LACE #2: Mediating Touch
Hospitality, Integration, and the Interstitial
July 26-28, 2024 Symposium
July 29-August 2, 2024 Residency
The ImPulsTanz Symposium for Dance and Other Contemporary Practices is committed to bringing together practitioners working at the intersection of art, academia and activism to examine the challenge of place, the restriction of its specificity and to explore strategies for successful interpersonal cross-cultural contact-making in the age of gentrification, polarisation, and segregation.
To read about this symposium’s topics, start here.
about this symposium
The structure of this symposium is emergent, every year a little different than the last. This is because, for the curators of this symposium, its structure is a site of experimentation.
Historically speaking, the curators of this symposium have always been artists, scholars, and specifically, embodied practitioners. We have always shared an understanding that our main goal in organising this event is to provide our community with an opportunity to engage in knowledge exchange on our own terms. Our terms, of course, originate with notion and the practice of “embodiment” and orient around notions and practices of “presence,” “attention,” and “touch” and “touching”–to name but a few examples.
More recently, a new line of inquiry merged with the existing one. This new line of inquiry originates with the notion and the practice of “artistic research” or “practice-based artistic research”. This line of inquiry highlights the significance of situatedness; what happens to your practice, for example, when–as a dance artist–you step into the academic context and are asked to express yourself in ways that may not be conducive to the development of your practice?
What these lines of inquiry share is an appreciation of how difficult it is to value “experience” as reasonable means of communication in the contemporary West. One of the questions we keep coming back to is, how do we create the conditions for knowledge exchange to actually take place in the realm of experience? How do we, in other words, recognise experiencing itself as a site where knowledge exchange as well as knowledge making is taking place?
Analysing previous symposia relative to the above described lines of inquiry, we’ve come up with this year’s structure.
The basic building block of this structure is a deep dive. Deep dives are meant to create the conditions for deep dive hosts–artists, academics, and activists–to meet the public in the arena of experience.
Panels will be taking place at the end of the day, following three deep dives. Panels are meant to create the conditions for deep dive hosts to meet the public in the arena of reflection, and integration.
What we’d like to achieve here could be described in fairly simple terms. We’d like each member of the public to gain personal, bodily experience of an aspect of the presenter’s work before they enter the space of analysis and, effectively, the space of discourse. What we’d like to learn, at the level of this symposium, is how our participating in analysis and discourse-making will change after we’ve gained actual experience of whatever material is being reflected upon?
All the symposium events will be made available for streaming.
Details coming soon!
A deep dive is a 90-minute-long event inviting a panellist to share an aspect of their practice experientially. All panellists, i.e., deep dive hosts, have been asked the question, What aspect of your work will the participants be able to experience, and Why, why would you like to share that aspect of your work experientially?
The focus of a deep dive is not theory, but practice, i.e., experience.
The host of a deep dive is a panellist, or a deep dive host.
A panel is the last event of the day. Panels are moderated and 120 minutes long.
The focus of a panel is reflection and integration.
Panellists, i.e., deep dive hosts, have been invited to participate at a panel similarly to the way that speakers are traditionally invited to participate at panels. What’s different at LACE symposium is that by the time the collective has approached a panel, we’ve all spent a significant amount of time with the panellists, experiencing different aspects of their work, research, and/or practice.
Our question is, How will our collective participation at a panel change once we’ve all had a chance to experience, instead of only hearing about, aspects of what is to be discussed?
The host of a panel is a panel moderator. The participants are panellists or deep dive hosts.
A residency is a week-long moderated event catered to professional artists, activists, and academics who are interested in meeting others through the prism of their practice.
Each residency is organised around a specific theme or area of interest. The host of the residency, its moderator, is the one who determines the theme or the area of interest in collaboration with the curatorial team, and suggests a way to organise the practice for the week.
As a participant, you approach a residency with your practice because you have a reason to explore your practice in relation to a theme or area of interest, and other people’s practices.
Defined as they are, LACE residencies are committed to exploring relationality, interstitiality, collaboration, and sensitivity to the world through the prism of personal and collective artistic, academic, or activist practice. The focus of any residency is the group.
What’s new about this year’s residencies is that they’re taking place after instead of before the symposium. We are looking forward to exploring the potential of the residency to extend the time you can invest towards exploring certain topics. Some of you might find a reason to attend a residency during the symposium.
The host of a residency is a residency host or moderator.
general information
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Symposium, July 26 — July 28
Friday, July 26
coming soon…
Hosting is a practice of dreaming and rehearsing in public and with public alternative ways of relating toward one another beyond transactional, competitive, or exploitative forms of interacting from within our imbricated-with-all condition of being human. Human society is non-divisible from an earth system that now has our social and economic systems deeply inscribed within its many layers. This inescapable embeddedness with geopolitical and socio-economic systems that produce horrific injustices and costly consequences for all planetary life and human mental health is hard to bear for some and literally impossible to bear for many. The recent years have borne witness to the consequences of increased divisiveness, cultish individualism, and dangerous disregard for the long-term impacts of violence and forced displacement. Things are not good right now. Dreams of better futures are difficult to have and to sustain at the moment.
