di Venezia in the exhibition entitled One Needs to Live Self-Confidently... Watching, curated by WHW. The Croatian presentation will be in the Arsenale.
Tomislav Gotovac's complex and multilayered projects, combining a range of different art practices, are considered pioneering and anticipatory in the areas of structuralist and experimental film, conceptual art, body art, and performance. The presentation of his work will include the key structural and experimental films, and series of photographs from the beginning of the 1960s through to the end of the 1970s. This selection of Gotovac's work does not aim to 'discover' or canonise him internationally, but to show how relevant his work is today and to contextualise it beyond the usual representational clichés of the East European dissident artist.
BADco.'s artistic practice, operating at the intersection of theatre, performance and dance, engages with a redefinition of the performative act and of the established relations between the audience, performers and performance. The acronym of the name BADco.—'Nameless Author's Assoc.' indicates a consistently executed collective working model. The Venice installation, conceived as theatre by other means, will construct a field of friction between the power of images to engage with our collective imagination, to open or close the horizons of the future, and of different modes of spectating.
The red thread connecting the work of Gotovac with BADco.'s practice is the critical discourse based on the thematisation of the procedures of watching. Gotovac's methods of observing refer to the structuring of a film, and they always imply the construction of reality as art. As he once said: "I am constantly bewildered by what lies between my eyes and what I am seeing". In BADco.'s work the thematisation of the gaze springs from focused and continuous exploration of the relationship between the protocols of viewing and performing, their similarities and differences.
Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac (1937–2010) was an avant-garde film director and performer. He graduated in film directing from the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television in Belgrade. Gotovac made his first performances, films, collages and series of photographs in the early 1960s. His artistic activities combined visual art, the avant-garde, experimental, documentary and feature films, performance, body art and conceptual art. In addition to various individual and group exhibitions, performances and experimental film practices, Gotovac showed his films at local and international film festivals. In 2005, he changed his name to Antonio Lauer. The Croatian Film Clubs' Association and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb published a monograph on his work in 2003.
BADco. is a Zagreb-based theatre collective. The collective, a confluence of interests in choreography, dramaturgy and philosophy, is nowadays made up of Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Lovro Rumiha and Zrinka Užbinec. Since it was founded in 2000, it has systematically focused on theatrical and dance performance as a problem-generating rather than problem-solving activity - questioning the established ways of performing, representing and spectating. BADco. approaches the theatrical act as an unstable communicational exchange, a complex imaginary, challenging the spectator to look beyond the homogenising media reality and reclaim her or his freedom of spectating.
What, How and for Whom/WHW What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective founded in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. WHW has been involved in a wide range of production, exhibition and publishing projects. Since 2003, WHW has been curating the programme of Gallery Nova in Zagreb. In 2009, WHW curated the 11th Istanbul Biennial entitled What Keeps Mankind Alive?.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Croatian Film Clubs' Association and Zagreb Youth Theatre. It is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.
Young Arab Theatre Fund is pleased to announce the opening program of Meeting Points 6, a biennial event comprising contemporary art, film, theater, dance, and performance which will open at the Beirut Art Center, Lebanon from April 27 to May 11, and at the Opera House Damascus, from May 2–5.
Curated by Okwui Enwezor, and organized by the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF), in collaboration with regional and international partners the project of Meeting Points 6 will take place across eight historic cities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe over a one year period between April 2011 and March 2012.
Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic, the principal conceptual enquiry of Meeting Points 6, is a cultural project conceived as a response to the various scenarios of rupture between antagonistic political camps and civic critical cultures that are presently unfolding in contemporary Arab societies. The responses to these transitional challenges, which have distinct cultural dimensions, cover a broad spectrum of activities, practices, positions, institutions, and social forms that can be felt in diverse pressure points. At the core of these pressure points, at once local and national, global and transnational, secular and theological, regional and geo-political is what may be characterized as a rising dimension of Civic Imagination. Within this context, artistic practices and their critical logics provide opportunities for constructing and constituting models of civitas, which in turn induce fresh demands for emancipatory and civic techniques. Such techniques not only advocate the obviation of the simplistic dichotomy between progressivist assumptions of political forums and the seemingly conservative institutions of national cultures that oppose them, they also take to task certain strategies of activism around which so-called radical practices have been traditionally perceived within institutional settings.
Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic is deliberately located in the multiple fault lines between these spaces, and is conceived as three distinct Flash Points (Middle East and Levant, North Africa, and Western Europe). It is a project shaped by processes of unraveling, as well as conjunctions. A network of unfolding actions, interactions, aesthetic proposals, performances, and public responses by artists, choreographers, dancers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performers constitutes its immediate forms of enunciation. Through the interaction of the participants, the project endeavors to explore locations of reasoned dissent and reflection, in which it is possible to imagine sequences of activities that are rooted in agendas of struggle, which become spaces of becoming, and possible spheres of global civitas. However, such agendas are neither invested in utopian and progressivist ideals of reformist modernity nor are they inured to the seeming conservatism of fundamentalist cultural politics.
In the present transformative events reshaping the subjectivities, as well as the cultural and political topographies of contemporary Arab societies Locus Agonistes is not only premised on the analysis of. geo-political entanglements, it is a response to the momentous historical forces and the emancipatory logics that are currently reshaping debates on civic identities, cultural strategies, and artistic practices both in its immediate context, and in the localities adjacent to them, for example in Europe.
Comprised of new commissions and existing works, the project, is divided into two programmatic and scenographic strands: The Beirut Art Center would be the venue for an exhibition encompassing installation, photography, sound, video, film, performance, and choreography; while Opera House Damascus will play host to a program of theater, dance solos, dramatic monologues and readings, rehearsals, sound, and performance.
Over the coming months, Meeting Point 6 will present updates of the development of the project as it continues to unfold.
List of artists:
- Adel ABDESSEMED - Jumana ABBOUD - Omar ABU SAADA - Saâdane AFIF - Mohammad ATTAR - Doa ALY - Omar AMIRALAY - Tarek ATOUI - Sammy BALOJI - Tony CHAKAR - Stan DOUGLAS - Hafis DHAU & Aicha M'BAREK - Mounir FATMI - Oussama GHANAM - Fakhri EL GHEZAL - Joana HADJITHOMAS & Khalil JOREIGE - David HARE - Mona HATOUM - Samah HIJAWI - Bouchra KHALILI - Fadhel JAIBI - Jalal TOUFIC - Lamia JOREIGE - Sandra MADI - Basim MAGDY - Rima MAROUN - Radhouane EL MEDDEB - Selma & Sofiane OUISSI - Omar RAJEH - Tino SEHGAL - Laila SOLIMAN
Press Contact: Markus Müller Bureau Mueller Alte Schönhauser Straße 35 10119 Berlin Tel.: +49 - 30 - 20188432, Fax: +49 - 30 - 20188575 bureau@bureaumueller.com
There were a ton of little snags along the way, but I built a small, simple program entirely out of Max/MSP (dynamic metronome - I posted about it in December) that I have since built an installer for using NSIS ( nsis.sourceforge.net ).
I'm pretty stoked about the idea that I can use Max to build a professional .exe from the ground up and distribute it.
I have a beta version available for download here:
In recent years, technological innovations have given rise to a new field, dance technology. Populated by artist-practitioners, technologists, and theorists, this new area encompasses performance, research and development of video game technologies, motion capture experimentation, and dance for the camera. For some time, work in dance technologies has advanced without a recognizable critical dialogue in the United States.
This began to change in October 2009, when the World Performance Project at Yale, in collaboration with SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at MIT, convened an international cohort of artists and scholars for a one-day meeting at Yale. That event, “Emergent Global Corporealities: Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social,” brought artistic creation, comparative media theory, and emergent technologies together with considerations of the social and corporeal.
This group reconvenes at MIT in April with additional participants for Version 2.0. “Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social @ MIT” brings a dozen researchers to MIT to present their original media-focused research. The two-day symposium includes readings, demonstrations, and some small-scale performances, culminating in an anthology of writings to be edited by the conference convenors.
The symposium convenors are Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor, Music and Theater Arts at MIT and Harmony Bench, Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.
