Wild Card residency for Raul Maia and Thomas Steyaert

The Wild Card residency was held in Zagreb in the period from October 13^th to October 30^th 2017. Within the framework of Kliker festival artistic duo Raul Maia and Thomas Steyaert held a two-day workshop Živi Materijali (Alive Materials). The workshop was intended for dance educators, and it proposed an idea of learning through dance performance. The workshop was focused less on practicing already defined movements, and more on development of own abilities to create physical experiences of themselves. The technique was observed as a consequence of diving into mentioned experiences, sometimes by ourselves, sometimes with others, in a physical, performative environment. We won’t practice “something that will happen later”. The goal is to make something happen – now. That’s how the workshop is described by Raul Maia.

The second part of the nearly three week residency, artist used to work on development of their artistic project Ballet of Staring, that is on development of a new artistic framework that contextualizes how the audience will experience non-referential communication systems. The artistic framework consists of outer elements like light, sound, costumes, set, but also determination of certain physical aspects in time and space. The artistic framework can drastically change the way the audience reads the performance. That relationship between long-term development of non-referential communication systems and production of new artistic frameworks for every work defines the collaboration. All tittles of the work start with the word “Ballet..” but in the and they differently deal with the identity of every new creation. So far the collaboration resulted with two-level performances, numerous site-specific and a few video works.