How to cultivate and maintain critical habits towards reconsidering tools for navigating political commitments? Which concepts, which vocabularies, which practices should be used and how to not assume the meanings of them are shared? How does the long-term desired change differ from the change achieved now and how to cope with that difference? How to maintain and cultivate multiple relationships in multiple spheres of engagement, personal, professional, digital, etc.? How to stay connected to one’s feelings while feeling with another? Can one remain accountable for all their actions and be ready, courageous, and humble enough to take in criticism? How to deal with the fear of inadvertently harming another? How to cultivate trust that others will hold me accountable compassionately?
These are the questions and anxieties that can and do reverberate in me and that I bring with me into the shared spaces I host and co-host. These spaces are organized and arranged to be used by the public to meet, to discuss these kinds of questions, to transmit information through the body, to analyze difficult affinities, to perceive one’s own and one another's complex personhoods interacting, to seek forms of partial healing and repair, to feel, to feel differently, to form temporary community, to test out fragile unities on uncommon grounds, to negotiate togetherness. This kind of place is neither stage nor exhibition. It does, like these other forms, engage in strategies of display but the hosting place employs proximity, rather than distance, it prioritizes contact rather than detachment. The beautifully composed tray of hors d'ouvres will be steadily devoured. A flower can be mischievously pulled from the arrangement and flirtatiously offered to a fellow guest after a certain hour. Here the entire human sensorium can be engaged beyond just eyes and ears.
Trained in dance, philosophy, and literary criticism, artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis (born 1981 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) creates works that resist classification, affirming pleasure, connection, and permeability. Lewis employs an expanded sense of the choreographic; she generates affective bodily experiences that address all of the senses in her inherently collaborative practice. Her terminology for many of her works is occasions: immersive social situations in which the dramaturgy of the moment is composed in real time. Her works have been presented internationally in biennials and solo exhibitions as well as in music, theater, and dance festivals. She is a co-founder of Bodysnatch, a diverse community of dancers and DJs that gathered monthly between 2011-2020 to throw down on Tuesdays at Kotbusser Tor’s Monarch. Lewis is a professor at the Fine Art Academy (HGB), Leipzig, leading the Class for Performative Arts since 2021.
Growing up with diverse backgrounds, I immersed myself in ethnic-cultural encounters, reflecting on identity, discrimination, and the powerful act of gathering. This upbringing fuels a deep desire to prioritise human connections, inviting a shared exploration of the unknown, to infuse a "hug" quality into artistic encounters, transforming gatherings into warm spaces for connection. Hosting, circles, rituals, and art serve as avenues for meaningful encounters in my practice.
My aim is to integrate meeting's essence into daily practices, emphasising process over results. How can meetings become inherent in interactions and artistic practices?
In my artistic-activist practice, I introduce a gathering concept inspired by the Moroccan henna ceremony, emphasising hospitality, invitation, recognising the other, and possibility of togetherness. This ritual conducted in a circle, involves hosting, wishing blessings, and recognising the responsibility in meeting others. I propose adapting it for creative and collaborative pursuits, extending its applicability to daily life; participants will gather in a circle to explore gestures of hospitality. Through simple acts, combining seeing and recognising the "otherness," individuals will choose a way to extend a blessing from themselves to others.
This gathering encourages active participation and genuine collaboration, it's an opportunity for shared learning, exploring the meaning of hospitality through a ritual embedded in the idea of the meeting.
Chen Nadler (she/her) is a Helsinki-based choreographer, performer, and educator. She is creating multidisciplinary works, collaborating across various art forms with people from diverse backgrounds, creating pieces for galleries, stages, site-specific venues, community, and video art projects.
Chen focuses on movement as a connecting source – a connection first of all to the self, then expanding to connections with the surroundings- beings, people, natural, and urban spaces, energies, spirits.
She explores the transformative potential of repetitiveness and circular motion and patterns, considering their role in her cultural background and in the possibility of energy flow and renewal. Her inspiration derives from nature, dreams, nocturnal bird sounds, and twilight's deep blue hues, combining a sense of mystery into the joy of dance. She is seeking to meet, to play, to collaborate, to search aesthetics of togetherness, blending elements of the unknown, the dramatic but full of potential relations with chaos and the magic born from shared experiences within a common landscape.
Chen has collaborated with companies in Spain, Finland, Israel, Italy, and participated in research residencies across Europe. For the past six years she has been working together with her partner Daniel Motola, who is a sound designer, musician, and videographer. Together, they collaborate on various artistic encounters, ranging from facilitating workshops to video-art projects and social artistic improvised gatherings, building a community creative environment.
Her educational journey includes completing a professional dance program in Tel-Aviv (Maslool Dance Program), studies for B.Ed. in Social and Steiner Education (Oranim) in Haifa, and studying Steiner Education and philosophy as an exchange student in Snellman college, Helsinki.