Confirmed Participants Include: Johannes Birringer, Chair in Performance Technologies, Brunel University Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer in Dance and Film Studies, University of Surrey Maaike Bleeker, Chair, Performance Studies, University of Utrecht Ian Condry, Associate Professor, MIT Scott deLahunta, Independent Artist, Berlin Simon Ellis, Independent Artist, London Jason Farman, Assistant Professor, Washington State University Susan Kozel, Professor, University of Malmo Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor, University of Michigan Nick Monfort, Associate Professor MIT Chris Salter, Associate Professor, Concordia University Marlon Barrios Solano, researcher/on-line producer/dance-tech.net (New York/Geneva) Jaime del Val, Independent Artist, Barcelona Maria X (Maria Chatzichristodoulou), Lecturer, University of Hull
Please join us at 92YTribeca for an evening of historical and contemporary short videos and live performances featuring strange, gross, funny, and wondrous creative adventures with living organisms.
Appearing LIVE!
* Collaborative neuromuscular circuit hacking by Toringo:Margolis and Loud Objects! * Biofeedback video straight from Zach Layton's brain! * Hot live DIY-bio action with Nurit Bar-Shai and the Genspace crew!
Plus a broad selection of funnystrangeawesomestupidgross videos showing life at its wrongest.
WARNING: Some content inappropriate for ALL HUMANS. Really.
Curated by Douglas Repetto, Jenny Torino, and Marie Evelyn (Analogous Projects). Thanks to 92YTribeca for making BioWrong possible!
* * * * * * *
Next regular dorkbot-nyc meeting: 06 April, 2011
..............................
.......................................... .........dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity.......... ......................... http://dorkbot.org ........................... ........................................................................
The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (www.adobemuseum.com) announces its second exhibition, John Maeda: Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC), on view March 23–December 31, 2011. The exhibition is a digital representation of Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), leading an interactive lecture on how artists are connecting the worlds of digital creativity and analog (or handcrafted) creativity. Titled Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC), the lecture underscores the mission of the AMDM to provide an interactive venue for presenting digital media works as well as providing a forum for expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society.
According to Maeda, "Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form—the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But just as it took Icarus to first imagine human flight by carefully observing how birds can fly, digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world." Maeda sees the thread that runs between the tools of physical art making—such as pens, brushes and pigment—and the way new media has co-opted many of the same tools to manipulate bits in digital art. Through the exhibition, he examines the history of linking analog and digital creativity within his own work and the works of others.
The exhibition takes the form of an interactive lecture, with a digital representation of Maeda speaking on a simple stage resembling his office at RISD. Dynamic infographics, video content and audio remarks illustrate Maeda's talk. Scenes from RISD art studios, including wood, glass, metal, and paper workshops, demonstrate the richness of expression Maeda feels must be captured in digital art's next chapter.
About John Maeda John Maeda is a world-renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to integrate technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century synthesis of creativity and innovation. A recipient of the National Design Award and represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Maeda became president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in June 2008.
A former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab. Maeda's early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining skilled computer programming with sensitivity to traditional artistic concerns. He has published four books including The Laws of Simplicity, now translated into 14 languages. His new book written with Becky Bermont, Redesigning Leadership, expands on his micro-posts on leadership and innovation as @johnmaeda on Twitter. In 2008 Maeda was named one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine and in 2010 he was called the "Steve Jobs of academia" by Forbes magazine.
A native of Seattle, Maeda earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT, followed by a PhD in Design Science from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan and a master's in business administration from Arizona State University.
About Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM) The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (www.adobemuseum.com) is a one-of-a-kind online museum and interactive venue designed to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital media works and provide a forum for expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society. The AMDM is open 24/7, 365 days a year, free of charge. Visitors are invited to sign up for free membership to enjoy special benefits including advance viewings of exhibits and exclusive events.
The AMDM launched in October 2010 with inaugural exhibition, The Valley, a specially commissioned work from renowned American artist Tony Oursler. Exhibitions are curated by leaders in art, technology and business, changing regularly throughout the year. A permanent exhibition archive remains indefinitely accessible at www.adobemuseum.com.
About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
Join La Mama for these experiential workshops for professional directors, playwrights and actors at La MaMa Umbria International in Spoleto, Italy during 4 Programs this summer.
