symposium: Crisis? What Crisis?!

Crisis? What Crisis?!
Dance & Aesthetic – Dance & Labour – Dance & Politics

Download the detailed programme and schedule in the right column!

Friday, 11 August
20:00–22:00
Contributions
Krassimira Kruschkova (text) and Jay Pather (video)

Kick Off Dialogues
Claudia Bosse, Igor Dobricic, Eisa Jocson, Gerald Raunig, Rok Vevar
 
Saturday, 12 August
09:30–18:00
10:00 Warm Up Session Angela Schubot
11:00 Talkback Session Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Jasmina Založnik 
12:00 Input Lecture Silke Bake Running riot, striking root 

LUNCH BREAK

14:00 Afternoon Sessions

Silke Bake, Philipp Gehmacher, Isabel Lewis, Vanessa Joan Müller 
Stepsiblings? On the uncanny relation between performingand visual arts

Valentina Desideri, Astrid Kaminski, Angela Schubot
Conversation and speculation on intuition and performance, including fake/healing, ritual and the pathologies of non-existence

Igor Dobricic 
The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter - Table Talk

Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil
Choreo-graphic Figures. Deviations from the Line - A lecture performance

Will Rawls 
Intermediate Certificate Course for Testing Your Theories of Race

Maria F. Scaroni, Simone Willeit
The enthusiastic, curious monkeys on strike

Selma Banich 
Dance and Commons: What do we fight for?

Diego Agulló 
Betraying Ambition: What Moves You? (A lecture on Art and Ethics)

17:30–18:00 Wrap Up Session 
Jasmina Založnik, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski
 

Sunday, 13 August
09:30–18:00
10:00 Warm Up Session Maria F. Scaroni 
TOTENTANZ. A CONTEMPLATION ON EQUALITY

11:00 Talkback Session Katalin Erdodi, Yosi Wanunu
12:00 Input Lecture Gurur Ertem
The contemporary condition and instituting by the hearth
LUNCH BREAK

14:00 AFTERNOON SESSIONS
Valentina Desideri
Political Therapy – A group session

Isabel Lewis
Sense and Sensuality

Anne Breure
Fair Practice Label in the Arts

Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovksi, Ivana Vaseva
How to make a festival with 100 Euros and 1.000.000 Euros

17:00–18:00 Wrap Up Session
Katalin Erdodi, Mårten Spångberg, Yosi Wanunu

Crisis! What Crisis!? is curated and organised by Dragana Alfirevic, Hanna Bauer, Rio Rutzinger, Iris Raffetseder, Chris Standfest and Simone Willeit.

TICKETS
3-day ticket € 30,- online and at the box offices available >>here
1-day ticket €12,50 available at the venue only.

Hunger auf Kunst und Kultur
ImPulsTanz offers a limited ticket quota for the symposium for holders of the „Kulturpass“.
Kulturpass holders get – depending on availability – a 3-day pass.

Reservations: On 10 August ImPulsTanz you can make a reservation at the box office at Volkstheater from 11:00 - 19:00.
Ehemaliges k. und k. Post- und Telegraphenamt
Zollergasse 31, 1070 Vienna

CRISIS! WHAT CRISIS!? – INTRODUCTORY NOTES 

Dance & Aesthetics
What is at work in our works? Seen that within the recent past the discourse in dance and performance was dominated by questions around the ethics of practice, togetherness and collaboration, we want to shift the debate towards questioning our aesthetics of extended choreography: Where are we now? How do we deal with the seemingly complete randomness of form(s) as well as of places, venues, contexts of/for choreography? Do we experience a “comeback” of dance theatre, of narrative based, “message oriented” pieces, and does “the political” become overt and explicit again? In this case, might a tendency towards a new “virtuosity” be read as an instrument of legitimation, as a “popular” means to transport a specific content (often marked as queer or post-colonial)? Or, and maybe on the contrary: What about the strong tendencies towards shamanism in choreographic practice and all the different aspects of healing and sensorial participation? And last but not least: how can we develop a language in order to negotiate or confront issues of representation and criticality when it comes to racism and colonialism?
This would be some of the questions we feel the need to address between artists, cultural workers, critics, scholars and an interested public – in order to gather strength, to revive a debate we want to share within a field which is more and more overtaken by populism and commerce.
1 For further information: mdtsthlm.se/archive/175/