Currently, Chen is pursuing her MA studies in Choreography at the Theatre Academy (Uniarts), Helsinki, Finland.
Saturday, July 27
Growing up with diverse backgrounds, I immersed myself in ethnic-cultural encounters, reflecting on identity, discrimination, and the powerful act of gathering. This upbringing fuels a deep desire to prioritise human connections, inviting a shared exploration of the unknown, to infuse a "hug" quality into artistic encounters, transforming gatherings into warm spaces for connection. Hosting, circles, rituals, and art serve as avenues for meaningful encounters in my practice.
My aim is to integrate meeting's essence into daily practices, emphasising process over results. How can meetings become inherent in interactions and artistic practices?
In my artistic-activist practice, I introduce a gathering concept inspired by the Moroccan henna ceremony, emphasising hospitality, invitation, recognising the other, and possibility of togetherness. This ritual conducted in a circle, involves hosting, wishing blessings, and recognising the responsibility in meeting others. I propose adapting it for creative and collaborative pursuits, extending its applicability to daily life; participants will gather in a circle to explore gestures of hospitality. Through simple acts, combining seeing and recognising the "otherness," individuals will choose a way to extend a blessing from themselves to others.
This gathering encourages active participation and genuine collaboration, it's an opportunity for shared learning, exploring the meaning of hospitality through a ritual embedded in the idea of the meeting.
Chen Nadler (she/her) is a Helsinki-based choreographer, performer, and educator. She is creating multidisciplinary works, collaborating across various art forms with people from diverse backgrounds, creating pieces for galleries, stages, site-specific venues, community, and video art projects.
Chen focuses on movement as a connecting source – a connection first of all to the self, then expanding to connections with the surroundings- beings, people, natural, and urban spaces, energies, spirits.
She explores the transformative potential of repetitiveness and circular motion and patterns, considering their role in her cultural background and in the possibility of energy flow and renewal. Her inspiration derives from nature, dreams, nocturnal bird sounds, and twilight's deep blue hues, combining a sense of mystery into the joy of dance. She is seeking to meet, to play, to collaborate, to search aesthetics of togetherness, blending elements of the unknown, the dramatic but full of potential relations with chaos and the magic born from shared experiences within a common landscape.
Chen has collaborated with companies in Spain, Finland, Israel, Italy, and participated in research residencies across Europe. For the past six years she has been working together with her partner Daniel Motola, who is a sound designer, musician, and videographer. Together, they collaborate on various artistic encounters, ranging from facilitating workshops to video-art projects and social artistic improvised gatherings, building a community creative environment.
Her educational journey includes completing a professional dance program in Tel-Aviv (Maslool Dance Program), studies for B.Ed. in Social and Steiner Education (Oranim) in Haifa, and studying Steiner Education and philosophy as an exchange student in Snellman college, Helsinki.
Currently, Chen is pursuing her MA studies in Choreography at the Theatre Academy (Uniarts), Helsinki, Finland.
This deep dive will explore touch through a micro-phenomenological lens, mapping the layers of communication and the dimensions of experience that it opens in our sensory perception. Drawing on the bodywork of Amatsu soft tissue therapy, the session will focus on ways of recalling sensory experiences of touch. By tracking how we cross the interface of the bodymind through touch, we perceive how novel relational spaces and new understandings emerge.
Jenny Roche (she/her) (PhD) is Associate Professor and Course Director of the MA in Contemporary Dance Performance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. From 2013 to 2017 she was Senior Lecturer in Dance at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. She has worked extensively as a dancer, including with choreographers Rosemary Butcher, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, Michael-Keegan Dolan and with her sister, Liz Roche with whom she co-founded Rex Levitates Dance Company (now Liz Roche Company). Jenny has published widely on the creative practice of dancers, dance and Somatics and arts practice research. Her book Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities was published in 2015 and Choreography: The Basics, with Stephanie Burridge in 2022. From 2007 to 2011 she was dance advisor to the Arts Council of Ireland. She continues to work as a collaborator and performer in various creative arts research contexts, including Expanded Fields (2019) with London based artists Gibson/Martelli and Alternately Terrific and Gentle (2023) with Liz Roche and Jodi Melnick. She is a practitioner of Amatsu soft tissue therapy. Most recently, she has been exploring Micro-phenomenology as a method for articulating embodied dancing knowledge.
11.30AM - 11.45AM break
This deep dive is a study in intimacy, permeability, and an attempt at a heretic’s theology of touch. Departing from a participatory and relational art context, I hope to explore an expanded reading of touch and touching with the help of ecstatic vocabularies taken from mystical theology. In this reading, touch is a folding of space-time that drags the sensing body into its depths. Whose voice dies and whose voice blooms in this turbulent moment? What remains in the air, under our tongues, beyond the extent, before the word? What happens when we surrender the “Who are we?” for the sake of a “When are we?”
