EAST DANCE ACADEMY
What to Affirm? What to perform?
Rather than thinking in aesthetic terms, we are interested in “coming out” of the dance habitus of the politically and ideologically dense societies of the East. Although there is nothing essential about the East as such, there is at least a persistent idea of transitivity that was always assigned to the former political regimes of the East in terms of transition from socialism to communism, then from fake communism to wild capitalism, etc. This never-ending flow/flood of transition(s) is in fact something like living in a constant trans, i.e. in a state of art that is always in motion, in constant transformation, transition, and translation. Moments of transgression, of subversive singularities rather than massive oppositional cultural practices, are at the same time chains of transitional moments with their intrinsic potential to transform both space and time, to shift the co-ordinate system in which the artwork is produced. In other words, the specific quality of transition comes out of an intensive approach to the debate on the ‘transitional moment’ (here and now) rather than the transitional period (understood as a massive time metaphor, in which one acts now and then), which demands a reconnection of our optic and sonic links to the world we live in through a different approach to the production of time. In the process of transition, of becoming the same, only more redistributed and actualized, one is always late, especially in comparison with the engaging speed of capital. Mental sets that we call "dance" are trans-positions of thinking, which are graspable in a metaphorical, yet material (traceable) way.
That's why the East is essentially about/in the West.
We invite you to join our October/November week of events:
29. 10. 2007
18:00
Theatre &TD - Semicircular Hall
s-o-s project
Presentation of Self-Managed Educational System in Art
A project by TkH Centre and Kontekst Gallery, Belgrade; in cooperation with PAF (PerformingArtsForum, St Erme, France)
Self-Managed Educational System in Art: s-o-s project
Self-Managed Educational System in Art is a research project by TkH, centre for the theory and practice of performing arts from Belgrade. The project investigates educational systems in the fields of arts and humanities. It was launched in 2006, in cooperation with Kontekst Gallery, Belgrade. The acronym of the Serbian name of the project: s-o-s (Samoupravni Obrazovni Sistem) is used as the short version of the project’s name in both Serbian and English. The key issues and concepts of the project are: artistic education, the production and management of knowledge, research self-organization, self-education, self-management, the application of open-source procedures in education, the contemporary contexts of knowledge production, and the commodification of knowledge.
The s-o-s-project is envisioned as an open system of scholarly research, theoretical and practical public events (public clocks), presentations, and production of texts that build on the practice of post-pedagogy in the field of art theory, cultural studies, cultural activism, and educational methods. The aim of the project is to find and/or create alternatives to public educational institutions in the direction of self-education, in particular self-education as collective practice.
For additional information, visit: http://www.tkhgenerator.net/spip.php?article85
29. 10. 2007
20:00
Theatre &TD - Main stage
OOUR: "Salon"
Concept and choreography: Selma Banich, Sandra Banić, Ana Banić, Oliver Frljić, Adam Semijalac
Parformed by: Selma Banich and Sandra Banić
Production: OOUR
Co-production: University of Zagreb – Student Center – Theatre &TD - CIIU, Fabrik Potsdam ( in the framework of Tanzplan Potsdam: Artists-in-Residence), working platform Experimental Free Scene / EkS-scena.
Taking the concept of Satie’s furniture music as its starting point and to a certain extent building on the experience gained by working on Creating Eve, this performance brings the performative act from the sphere of affectation back to the sphere of manual work by using dance, which always retains its function of reflecting on performance as a series of simple performative acts, which do not cause any other form of aesthetic breakthrough. Music, as the facilitator of something that is primarily taking place and coming to its end in another medium, has offered the basis for reflecting on the activity that appears and becomes conceptualised through the accumulation of certain experience of the spectator, working at the same time on the mechanisms that destabilize all attempts at one-sided critical interpretation and the corresponding hierarchies.
