PSR KOREOGRAFIKRITIKVERKSTAD – Choreography Criticism Workshop

In the frame of the activity Performance Situation Room, the LLB partner MDT Stockholm is hosting a workshop on Choreography Criticism:

What is the shape of the criticism to come? Let’s find out together! We see three dance performances and write about them, each time with a special task to guide us. There is no right or wrong, only hope in experimentation. We are in the pursuit of news ways of writing and thinking about dance. If you are too – join us!

This workshop concept, “Koreografikritikverkstad” or KKV, has been developed by MDT and Kritiklabbet. It has already taken place three times in Stockholm and several times abroad. Check out its history at www.koreografikritikverkstad.se

We were looking for up to 8 people to join the workshop. It’s for free but all participants must be able to attend all events. Your text will be your own, but in participating you agree to also publish it on the KKV website. The workshop is guided and organized by Axel Andersson (Kritiklabbet) and Julia Kolehmainen (MDT).

DATES

March 24 at Turteatern, intro meeting and Gunilla Heilborn’s Monument (start 18:00)
March 28 at Turteatern, text meeting for Monument (18:00-20:00)
March 29 at MDT, Heine Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki’s Unannounced (start 20:00)
April 3 at MDT, text meeting for Unannounced (18:00-20:00)
April 7 at Weld, Rannei Grenne & Solveig Styve Holte Flakkande Røynd (start 18:00)
April 10 at Weld, text meeting for Flakkande Røynd (18:00-20:00)

REPORT by Julia Kolehmainen, project manager for KKV as part of an internship at MDT:

Koreografikritikverkstad (KKV)is a practical workshop in finding forms for writing and discussing criticism of choreography. It is an anarchic approach and format to the future of what elsewhere is called ”dance criticism”. In short: a number of workshop participants meet and see choreographed performances together. They are given a ”task” before or after the show informing them of how they should write their criticism. These tasks could set a formal frame, or be related to content. An example of the latter can be the recurringtask to ”write a subjective review”, that is to bring in all the personal reflections of the experience that most reviewers leave out. After writing their texts they meet to discuss them collectively. 

The performances we saw were: Monument by Gunilla Heilborn (SE) at Turteatern, Unannounced by Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki (NO/JP) at MDT, and Flakkande røynd by Rannei Grenne and Solveig Styve Holte (NO) at Weld. MDT has collaborated with both Turteatern and Weld in previous rounds of KKV with much success.

We were six participants in total, including Julia Kolehmainen (intern at MDT during spring 2019) and Axel Andersson (Kritiklabbet) who together organized the workshop. One of our participants writes critique professionally in newspapers, but expressed that is isa pretty narrow and not so creative genre, and critique can be so much more. We also had participants who are students in art and philosophy, who had not written critique in relation to choreography or dance. Although they had seen multiple dance and performance performances, they had not written about these art forms, and therefore thought it would be fun to approach the area in the form of experimental or exploratory criticism.

We also agreed that we think choreography and dance needs more dialogue as it seems as if words are often included already in the choreographic expressions of today.We received positive feedback from all of our participants, one of them hoping that a workshop like this would be included in courses at the university. This time it was the first time, except for the very first KKV, that all of the participants were new. They all expressed that they wished we would have met for a longer time and seen more performances, as our discussions grew for each meeting. This however would of course have been hard to do, considering scheduling for multiple participants.