We will open a set of playful exercises in contemplation to gently challenge our attention, sensation, and perception. Simple and playful stuff, like touching everyday objects, looking through the space and engaging with movement in a non-performative manner. You do not need to have any experience in advance. You will not be asked to touch others. We will adjust every activity to our needs, and you’re encouraged to engage or take a step back whenever you feel like. We will also take the time to introduce everything in advance and share our thoughts in an open discussion. Some topics we may encounter include boundary loss, contamination, more-than-human ethics, and the limits of consent. Our invitation is to explore the artistic and the sensory realms inspired by mystical writings, without making it a spiritual or religious practice.
Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician, and student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature, and computer. Working with relationships and sense perception as artistic material, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts, and hybrid publications. Áron’s background is in underground music, activism, and youth movements, including an experimental children’s fantasy camp they attended and later organised between 1999-2022. They received their formal education at the Royal Academy of Art and Conservatory of The Hague, the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, and are currently pursuing doctoral studies at Stockholm University of the Arts’ Institute for Dance. Their artistic dissertation, Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come, is due in 2026.
1.15PM - 2.15PM lunch
The Hospitality Lab for Forgotten Practices is an invitation to explore the aesthetics of hosting through specific scores created as part of our choreographic research. The scores are designed to invite awkwardness, humour, vulnerability, and reflection on an imagined ethics of hospitality.
Interested in how ridiculousness can be an active form of resistance to normative ways of being and knowing (how to be a good performer, dancer, improviser, female, or artist), our research explores vulnerability as an invitation for connection, and hospitality as a lens for authentic practices.
HICKS AND REYNOLDS met in Berlin in 2012. They later both completed a Master’s in Contemporary Dance Education in Frankfurt a. Main. With the shared experience of being North American expats who moved to Germany, they were drawn together through their love of spontaneity and humour. Inspired by playful and uninhibited improvisation, they developed a working method that draws on high energy and spontaneous idiosyncratic movement. Their first full-length collaborative work, ‘Making Impressions and Other Failures’ premiered in 2018 in Frankfurt, and additionally was selected by jury for the Hessische Theatertage21, supported by National Performance Network for guest performances as part of Into the Fields Festival in Bonn, and toured to the FAKI Festival in Croatia. Separately, Laura Hicks and Ilana Reynolds also lead independent careers as choreographers and educators in contemporary dance practices.
3.45PM - 4.15PM break
coming soon…
6.15PM - 6.30 PM CLOSING CIRCLE
Sunday, July 28
Growing up with diverse backgrounds, I immersed myself in ethnic-cultural encounters, reflecting on identity, discrimination, and the powerful act of gathering. This upbringing fuels a deep desire to prioritize human connections, inviting a shared exploration of the unknown, to infuse a "hug" quality into artistic encounters, transforming gatherings into warm spaces for connection. Hosting, circles, rituals, and art serve as avenues for meaningful encounters in my practice.
My aim is to integrate meeting's essence into daily practices, emphasizing process over results. How can meetings become inherent in interactions and artistic practices?
In my artistic-activist practice, I introduce a gathering concept inspired by the Moroccan henna ceremony, emphasizing hospitality, invitation, recognizing the other, and possibility of togetherness. This ritual conducted in a circle, involves hosting, wishing blessings, and recognizing the responsibility in meeting others. I propose adapting it for creative and collaborative pursuits, extending its applicability to daily life; participants will gather in a circle to explore gestures of hospitality. Through simple acts, combining seeing and recognizing the "otherness," individuals will choose a way to extend a blessing from themselves to others.
This gathering encourages active participation and genuine collaboration, it's an opportunity for shared learning, exploring the meaning of hospitality through a ritual embedded in the idea of the meeting.
Chen Nadler (she/her) is a Helsinki-based choreographer, performer and educator. She is creating multidisciplinary works, collaborating across various art forms with people from diverse backgrounds, creating pieces for galleries, stages, site-specific venues, community and video art projects.
Chen focuses on movement as a connecting source – a connection first of all to the self, then expanding to connections with the surroundings- beings, people, natural and urban spaces, energies, spirits.
She explores the transformative potential of repetitiveness and circular motion and patterns, considering their role in her cultural background and in the possibility of energy flow and renewal. Her inspiration derives from nature, dreams, nocturnal bird sounds, and twilight's deep blue hues, combining a sense of mystery into the joy of dance. She is seeking to meet, to play, to collaborate, to search aesthetics of togetherness, blending elements of the unknown, the dramatic but full of potential relations with chaos and the magic born from shared experiences within a common landscape.
Chen has collaborated with companies in Spain, Finland, Israel, Italy, and participated in research residencies across Europe. For the past six years, she has been working together with her partner Daniel Motola, who is a sound designer, musician, and videographer. Together, they collaborate on various artistic encounters, ranging from facilitating workshops to video-art projects and social artistic improvised gatherings, building a community creative environment.