Erik Ehn presents his workshop on Spatial Writing at the 5th Annual La MaMa International Playwright Retreat, July 3 – 13, 2011 at La MaMa Umbria is Spoleto, Italy.
The 12 Annual La MaMa International Symposium for Directors takes place from July 15 – August 15, 2011 at La MaMa Umbria. There will be 2 two-week sessions, featuring teaching artists Ping Chong, Ruth Maleczech, Dijana Milosevic, Luca Ronconi, Hjalmar-Jorge Joffre-Eichorn, Baba Israel, JoAnne Akalaitis, Dorcy Rugamba, Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari* and special guests. In addition, participants visit local cultural sites, attend arts festivals and community fairs and meet local artists.
Tina Landau and André de Shields share their approaches to actor training during the inaugural year of the La MaMa Umbria Master Acting Workshops, August 17 -27, 2011.
Cricot-2 Workshops, led by leading actors from legendary director Tadeusz Kantor’s company, will be held June 13 – 26, 2011.
The international symposium “Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity“ is dedicated to the question of how dance, both in its historical and in its contemporary manifestations, is intricately linked to conceptualisations of the political. Whereas in this context the term “policy” means the reproduction of hegemonic power relations within already existing institutional structures, politics refers to those practices which question the space of policy as such by inscribing that into its surface which has had no place before. Thinking politics as the absent political within policy is therefore by definition linked to the idea of choreography in the truest sense of the word: The art of choreography consists in distributing bodies and their relations in space. It is a distribution of parts that within the field of the visible and the sayable allocates positions to specific bodies. Yet in the confrontation between bodies and their relations, a deframing and dislocating of positions may take place. This ongoing distribution and reconfiguration of the sensible (Jacques Rancière) which structures the body and its parts and links it to the existing symbolic order of any given society can be considered a site of resistance allowing for interventions into hegemonic discourses, traditional distributions and fixed framings. In the public space of theatre, whose characteristic feature is the separation of stage and auditorium, dance may not only distribute its bodies, but also split and to share that which is separated and yet united: The community of bodies as well as their words and the objects they produce.
Over the past years the term “policy” has undergone a renaissance in political philosophy. On the one hand there are those who bemoan the disappearance of politics (Alain Badiou), on the other hand others welcome its return and relational integration into sociability (Nicolas Bourriaud). Inbetween these extremes there are those who accuse political philosophy itself of playing into the hands of the powers and of thereby sacrificing the idea of politics for a universal process of administration (Colin Crouch, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière). In the course of this discussion the question of what constitutes a democracy becomes more and more virulent. Recent developments in the world economy suggest that Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” of self, other and society, which he developed in his lecture series between 1977 and 1979, is more pertinent than ever. Whereas the citizens of the one world have involuntarily become bearers and sharers of incalculable risks, the frontiers to the other world are protected more and more rigorously. Examples of this are the overflowing refugee camps e.g. on the southern Italian shores as well as international airports that resemble high security tracts searching and registering masses of bodies in their microstructures with new technological devices. While one part of the world population deterritorialises itself voluntarily, the other part is forcibly prevented from entering this space defined by its increasing mobility, acceleration, and high speed communication highways. Neoliberal dispositives of power are linked with technologies to secure and enclose territories, discourses and bodies whose general health is cared for while they are deprived of a possible shared way of life.
The renaissance of the political goes together with the rebirth of a long discredited term: That of community. In the German political tradition of Ferdinand Tönnies, community - in a Romantic understanding - opposed to society. In the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito, however, community no longer appears as a simple opposition to political developments, but rather as a contested space of discussion that risks community in a dialogue between equals. Although contemporary developments in world politics and world economy establish increasingly asymmetrical relationships between people, it is the idea of a community of equals that may subvert these developments.
