PSR Anthropology – Development Residency

This Performance Situation Room implemented by danceWEB in the frame of ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival hosted the performance artists Mårten Spångberg, Emma Luise Rößling, Maria Baroncea, Karolina Magdalena Kraczkowska, Sidney Joseph Geller Barnes and Vlad Benescu. They used this residency period to deepen their research on the thematics of Anthropology. 

“Anthropology” is the second part of a trilogy addressing relations between dance and ecology. The project researches alternative narratives concerning ecology and its relations to the body, understood as a possible intermediary between modalities of organising life. In what ways can dance function as a laboratory for how we can approach the world differently? Perhaps what is needed is not to regulate life as we know it but to labour for the possibilities of new forms of life. Not climate change but a change of the climate, climate being what all beings, creatures, animate and inanimate share and contribute to. It’s not a matter of commitment to save the world but instead a letting go of established dichotomies between for example nature and culture, work and leisure, intuition and science, human and non-human, subject and object. “Anthropology” proposes vague forms of being with, cohabitation and exchange that dissolve information and knowledge in favour of experience and wisdom. Instead of definition availability, instead of from here to there a landscape that expands with us.

The performance takes the form of an autonomous system, a living being, that the dancers need to generate relations to, to form ecologies that nourishes the system and still maintains its specificity. In this sense the performance will adapt to conditions, unfold differently each occasion and continue a process of care and awareness. Understanding the piece as an autonomous organism refers to forms of knowledge transfer taking place across species and different, incompatible epistemologies, a kind of leakage between realities that open up to new forms of ethics, alternative narratives and non-human geographies.

This PSR resulted in a Creative Crossroad co-production supported by the LLB partner 4Culture.