Her educational journey includes completing a professional dance program in Tel-Aviv (Maslool Dance Program), studies for B.Ed. in Social and Steiner Education (Oranim) in Haifa, and studying Steiner Education and philosophy as an exchange student in Snellman college, Helsinki.
Currently, Chen is pursuing her MA studies in Choreography at the Theatre Academy (Uniarts), Helsinki, Finland.
This session is an invitation to a collective ritual where playful transitions can rise through embodied memories and dreams. Cartographic Echoes—which could not find the voice in the choreographer’s motherland—was originally developed as a participatory performance based on generational indigeneity story and homing a place. Now it is time to embrace all pleasant and unpleasant social, political, economic conditions as they are and let the piece reveal itself in each body by unfolding.
During this Deep Dive, listeners are welcome to actively engage in researching and dissecting the various sections of Cartographic Echoes and find their own translations in the structure of the performance. Scores and necessary tools will be given to the participants to deconstruct the piece and experience their ownership in each part by embodying their narratives, emotions, memories, and future intentions. The experience will end with the closing circle where participants will be able to share their process or documentations through any written, visual, or oral mediums.
The session aims to signify the importance of inclusivity, equality, and integrity in the performing arts by blurring the boundaries in between the spectator, researcher, and performer. This journey might be a contribution to expand the unifying power of dance and embodied expression in social, persona, cultural, ecologic layers for all by multiplying stages, encouraging creativity, opening a playground, suggesting flexibility and fluidity in space and time.
This piece has been developed with the support of Calouste Gulbekian Foundation Armenian Studies research grant.
Lerna Babikyan (she/her) is a dancer, trainer, writer, and lecturer who holds BA degrees in Adult Education, and Modern Dance; she completed her MA on Movement, Mind and Ecology at Schumacher College.
Her unquiet state to the effects of ongoing destructive colonial systems to all living beings has been a long-term motivation to evoke the change starting from art experiences and pedagogic systems. As an artist she is utilizing the tools of art making such as; deconstruction, imagination, experimentalism, narration and playfulness that audience/learners can gain back their self & holistic awareness, authentic expression, creativity, autonomy, empathy and self-confidence. By minding today’s ethic, ecologic, educational and aesthetic needs; she is making dance pieces, designing creative dance and somatic based learning programs for all ages with the purpose of holistic learning and inclusive living with the feeling of kinship in the universe.
She strongly believes in the transformative role of the dance art, power of the connection and dialogue. Accordingly, she is offering land-based, ecosomatic, urban art experiences and participatory performances.
11.30AM - 11.45AM break
If I had to summarise what I do in one sentence, it would be: "Reclaiming our bodies' freedom through reclaiming pejorative words," and I like to refer to this process as “opening the language”.
The movement-based exploration I advocate focuses on examining the gestures of our daily life in relation to conventional social interpretations. This approach implies the possibility of understanding, from another perspective, those words that make society uncomfortable, those words that acquire a pejorative meaning, especially when they are put in relation to anyone who identifies as a woman, or to anyone belonging to the so-called ‘vulnerable population’. By giving them another value, it helps empower our feelings and our inhabiting of the body.
For instance, failure, fragility, anger, or difference are terms that are accompanied by a host of stigmatised understandings and possibilities, and which we would generally prefer not to feel or relate to ourselves. In contrast, their opposites, such as success, strength, and calm are more revered terms, often regarded as desirable life goals by many. But what happens when we fail to achieve them? How do we navigate situations for which we were never prepared? Feeling fragile and angry is part of reality, and the semantic burden imposed on these words makes it even more difficult to cope with such situations.
Growing up in Mexico has fuelled my commitment to confronting violence and redefining the discourse on the body in a context where bodies disappear. As a dancer and choreographer deeply rooted in the exploration of fragility and its multifaceted expressions, my movement-based practice serves as transformative space that delves into the interconnected realms of fragility, victimhood, anger, vulnerability, and embodiment, fostering daily practices that challenge patriarchal and colonising structures.
Survival has increasingly defined how we navigate our lives. Without intending to sound pessimistic, "how to survive…?” might well be the sentence we are all destined to complete. It's probable that the answers to that question are tied to concepts like Hospitality, Integration, and the Interstitial. This is why I believe it's crucial to explore their potential as a means of opening up the language and unlocking their potential.
In this Deep Dive, I propose to share my practice and exercises to explore Hospitality's meanings more deeply, expanding its possible interpretations and understanding what it truly means to care for others and be cared for. I propose that we collectively look for a common way of defining Hospitality. To do this it seems important to me that we confront and challenge each other's visions of this term, through questions such as: “If hospitality is often seen as a desirable goal, what happens when it doesn't lead to well-being? ”. The body constantly seeks strategies to process our experiences, yet we rarely allow it to freely explore spaces not traditionally seen as positive. However, it's in these spaces that we learn about self-care.