Dance & Labour
Who is at work in our works? Dance & Labour deals with questions starting from a somehow unionist type such as what do working conditions look like, where does the money come from, how is it distributed (if there is any at all) and what mechanisms, structures and evaluation markers determine its distribution? On the other side, we want to discuss the fact that we all also work and live beyond these financial limitations: what about the traps of working for free – just to make
oneself visible, just to do, just to feel, just to follow needs and phantasies and urges and pleasures and thoughts…?! At what point do we come to the conclusion that this has to end! How to act around and against it, how to dismantle the powers/constructions that be…
Questions stemming from basic notions of neoliberalism, racial and patriarchal capitalism, and precarity. But then again, what’s wrong with basic?
Nevertheless, unionist approaches usually lack the subject of the body. Or, let’s call it: matter. To question relationships between dance and labour implies to simultaneously question its impact on the body; as regards to the somatic, the aesthetic and the imaginary, as regards to human capital and labour force, to disciplines and orders of pleasures, expression, love. How do we subvert or augment the unionist approach with our own perspective, action, discourse?
One of the recent examples that stands out in this discussion would be the relation between choreography and fine arts. How does the increasing influence of the fine arts (market) on dance and performance re-shape not only aesthetics and practices, but also the relationship between dance and labour – how do performers shift their practice to fit in, to exhaust their physicality, materiality, spirituality?
All in all, we need to ask: Within such a precarious work and life condition, where are the structures, means, friendships, places, to re-create? To develop new things, to follow the needs of the dance(r)s…? Or to put it more blankly: How to not (only) reproduce and re-create this singular creativity (always bound to turn into a sort of post-contemporary exoticism), which is still substantially linked to the concept of individuality, in order to invest it anew in works of arts or to invest it over and over again to turn and shape oneself into a piece of an art work?
So let’s assume the “re” is the problem; presupposing and accepting power structures, hierarchies, the very grammar of a societal and political order, which is bound to the concept of labour and its link to money, while at the same time this link is a fake, a murderous globalised political fairy tale…
Maybe we should finally strip down the veils and rewrite the UNhappy ending?

Dance & Politics
Is it still us at work in our work? A spectre is haunting Europe, but this time one of assumed fear, nationalism and protectionism. Some of the LLB network partners already have to react to governmental decisions and reformulated funding schemes, limiting their direction and freedom of artistic production or increasingly fulfil evaluation markers in funding that do not lie in artistic value and societal impact, but on economic usability and market-connection capability. Under these
circumstances how can we, as European and worldwide acting artistic community really stay with our partners, artists and colleagues and advocate for change – confronting and subverting the hidden demands of focusing the national, the solely representational character or the pure economic side effects of art? How does the work of the dance community and a European Network at this point still contribute to a Europe (and a world) of ideas, rather than one of commerce shaded by economic and cultural protectionism and austerity? In a time that continues imperializing and exploiting countries within and outside the fortress Europe, we might also ask whether our artistic practices and exchanges effectively revisit and deconstruct Europe’s colonial past and its racist imprints and how far funding bodies en- or discourage a real exchange between different cultures, rather than being a mere vehicle for their own countries’ agenda.
Regardless the circumstances and traps art sometimes finds itself in, we must also ask ourselves: what are the artistic values, the political, the knowledge and shared practices that are already experimented with in dance and might function as small nuclei for a pluralistic democracy and a broader understanding of political participation. And how can they be adapted, transposed and used as practices of change – as hidden, implicit and pluri-spectral they might be - to be embodied and
experimented with by societies in general. And why not complicate thoughts and acts by using our multifaceted and heterogeneous practices and outputs to continue disturbing and blurring these brain-numbing attempts of simplifications and homogenizations within the official political discourse and societies’ output? Under these circumstances is there still any believe and understanding for the
role and impact art can have on societies?