Choreographic Convention #3 – Stockholm - POST-DANCE-ING

The third Choreographic Convention is taking place from October 23 – 25, 2019 in Stockholm, hosted and organised by the network partner MDT and focusing on "POST-DANCE-ING"

MDT, Cullberg, Danscentrum and DOCH produced a conference called POST-DANCE-ING.

We wanted to create a conference with an unconventional format that emphasizes conversation, as well as supports the potentially different languages available to this conversing.

A conference with five in-depth conversations that spiral deliberately, intuitively and decidedly into other spaces and configurations, possibly into other forms.

So we invited a few thinkers to each propose a starting-point. And linked to those, invited “Conversation Partners” that formulated and prepared a response to these “Starters”. This conversation was then taken further by a discussion group that was requested to react and discuss on the spot. This conversation then continued for those attendees who wanted to, in another room.  The idea was to make room for conversation in various forms: prepared, unprepared, spoken language, movement, presented on a stage in front of an audience or a equal, smaller group in a separate room. 

Participants in the conference : Rebecca Vinthagen, Reggie Wilson, Jeanine Durning, Eva Mohn, Josefine Wikström, Erdem Gündüz, Konstantina Georgelou, Karina Sarkissova, Eva Meyer-Keller, Mette Edvardsen, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Tamara Alegre, Ilse Ghekiere, Julia Giertz, Halla Ólafsdóttir, Alice Chauchat, Agnes Quackels, Rickard Borgström, André Lepecki & Eleanor Bauer.

Timetable:
23/10 9.30-17.00
24/10 10.00-17.00
25/10 10.00-16.00

Venue: MDT, Stockholm

The conference was live streamed in collaboration with Riksteatern. The documentation stayed online for 30 days after the conference and was seen by 1 284 people by November 26^th. Audience at MDT was 150 people. 

A brief history of the project:
In 2015 we (at that point André Lepecki (DOCH), Gabriel Smeets (Cullberg) and Danjel Andersson (MDT) put together a conference (http://mdtsthlm.se/archive/175/)  with the intention to open up a discussion on contemporary practices within the field of dance without stumbling into the usual traps (we almost always inevitably end up talking about lack of funding when we talk about projects or about what dance is when we talk about choreographic practices). We framed this intention as a conference titled “POST-DANCE: Beyond the kinesthetic experience and back”.  This conference was instantly sold out and we streamed it (with the help from Riksteatern) live with thousands of views.

We did not say what Post-dance was but asked the participants to speculate with us. In 2017, we (Mette Edvardsen, Mårten Spångberg and Danjel Andersson) edited and published a book with texts from the conference and new thinking on Post-dance. It turns out that what we dreamed of doing (to open up discussions on contemporary practices within the field of dance) with the launch of the non-concept container (that is Post-dance) is now happening and our conference has become the starting point we hoped for. There is no way to have an overview of all that has been happening since then. We know that they want to translate the book into both Russian and Portuguese and we know that there was a master’s thesis written by a Norwegian in Denmark (Amanda Øiestad Nilsen). Oktoberdans festival in Norway hosted a seminar, the festival Block Universe held a sold out Post-dance conference in Tate Modern in London. The scenes in Moscow and Vienna held seminars. Amsterdam and Oslo also did in combination with a launch of the book. And there have been launch events for the book in more than 10 different countries. There is an unauthorized Post-danza.pdf circulating on the internet and there remains great demand for the now out-of-print book (2000 copies).

POST-DANCE-ING

There are now many conversations on what Post-dance is and/or is not. We would like to push the conversation a bit further by asking: What about the -ing? If we knew what Post-dance was/is (and we do, no?) what and where is the -ing? The do-ing, the post-dancing, the practice-ing if you will.  We – Zoë Poluch (DOCH), Gabriel Smeets (Cullberg), Tove Dahlblom (Danscentrum), Danjel Andersson and Sara Bergsmark (MDT) – have invented a concept for an event in MDT in Stockholm.

The conference will be followed by a publication in 2020, also supported by Life Long Burning. This will be a way to capture, document and develop some of the important conversations that took place during these three days. 

PROGRAM:

October 23rd:

Starter – Reggie Wilson
Conversation partner – Jeanine Durning
Panel – Eva Mohn & Josefine Wikström

October 24th:

Starter – Erdem Gündüz:
“We seek truth at every age. We are discussing post-dance in order to understand realıty in the post-truth era. The speech deconstructs what ınfluenced the self and what is the ownership of the artworks.”
Conversation partner – Konstantina Georgelou
Panel – Eva Meyer-Keller & Karina Sarkissova

Starter – Malik Nashad Sharpe:
“ON HOPE: Fucking the Regime of Hope in Choreography
I would like to discuss pessimistic dance and choreographic practices, and how this operates in current socio-political trappings. Why offer hope, when we can offer the unreal instead”
Conversation partner – Tamara Alegre
Panel – Ilse Ghekiere & Julia Giertz

October 25th:

Starter – Halla Ólafsdóttir:
”It´s all about you and us and all the love in-between
again and again and again, over and over and over, it´s never over (into infinity) 4ever  until DEATH”
Conversation partner – Alice Chauchat
Panel – Rickard Borgström & Agnes Quackels

Wrap up
André Lepecki & Eleanor Bauer

https://springbackmagazine.com/read/postdancing-in-the-dark/

Gergely Tallo the director of Workshop Foundation participated on the first 1,5 days of the Post-Dance-Ing Conference.

On the first event of the program, after a short lecture of Rebecca Vinthagen, participants worked in small groups and discussed the possible micro actions in their everyday professional life. The most interesting conclusion for Tallo was that everything is so personal, we think that we are facing to professional issue, problems but everything is related to personal habits, experiences.
The program continued with two American artists, choreographers, Reggie Wilson and Jeannine Durning. They talked, moved, shared, danced around the role, relationship, situations between dance, dancing and (written) words, talking and thinking.

The second day started with the lecture of Erdem Gündüz on post-dance, post-truth era than continued with a long discussion.