I suggest we collectively embrace the fragility within hospitality, creating a space where discomfort and fragility become powerful allies rather than sources of fear. We will share a common definition of Hospitality and find a way (through a choreographed reading or an improvised dance, etc.) of corporalising this definition with the people present at the symposium. To be fragile should not be a space walked through with fear or rejection but a quality to develop collectively.
I am a dancer and choreographer with studies in dance, visual arts, cinema and gender equality. The starting point of all my research processes is Fragility in its different manifestations - between resistance, violence and displacement. My work leads me to explore other possible meanings to this pejoratively feminized concept. Moreover, being Mexican has led me to confront violence and to try to understand how to talk about the body in a country where bodies disappear.
Together with Nadia Lartigue, we founded the Biblioteca Itinerante de Coreografía - a compilation of publications on contemporary choreography that are difficult to find in Mexico. I am a member of the ensemble ¡miércoles! along with the Chilean musician Nicolás Jaar. I also collaborate with the Collectif V.I.D.D.A in the creation of the trilogy Des pas si présent, this project aims to address the question: What were our first sounds? drawing inspiration from the Mixtec language Tnu’u Dau. Since 2021, I contribute as a curator to Yuntindudi, an art space located in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, in Mexico. With Natalia Huerta, we co-manage Colectivo Circular, a cross-border project that seeks to empower people through art and psychosocial activities.
During the last few years, I have dedicated myself to researching the possibilities of the choreographic documentary, a concept still unknown, in its possible manifestations through video, performance and text. The work consists in exploring the possibility of providing alternative artistic tools that question the patriarchal and colonizing structures that surround us. I also teach research and creative laboratories in performance and visual arts; always with the urgency to generate a deeper approach to the possibilities of resilience of the body from performance interventions in contexts of vulnerability and diversity.
1.15PM - 2.15PM lunch
RELAY is an Erasmus+ partnership coöperation project that started in 2021 and will be completed in the autumn of 2024. RELAY investigates (im)materialites of movement and sound, and the transformation that takes place as they are handed over between people, places, contexts, and across time.
This deep dive will give the participants a chance to experience some of the methods and working tools that the project has developed throughout its course. These methods and tools will interweave physical, reflective, and documentational practices, based on a shared investigation into how knowledge develops through transition and transmission.
Participating institutions are The Danish National School of Performing Arts(DASPA, Copenhagen), Sikinnis (Heraklion), University for Music and Dance (HfMT, Cologne) The National University of Music Bucharest (UNMB, Bucharest), The National Dance Center Bucharest(CNDB, Bucharest) and The National University of Theater and Film, Romania (UNATC, Bucharest).
The introduction will be facilitated by Konstantinos Tsakirelis and Rasmus Ölme.
Three women combining different disciplines - history, archaeology and choreography - we share our desire for discovery. Embedded within all three practices lies the notion of listening, noticing, multidimensionality, and awareness, which can be used as creative tools. As part of the deep dive we like to share aspects on our creative process that infuses our practices. We will try to trace through all the senses the impact of history on different sites and how it connects different communities.
This workshop will be facilitated by Stella Malliaraki and Vera Sander and Evita Tsakalaki.
To start with we would like to propose a collective soundpainting exercise in which we will create together a composition in real time using voice, body, and environment.
From here, we continue to explore our bodies as transmitters - between 2 or more other bodes, between spaces, spots, moments, in playful and meaningful ways, in sound and movement and any other means of communication, in and between conventional and unconventional spaces such as staircases, corridors, lobbies etc.
To end with, we offer ways of taking time for listening, exploring, contemplating the artistic material in the making, and meditating upon the material that we carry away and the material that we leave behind.
This workshop will be facilitated by Jan Burkhardt, Cătălin Crețu, and Andreea Duta.
In this workshop we will share practices and scores that were developed in the making of the ARTwork, a shape-changing sculpture that has been made by all participants of the RELAY project.
The scores are suggestions for entering collaboration without the need for consensus as a starting point, but through a direct engagement with diverse artistic materials. By paying attention to what is already in the room, the idea is to let common themes and interests emerge from practice.
The workshop will be facilitated by Maia Means and Max Wallmeier.
Konstantinos Tsakirelis is a choreographer, director and dance instructor. He has long and wide-ranging experience as a teacher and creator, having worked in institutions in Greece and France. In 2020 he founded Sikinnis Dance and Performing Arts Centre, in Heraklion, Crete.
After a career as dancer Rasmus Ölme went on to choreograph and then to artistic research. Rasmus holds a PhD from Stockholm University of the Arts and is currently working as professor at the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen.
Stella Malliaraki has worked as a freelance museum educator and has collaborated with different museums in Greece. She is interested in public archaeology, local history and how it can be interpeted throuhg different disciplines. Moreover, she is involved in projects developing sustainable models of turism.
Vera Sander - professor for contemporary dance and choreography at the HfMT Cologne - is passionate about discovering and exploring choreographic and physical knowledge as a source of interdisciplinary and intercultural creativity. In addition to choreographing, teaching and collaborating in artistic projects, she is involved in implementing study programs in higher education as well as international exchange formats in the field of art.