30. 10. 2007
17:00
Theatre &TD - Semicircular Hall
Ana Vujanović and Saša Asentić
“Tiger’s Leap into the History (Evacuated Genealogy)” – a video installation
Production of video materials: Dragana B. Stevanović, Marta Popivoda, and Saša Asentić
The installation consists of video interviews and documentary materials, with the aim of reconstructing the local dance scene – which the visitors can trace on the supplied map.
Interviews with: Katalin Ladik – poet, actress, and performance artist; Svenka Savić – ordinary professor of psycho-linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad; Dubravka Maletić – choreographer; Sonja Vukićević – choreographer and dancer; Nela Anotonović – choreo-director; Ana Vujanović (self-interview) – theoretician of performing arts; Jovan Ćirilov – theatrologist and the artistic director of Bitef; Vladimir Kopicl – writer and cultural critic; and Boris Kovač – composer and multimedia artist.
“Tiger’s Leap” as a mode of historicization is the basic research methodology in investigating the Serbian dance scene throughout the 20th century, which is presented as a video installation.
The basic reference is Benjamin’s last text: Theses on the Philosophy of History, according to which “to articulate the past historically does not mean to know it ‘as it actually was’. It means to master the memory as it flashes in the moment of danger.” The key idea of Benjamin’s notion of history is German Eingedenken, which is here translated as ‘memory’. However, Žižek has observed in his Sublime Object of Ideology that “we should not translate that Eingedenken simply as ‘memory’ or ‘reminiscence’; a more literal translation of ‘transposing oneself in thoughts/into something’ is equally inappropriate,” since Benjamin’s Eingedenken is an interested appropriation of the past. Thus, the dance past that we are offering mostly consists of the specific reminiscences of interviewed persons, who here-and-now inscribe the there-and-then, not in the manner of teleology, but in some sort of weak genealogy, which has been evacuated from the official history of contemporary dance scene in European and global terms.
According to the Theses in the History of Philosophy, the tiger’s leap is a leap of the present into an open past, which has been waiting for it in order to – according to Žižek – come into existence at all: “Benjamin [was] – a unique case in Marxism [that] – understood history as a text, a series of events that were only to become what they had always been – their meaning and their historical dimension were established later, by their inscription in the symbolic network.” That intervention of the present into the past, which runs backwards, ‘stitching’ it there-and-then from a crisis-laden rather than a smooth position of here-and-now, is an aspect that is constitutive of our historicization of the Serbian dance scene. Whereas in the official historiography history is a homogeneous, empty time of continuity, in the critical historiography (or genealogy, as we have termed it with Foucault) history is a discontinuous time ‘filled with the present,’ which should be approached from a cautious distance (like Klee’s Angelus Novus). Indeed, critical artistic practice is not directed towards the products of art or towards supplying the machinery of artistic production, but rather towards its ‘cautious observation’ through the layers of time, contexts, agents, and specific artistic dispositives...”
30. 10. 2007
20:00
Theatre &TD - Main Stage
Saša Asentić: “My Private Biopolitics”
Concept and performance: Saša Asentić
Assistant: Olivera Kovačević-Crnjanski
Theoretical background and dramaturgy: Ana Vujanović
Production: Per.Art
The performance is a result of co-production with Centre national de la danse – Paris, research in residency (Theorem Dance residencies), and was prepared during the training workshop in practical dramaturgy THe FaMa in Belgrade and Dubrovnik. It is supported by DanceWEB and a part of the research dance project INDIGO DANCE.
Saša Asentić is a new name on the international art scene and this is the first time that he is presenting a project in Zagreb. With his performance “My Private Biopolitics” he has participated in some of the most important European festivals.
The questions spring up from the problem of finding a position within the relations of global and local bio-powers and the biopolitics of dance in today’s Serbia. How does one locate “one’s own (private and public) specificum”? And what is to be done with it, bearing in mind the tensions between local ideologies and global expectations (regarding these ideologies): should it be evacuated from one’s work in order to achieve successful communication (or coquetry) with the global, or rather western trends, in which this specificum is not included; or should one base one’s work on it even at the cost of failure, i.e. exclusion from the conceptual/programmatic map of international stage? Furthermore, is the first strategy something that gives us “right to a discourse” or is everything decided at a completely different place and by completely different procedures?