Viewed against this background, how did dance and how does dance, then, do politics with the body in the public (theatrical) space? How can it become political? The symposion looks for theoretical models, historical constellations, contemporary experiments and practical consequences that elucidate the relation between dance, politics and policy – which, in Jacques Rancière's terms, might be called ”police” as well. What does the structuring and distribution of bodies and their parts look like in historical formations of dance such as the court ballet of the 17th century, the Romantic ballet of the 19th century or the German Dance tradition of the Weimar Republic? What historical departures of dance where linked with political contexts and how? Which political contexts provoked dance as a critical intervention? Which contexts suppressed dance or, contrary to that, teamed up with dance in order to change and rearrange the distribution of bodies in the social and theatrical arena? What does a critical bodily practice look like in the age of genetic engineering and reproduction by the mass media? Does the relation between body and text have to be redefined? Are there choreographic practices that may subvert the dominant powers? How do the artists themselves think about their aesthetic practice and how does that influence the choices they make? What are the consequences of these choices for their institutional working conditions and practices?
Participants of the symposion are invited to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalisation from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology. One focus of "Communications” will be the discussion of recent developments in contemporary dance and the production of new spaces for collaboration and exchange. In how far do they help to reformulate what economists call the “becoming immanent” of the world”? On an artistic level the conference wants to look for possible answers by presenting pieces by dance makers dealing explicitly with the issues raised here. Apart from more established artists like Xavier Le Roy or Mette Ingvartsen a younger generation of artists shall use the conference as their platform. This is why the organisers are planning to draw on artists and their work from institutions that have been supported by Tanzplan Deutschland over the past years. They are invited to explore the relation their work undergoes with social or political developments. The title of the conference paraphrases on purpose a text by Roberto Esposito. In his trilogy Communitas-Immunitas-Bios Esposito describes the reciprocity of opening and closure of social systems and of bodies alike. He tries to make this movement productive for a rethinking of the political in terms of an interweaving of communitas and immunitas - in a space where life is given a form in order to grant all bodies survival.
Thinking - Resisting - Reading the Political What perspectives and methods does advanced cultural theory offer for our attempts to grasp political discourse and analyze aesthetic treatments and performances of resistance? The international conference THINKING – RESISTING – READING THE POLITICAL brings together scholars from the fields of theatre, literature, art and media studies, from cultural theory, sociology, and philosophy, to discuss possibilities and limits of current models and attempt new approaches. The deliberately ambiguous German title exemplifies the bidirectional design: ‘widerständiges denken’ refers both to manners of thinking resistance, and to the search for a quality of resistance in manners of thought. Similarly, ‘politisches lesen’ intends both the search for a political element in dispositions towards reading, and that for an adequate disposition to read for an element of the political as understood in recent conceptions by Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. The conference assembles a set of thinkers from the fiels of theatre, literary, media and art studies, from cultural theory, sociology and philosophy, to discuss consequences that follow from these models: In what theoretically describable forms of thought can resistance appear, and how can resistance be thought of as an object of theory? How can the political mark certain texts, and what procedures are available for a reading that is marked by an appropriate sensibility for the contents and orders of the political?
In recent years, theory, art and feuilleton have all seen a recurrence of notions hailing from ethics and politics, including the controversial concept of an ‘ethical’ or ‘political turn’, but also an increased interest in ethical evaluation and political engagement, and new studies into social preconditions, as well as into reflections of the juridical and legislative influence on the shape of art’s production and reception. These movements join a by now well-established discourse on topically related objects within post-colonial and gender studies, and not least a renewed attention for politically engaged positions of previous theoretical discourses, which are now often read in new ways that are quite removed from their original and immediate political intentions.
At the same time, we find – often in different places, contexts and traditions – an increasing attention for far-reaching conceptions that entertain new claims to universality or an autonomous weltanschauung or agenda. What these contributions in the context of radical democracy theories and recent philosophical interventions concerning politics share despite their differences is an emphatic valorization of concepts of the political, the event or of truth, taken in the sense of a radical interruption and re-constitution of historical aprioris; a tendency that recurs in as different a manner as those of Badiou and Rancière, of Critchley and Esposito.
With an aim to better understand, clearly describe and critically discuss such concepts of a political dimension in aesthetics, the talks at this conference will look at those facets of the ‘political’ that are problematized in their discourses: At phenomena, that is, that depend upon their fundamental incommensurability with representations and institutions, with stable notions of political order and uninterrupted political discourse. Such interpretations distance themselves from a simple equation of political reading with an interest in politically engaged, appellative texts and literatures that support or accuse specific party politics or revolutionary programs; nor does their focus rest on purely literary treatments of categorical de- and re-differentiation in established political discourse, as they are discussed in postcolonial, gender and minority studies among others. Rather, following La Mouffe and Laclau, the political is here intended as a complementary and opposing concept to that of politics, confronting that incoherence that balances the politics of coherent commonality and communicability in favor of conflicting political autonomy and enouncement.