Evita Tsakalaki holds a Bachelor degree from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She is working as a dancer and choreographer focusing on site specific performances. Moreover, she is working as a dance instructor at Sikinnis, Performing Arts Center based in Heraklion, Crete.
Jan Burkhardt is professor for contemporary dance practice in artistic context at HfMT Cologne, and performs, facilities, creates in collaboration with may other institutions and artists in the international art field.
Cătălin Crețu is a composer and coordinates the work of the Electroacoustic Music and Multimedia Center at the National University of Music in Bucharest. His work involves the use of new musical technologies, programming, audio-visual interaction and improvisation.
Andreea Duta is a senior lecturer within Choreography Department at University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. Professionally, she is involved in dramatic and post dramatic theatre as a choreographer. As a pedagogue, she holds a PhD in Performing Arts and currently teaches choreography and composition and choreographic dramaturgy.
Maia Means is a Stockholm-based freelance dancer who works with performance, publication and organisational practices. She holds a bachelor degree from Stockholm University of the Arts.
Max Wallmeier is a Copenhagen-based choreographer and dancer. He makes his own work, alone and in shared authorship, performs and teaches. He holds a master in Choreography from The Danish National School of Performing Arts and a bachelor from Stockholm University of the Arts.
3.45PM - 4.00PM brunch
coming soon…
6.00PM - 6.30 PM CLOSING CIRCLE
Residencies, July 29 — August 2
Taking notes from mysticism, eco-theology, and medieval love songs, this residency explores languages of intimacy and ecstasy, and how they mobilise our bodies and our relationships. We will treat intimate relationships between human and nonhuman bodies as sentient creatures of their own – a third voice that blooms when our bodies touch. How can this voice be heard, felt, communed with? How does this voice challenge our own sovereignty and selfhood? And what if, when opening ourselves to another, we are met with silence?
Our conversation starter for the residency is a controversial set of mystical beliefs and practices from the Middle Ages often referred to as The Heresy of the Free Spirit. According to popular belief, Free Spirit Christians believed that one could best participate in this life by engaging with spiritual exercises that erase the separating lines between themselves and a divinely created world. We will carefully dip our toes into Free Spirit writings and practices, and let them inspire us to explore how intimacy and ecstasy render our bodies permeable.
Inspired by plant philosopher Michael Marder, we hope to discover how our bodies are in some ways always ‘ecstatic’ - always extending ourselves into the world and in/voluntarily inviting the world to extend itself into us. Here, ecstasy and intimacy become a ‘vital passivity’ that opens us to new relationships with a world enfleshed. Can we trust these relationships to know something about us we ourselves never will?
We will mainly work with exercises in language and touch that gently challenge attention, sensation and imagination in an interactive but non-performative manner. Our call words for vibes are: spooky, nerdy, silly, hungry, awkward and dizzy. In our first days we will familiarise ourselves with the Heresy of the Free Spirit through wayward readings and playful exercises based on their writings, including the infamous Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete. In the second half of our stay we will create small scores, contemplations and prototypes (a term best taken as ‘a playable question’) for practices in intimacy and ecstasy. Everything we develop is for us to keep and we can choose which parts we wish to publicly present on our final day.
This residency welcomes everyone with an interest in touch, movement, participation, intimacy, poetry, language, ecology, and the intersections of art, religion, and spirituality. Topics we touch on include boundary loss, contamination, abandonment, the history of heresy in the West, erotics, joy, silence, dread, more-than-human ethics, and the limits of consent. At large, you can expect to encounter a vocabulary of sensitivity that takes notes from a rejected corner of Christian spirituality, while still remaining in an artistic context. We work to create a space that is welcoming and attentive to different bodies, needs, backgrounds, beliefs or lack thereof - and as such host our activities in a clear, transparent and informal manner.
Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician, and student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature, and computer. Working with relationships and sense perception as artistic material, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts, and hybrid publications. Áron’s background is in underground music, activism, and youth movements, including an experimental children’s fantasy camp they attended and later organised between 1999-2022. They received their formal education at the Royal Academy of Art and Conservatory of The Hague, the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, and are currently pursuing doctoral studies at Stockholm University of the Arts’ Institute for Dance. Their artistic dissertation, Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come, is due in 2026.
"Three of cups" is an invitation to a collective celebration where we’ll assume that everyone’s personal crisis has come to an end. From here, we'll explore the possibility of inhabiting the discomfort that certain words generate, albeit through the prism of pleasure.
Seeking to connect with my grandmother's homeland – the Sierra Alta Mixteca region, in Oaxaca, southern Mexico – I am currently exploring the "closing" and "opening" of local languages. Each of this region’s numerous languages have developed into local variants, as the communities that spoke them "closed off their language" to safeguard it and its specificities from external influences or the natural evolution of words across the region's mountains. These communities and the effort they've gone through to "close off" and protect their language tell the story of resistance to the overshadowing of indigenous languages by the Spanish language due to colonisation. Their example prompts me to ponder the "closing" and the "opening" of language in our daily vocabulary across all languages. To what extent have we closed the potential of the words that permeate our existence and movements? How can we open the meanings of words to embrace improvised adaptability?