Which ”bodies” are imprinted in the body that is dancing on our local stage today? For example, which bodies are projected, through the expectations of a hypothetical “western programmer, and thus also spectator”, almost as a genetically determined feature/difference with respect to the other, who comes from this specific context? The particularity of that context is, in its actuality, very gloomy – that context is not a part of the First World, it is not EU, it is still called the East (even though the West is no longer called “West”), it is post-socialism in the world of capitalism, and it is terribly transitional, without a single bit of the “flexibility of nomadism” that would make it exotic…
31. 10. 2007
18:00
net.culture club mama, Preradovićeva 18
Baptism Under Triglav – animated reconstruction
Authors of the project: Jure Novak, Meta Grgurevič, and Andrej Lehrman
Presentation: Janez Janša
The transfer of the theatre performance Baptism Under Triglav into the computer medium is already a work of art, as it requires a transposition of the logic of theatre into the logic of a computer generated moving picture. The reconstruction is constructed as digital theatre and thus develops one of the ideas of the theatre of Dragan Živadinov. The recollections and documents about this unique performance in the Slovene theatrical past are fragmented and partial. The nature of the event was, so to say, a ritual, while the scenography, which brought about a visual masterpiece, was exceptionally complex. This prompted our decision to reconstruct the performance in the digital medium, which differs in its essence from the theatre version. The reconstruction is thus shorter than the original performance, at the same time opening the dimensions provided by the medium and taking into account the presumed intentions of the authors. Video collage of different techniques, the original audiovisual material, but also the new imagery and sounds, have been used to render the spirit of the original.
31. 10. 2007
20:00
Theatre &TD - Main Stage
Mette Ingvartsen: 50/50
Concept and performance: Mette Ingvartsen
Music: Deep Purple, Leoncavallo, Cornelious
Sound design: Peter Lenaerts
50/50 works with extreme and spectacular expressions as a physical practice instead of the usual psychological motivation. Movements deriving from clearly codified situations, like a rock concert, an opera or a circus number, are processed until they acquire a sort of deformed expressiveness.
Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish dancer/choreographer living and working in Brussels. She graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2004. She has worked with Jan Ritsema and Bojana Cvejic on several theatre productions.
YES MANIFESTO
Yes to redefining virtuosity
Yes to conceptualizing experience, affects, sensation
Yes to materiality/body practice
Yes to investment of performer and spectator
Yes to expression
Yes to excess
Yes to “invention” (however impossible)
Yes to un-naming, decoding and recoding expression
Yes to non-recognition, non-resemblance
Yes to non-sense/illogic
Yes to organizing principles rather than fixed logic systems
Yes to moving the “clear concept” behind the actual performance of
Yes to methodology and procedures
Yes to animation
Yes to style as a result of procedure and specificity of a proposal.
Yes to complexity
Thanks to Podevil, Berlin, P.A.R.T.S, Hannah Sophie Hohlfeld, Mårten Spångberg
and Bojana Cvejic.
31. 10. 2007
21:00
Theatre &TD - Main Stage
OOUR: "Salon"
see above
02. 11. 2007
19:00
Theatre &TD - Semicircular Hall
Screening of the movie Making of... Mamories a made of this...
Co-production: PAF/Reims and BADco.
Director: Nicolas Siepen
02. 11. 2007
20:00
Theatre &TD - Main Stage
BADco. “Memories are made of this... performance notes”
Pravdan Devlahović, Ana Kreitmeyer, Krešimir Mikić, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec & Damir Bartol Indoš
Directed by: Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Collaborators: Tor Lindstrand (space), Daniel Fischer (software), Nicolas Siepen (film), Miljenko Bengez (lights), Silvio Vujičić (costumes)
Design: Gordan Karabogdan
Borrowing the title from the famous Dean Martin song, this notebook-like performance explores the mechanisms of forgetting, emotional consumption, and remembering moments and spaces that have been evacuated or that were never there.