So far, the demands and possibilities of these concepts have rarely been fulfilled or even systematically considered in cultural studies. Faced with a large number of almost positivistically empirical studies focusing on particular phenomena on the one hand, and ambitioned speculative designs on the other, we find a vast array of possible links, each of which has proven itself productive, and yet each of which threatens to oversimplify the ‘application’ of single terms and ideas taken from overarching theories by turning them into tools for highly specialized disciplines. At the same time, it is the political ambitions and presuppositions of many superficially adopted theories that seem to be insufficiently reflected, sometimes even hardly made aware, in such ‘applications’.
We want to attack both deficits. Both, we suggest, are owed not least to the difficulties engendered by the very idea of an ‘application’, a ‘use’ that is in itself often foreign to the main tenets of the original discourses. A naïve concept of method in the sense of established philosophy of science, or even following traditionally hermeneutical, descriptive, e.g. structuralist, and most poststructuralist approaches sometimes misrepresents theory as a toolbox, its instruments readily separated from their originating beliefs and turned to the screws and nails of otherwise unconnected objects of culture and art. But this stand in stark contrast to the central observation that political, social, conceptual conditions and artistic practices are incontrovertibly interlinked. Similarly unconvincing are those adoptions of radical theory that avoid discussing any consequences from the positions they adopt, omitting the necessary reflection of their own view of scientific and scholarly practice in contemporary cultural studies.
Returning to an interest in the political, we thus propose to accompany such interests with an intention towards theoretical conceptions, and to openly examine if and how that intention might translate into specific analytic or descriptive measures: The conference will discuss the problematic ‘consequences in methodology’ attributed to these theories from a number of different vantage points. The interdisciplinary setup will hopefully provide opportunities to productively discuss theories of various provenience and to grapple with works of art and individual analyses, examining, defending or rejecting the possibility of a methodology informed by advanced theory. The conference will aim not only to continue a critical reflection upon the proposals offered by current theories, but to constantly accompany that reflection with a conscious question as to the specific consequences that flow from these theories to the practice of cultural study and the analysis of individual and concrete pieces of art; a question that might well have to be answered in the negative, but deserves an explicit answer nevertheless. Can there be methods for a scholarly sound reading of the political? Is the activity of dealing with always already elusive and thus doubly resistant categories at all graspable in terms of methods or techniques? And whatever the answer may be, can it in turn help us to better understand common suppositions of methodology and contribute to a productive argument on what a method is?
Posted by Pepe Zapata on March 22, 2011 at 10:29am
Mercatde lesFlors, a venue -locatedinBarcelona, Spain-devotedtothe artsofdanceandmovement,celebratesits 25thanniversarythis season.And the active participaticion of audiences play a fundamental role in this celebration. How? Recoveringtheirmemoryand becomingparticipant andprotagonist ofthe celebration:
BE PART OF THE MERCAT'S MEMORY. You have lived unforgettable moments in the Mercat... you have been in the best shows... you have been moved by artists and companies you met... Share your memories with the rest of the Mercat's audience, in video or in text. WE ALL ARE MERCAT.
Toaccomplish this,Mercat de les Flors has just launched a sitethat will bring together25 yearsuntilthe endof the seasonallthe memories-invideo andin writing-of thosewho haveenjoyedthe shows at theMercatde lesFlorsandwant toshare them withtheotherspectators.These memoriescan be sentusingtheMercatprofilesonfacebookandtwitter,email,andalsoin thelobbyofthe venue,whichalsohasinstalledawebcamplatformtocollectpublic testimony.
Rise Up, Fallen Angel is an Integrated Media Performance that will involve live improvised music accompanying images projected on three large screens. The curator will group the images so they will be displayed to create a non-linear narrative relating to the theme. The exhibition will be different each time it is shown, but documentation of the event will be available for viewing. We are seeking images and video that do not contain text or language, but connect with the viewer on a primal, emotional level.