I propose an exploration into the intersection of language, body, and identity, dancing and sweating out our deepest toxicities. By opening ourselves to more authentic, liberating expressions, we'll challenge established conventions.
Through dance and improvisation, we'll embark on a journey of bodily decolonization, shedding restrictive patterns imposed by social norms. This involves redefining movement and posture and critically reflecting on how language shapes our world experience.
The methods I will use to organize this space emphasize collaboration and mutual support. Improvisation will be our primary tool for exploring new movement forms that resonate with each participant. Additionally, we will foster spaces for dialogue and collective creation to share experiences and strategies for personal and community decolonization.
Participants can expect to develop physical and conceptual tools to navigate uncomfortable situations with pleasure and authenticity. This residency will culminate with a collective performance, inviting us to question, unlearn, and reconstruct our bodily inhabitation and world relations for a freer, fuller existence.
"Three of cups" is part of METEORITAS, an experimentation lab series using body arts to deconstruct and challenge perceptions of fragility and anger as creative, self-educational tools. This collective endeavor seeks to explore and empower our bodies' possibilities in a world that often underestimates their potential and restricts their freedom.
I am a dancer and choreographer with studies in dance, visual arts, cinema and gender equality. The starting point of all my research processes is Fragility in its different manifestations - between resistance, violence and displacement. My work leads me to explore other possible meanings to this pejoratively feminized concept. Moreover, being Mexican has led me to confront violence and to try to understand how to talk about the body in a country where bodies disappear.
Together with Nadia Lartigue, we founded the Biblioteca Itinerante de Coreografía - a compilation of publications on contemporary choreography that are difficult to find in Mexico. I am a member of the ensemble ¡miércoles! along with the Chilean musician Nicolás Jaar. I also collaborate with the Collectif V.I.D.D.A in the creation of the trilogy Des pas si présent, this project aims to address the question: What were our first sounds? drawing inspiration from the Mixtec language Tnu’u Dau. Since 2021, I contribute as a curator to Yuntindudi, an art space located in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, in Mexico. With Natalia Huerta, we co-manage Colectivo Circular, a cross-border project that seeks to empower people through art and psychosocial activities.
During the last few years, I have dedicated myself to researching the possibilities of the choreographic documentary, a concept still unknown, in its possible manifestations through video, performance and text. The work consists in exploring the possibility of providing alternative artistic tools that question the patriarchal and colonizing structures that surround us. I also teach research and creative laboratories in performance and visual arts; always with the urgency to generate a deeper approach to the possibilities of resilience of the body from performance interventions in contexts of vulnerability and diversity.
The term “onism” describes the awareness of how little of the world we get to experience, as well as the frustration of being stuck in one body that inhabits only one place at a time. The term was coined 9 years ago by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and has since then been gaining popularity online.
During this residency, we will delve into the urge of expanding our subjective experiences by reaching across time and space, and investigate what it might mean to exist in several places, and in multiple bodies, simultaneously. We can practice this from various angles: physically, mentally, and virtually. Empathy and fantasy will be important tools, as well as a computer or a phone. We can approach the work by drawing inspiration from related practices and theories such as bilocation, transhumanism and the multiverse theory.
Since the residency takes place online, we are able to utilize common web-tools like Google Docs, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Zoom, and Maps amongst others, to extend ourselves, dream together, and explore the possibilities for poetics and touch through virtual space.
Nea Landin (she/her) is an artist working within the fields of contemporary dance, performance art, installation art, theatre, and technology. Her work combines choreography, visual arts and computer programming. It revolves around human digital presence and affects our bodies, minds and relationships to others. Previous works by Nea includes “desktop.dreams”, an online performance which takes place live on the computer desktop where common programs such as Excel, Mail, Photobooth and Chrome act as extensions of body and mind. The piece deals with everyday computer use, memory and the self, and has strong transhumanist undertones. Another work, “OTHER”, explores intimacy and closeness in relation to distance and anonymity. It is a computer mediated duet between two participants connecting to each other from separate rooms. The experience relies on fantasy and empathy as the participants share and imagine sensations, give each other sound massages, and mirror one another in various ways.
Nea has performed in Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Tunisia, Denmark and Finland, and collaborated with artists such as Adèle Essle Zeiss, Robin Jonsson, Uncover Choreography, Claire Parsons, Noah Hellwig, Iraqi Bodies, Christina Tingskog, Scott Cazan, Toby Kassell & Ingeborg Zackariassen, Valencia James, Ron Howell & Graham Vick. She studied dance at Balettakademien Stockholm, choreography, philosophy and Klein technique at Stockholm University of the Arts, and computer programming at Konstfack. Nea is currently on her second year as an artist in residence at SITE Sweden.