“Instead of being sorry for yourself, listen” she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks /really/ thinks.)
So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in you – suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack is in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes – your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! the world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked – it's the Grand Canyon.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up
05. 11. 2007
10:30
Academy of Drama Art
28 Gundulićeva Street (courtyard of the Evangelical Church)
Auditorium 4
Bojana Cvejić
In the Making of the Making of:
The Practice of Rendering Performance Virtual
lecture
There are two rationales that explain how “education” became a hot topic in the arts curatorship recently. The political one: that the arts entail a specific form of knowledge production, being transdisciplinary, discursive, creative, experimental, critical, open in approach etc.. These characteristics are taken for social values that relegitimize the political role of the arts in society today. The economic rationale is, of course, implicated by the political, although it may seem to reverse the order of recourse between arts, politics and economy. Thus, apart from the educational argument raised to justify the exceptional economic status of non-mainstream production in the arts in Europe (subsidies and subventions outside of corporate capital), the arts are looked upon for lending a model of contemporary freelance worker in immaterial economy in the figure of the artist (cf. Pierre-Michel Menger, Du labeur à l'oeuvre: Portrait de l'artiste en travailleur and Profession artiste: Extension du domaine de la création). Shifting focus from project- to service-based economy, performativity becomes the biopolitical metaphor for work (Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude): an activity of service without an end-product. Furthermore, the process of making a performance in the European context of “independent” production engages a specific form of non-calculated productivity outside of paid labour-time. Beyond the cynical mood of the critique in the 1990s, which emphasized the capitalization of research, laboratory, collaboration and other similar buzzwords for often “cheap-deal” programmations, new notions and new formats of development, presentation and distribution of performance, as well as forms of circulating knowledge in the performance field, are emerging in these processes related to performance-making.
Analysing a few paradigmatic cases from Belgium, France and Germany, which I observed or took part in (open-source platform everybodys.be, the research project “The Making Of The Making Of”, “practicable” project, project 6MonthsOneLocation, PAF projects and meetings), I would like to put forward and elaborate the following points and questions:
When a performance-making process is expanded to research not just instrumental to the project of one performance, the parameters of both research and performance might change. A collective learning process takes place and gives rise to operative reason changing the role of theory. Instead of applying theory for interpretation, theoretical discourse is produced in experimentation, in a kind of conceptual imagination that is necessary to power a methodological search for means, tools and language of a material practice. What also changes is the mode of production, somewhat linked to what is claimed as speculative pragmatism in current theory (Isabelle Stengers, Brian Massumi). No reason to dwell any longer on the ideological issues of collectivity and authorship, research im-personalizes the self in a collective process of individuation, that could also be qualified as a practice of a temporary, situated, and contingent platform of knowledge. If by-products (texts, videos, audio-clips, lectures, screenings, working groups, workshops, workshop kits and many other materials distributed to a physically present or otherwise an internet public) overspill to the extent of becoming the products of research – the whole notion of performance as the act here-and-now is in question. The virtual dimension of performance before and after the theatre stage is then a real dimension of performance beyond its spatio-temporal event. Performance is less an act than an actualisation of the virtual, where the “virtual” is the transcendental field of ideas whose real objects are problems. Does performance thus dissipate in a heteronomous and heterotopic multiplicity of expressions or is it a matter of reconceiving a radically empirical, in the sense of William James’s radical empiricism, embodied knowledge in such performance practice?
East Dance Academy is co-organized by: Maska (Ljubljana), Tanzquartier (Vienna), National Dance Center (Bucharest), CDU - Center for Drama Arts (Zagreb)
Partners: Walking Theory (Belgrade), INPEX (Stockholm), Art-Workshop Lazareti (Dubrovnik), Kanuti Gildi (Tallin)
Supported by: City Office for Culture – City of Zagreb
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