Choreographic Convention #2 – Transforming Relations

The LLB partner STUK is welcoming you to the LLB Choreographic Convention, taking place from April 23-27, 2019, focusing on the topic Transforming Relations, offering performances, workshops and a symposium:

Colloquium: Transforming Relations
in collaboration with the Cultural Studies Department of KU Leuven

STUK Auditorium
April 26
With Amelia Jones (Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California), Clare Croft (University of Michigan) and Antonia Baehr

In the first decades of the 21 st century, many traditional stereotypes surrounding gender and sexuality have continued to be scrutinized. The LGBTQA movement, queer theory and #metoo, for instance, have encouraged a growing awareness of those identities and experiences that are marginalized by dominant ways of categorization. Likewise, various genders and sexualities have been gaining visibility in popular culture, as well as in the political arena. The challenge persists, however, to negotiate between the development of categories and structures, and the relational conditions through which notions of difference are continuously reconfigured.
Dance has been particularly responsive to such issues of difference. Fostering an art that thinks through bodies, movement and relation, dance and choreography support an exploration and rethinking of questions of corporeality, sexuality and gender. They carry the potential to frame difference not as a divergence from what is already established in advance, but rather to queer difference as a creative openness that continuously produces new ways of relating.

On April 26 th , 2019, the Centre for Cultural Studies (KU Leuven) and Stuk Arts Centre are hosting their fourth annual symposium on choreographic issues, Transforming Relations: Dance and Difference. The event brings together speakers from dance studies and related theoretical fields, as well as practitioners, to reflect on how relations are transformed and how relations transform within the field of dance.

Further it bundles bundles work by artists who have been in residency in STUK’s studios in recent years. What connects them is the way they use performances based on movement and sound to create tactile or fictional spaces where they reformulate the relation between man and object, man and language, man and history. They create alternative, hybrid human images that bypass the dominant (hetero) normative frameworks, pleading for complexity and room for the senses. In collaboration with the KU Leuven’s Cultural Studies Department we provide time for reflection within the festival, with the symposium Transforming Relations: Dance and Difference. Speakers from both the academic world and the dance field discuss how dance, choreography and queer practices install a creative openness where relations are not fixed, but in continuous transformation.

PERFORMANCES:

Varinia Canto Vila "By getting one's hands dirty" | April 23

Kat Válastur "Rasp Your Soul" | April 23

Mathias Ringgenberg "Melodies are so far my best friend" | April 23

Stav Yeini "The Senders" | April 24

Sonja Jokiniemi "Blab" | April 25 & 26

Thiago Granato "Trrr" | April 25

Lisa Vereertbrugghen "Softcore – A hardcore encounter" | April 26

Download the the program booklet in the right column.

Report:

We organised the festival ‘EXTRACT #2: Transforming Relations” within the Choreographic Convention programme. This was the second edition of EXTRACT, a festival in which we focus on younger, more experimental artists that have a link with STUK through our residency programme. Within the festival we bundle a few performances by these artists in order to reach a broader audience, and also to make it interesting for international cultural professionals to visit STUK. 

During this edition of EXTRACT we chose seven performances to be presented at STUK. Apart from the once funded by Life Long Burning (mentioned above), we also presented: 

●      Varinia Canto Villa - ‘By getting one’s hands dirty’

●      PRICE - ‘Melodies have so far been my best friends”

●      Stav Yeini - ‘The Senders’ 

What connects these seven artists is the way they use performances based on movement and sound to create tactile or fictional spaces where they reformulate the relation between man and object, man and language, man and history. They create alternative, hybrid human images that bypass the dominant (hetero)normative frameworks, pleading for complexity and room for the senses. 

Apart from the performances, we also organised a symposium ‘Transforming Relations: Dance and Difference’. This symposium was presented together with KU Leuven’s Cultural Studies department. Here we provided time for reflection within the festival. Speakers from both the academic world and the dancefield (Prof. Dr. Amelia Jones (University of Southern California), Prof. Dr. Clare Croft (University of Michigan) and Antonia Baehr) discussed how dance, choreography and queer practices install a creative openness where relations are not fixed, but in continuous transformation. This was the third time we organised a symposium together with the Cultural Studies department. 

View some experience reports in the upper right column.

Recordings of the symposium: 

intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqbb20sXhMQ

Amelia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDczzSTiUkw

Antonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn_pzWVI7ug

Clare : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0lbqzQ1rY

Gallery pics © Joeri Thiry