REPLAY, RELOAD, RE-TUNE
12 February 2018 - 24 March 2018
DANCEHOUSE PUBLIC PROGRAM
With this program, we were particularly interested in exploring how choreography refracts and intervenes within this century of hyper individualisation, the utter 'selfie-isation' of our selves at a time of disquieting populism and increasing precarity. As neoliberalism continues to insidiously erode the social, the humane and any collective mode of action, whilst proclaiming the self-sufficient individual as the only player, we hope that choreography today can propose new forms of being and of coming together: new modes of activating agency, responsibility and care; new forms or re-tuning the self to re-invent imagination, participation and sensitivity.
PERFORMANCE
AN EVENING OF SOLO WORKS - MEG STUART
Choreography and performance: Meg Stuart
Technical direction: Jitske Vandenbussche
Light: Gilles Roosen
Sound: Vincent Malstaf
How to translate sensations and inner monologues into movement? Is it possible to track the hesitation before speaking, the movements not chosen, the spaces we travel to when we are daydreaming, the memories and projections that cloud our awareness of the present? - Meg Stuart
Over the past few years, American choreographer Meg Stuart has created several solos, exploring everyday movements and physical conditions. An evening of solo works presents a selection of these former solo works, as well as excerpts from evening-length performances. This iteration features an exquisite selection of the artist's body of solo works such as XXX for Arlene and Colleagues (1995) and Signs of Affection (2010), as well as excerpts from evening-length performances such as Hunter (2014) and Maybe Forever (2007).
Where: Space 28, Victoria College fo the Arts
Date: 23-24 March
REPLAY - ESZTER SALAMON
Public outcome of choreographic lab led by ESZTER SALAMON assisted by Boglàrka Börcsök
With: Alice Heyward, Amaara Raheem (VIC),Carlie Angel (SA),Deanne Butterworth (VIC),Diane Busuttil (NSW),Lydia Connolly-Hiatt (VIC), Niharika Senapati (VIC), Nikki Heywood (NSW), Patricia Wood (NSW), Sofie Burgoyne (VIC)
REPLAY explores the history and historicity of the gaze and perception related to female bodies by using the Kama Sutra as the basis of the choreography. Constructing a dramaturgy based on the gaze renders visible the constantly changing power dynamics between the performers, and also between the performers and the spectators. This 'play' is about the pleasure of moving and of watching movement, as well as the pleasure of undoing certain boundaries related to behavioral norms. REPLAY offered 10 Australian female performers an opportunity to explore these choreographic enquiries in a 2-week experimental choreographic lab culminating in this public presentation.
Where: The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent
Date: 24-25 FEBRUARY
WORKSHOPS
CHOREOGRAPHIC LAB WITH PUBLIC OUTCOME PRESENTATION
REPLAY with ESZTER SALAMON
In the history of dance, the communication between dancer and audience has fascinated a lot of choreographers, dance makers and dancers. What defines the communication between the one who dances and the one who watches? Eszter Salamon questions the power of the gaze of the dancer and audience, and at the same time the performative body. Is what we see what we get? Is the body a construction of our desire or our fears? What do we expose by exposing our body to the gaze of someone else? Inspired by her previous work Reproduction, REPLAY offers an opportunity to explore these choreographic enquiries in a 2-week experimental choreographic lab culminating in a free public showing at Abbotsford Convent.
Where: Lucy Guerin Inc. Studios,
Date: 12-25 FEBRUARY
THEORY & PROCESS
DANCING SOLO IN THE 21st CENTURY with BOJANA CVEJIĆ
A globally widespread genre, solo dance typifies both truth games and body techniques that individuals practice in everyday life, not only on stage. The most abundant format in contemporary dance performance, a mandatory test of artistry in education as well as a fetish item in a choreographer's oeuvre, solo dance is also perhaps the most inexpensive commodity traded in the art world nowadays. It is, moreover, the form in which many bodily systems and techniques are instructed and exercised in the everyday, ranging from therapy, business management rhetoric to entertainment in reality TV and social media. The principles and techniques of solo dance (such as "being-in-the-present", the cult of the personal, self-expression, auto-affection, virtuosity and creativity, projective self-ownership and entrepreneurship) are the technologies of the self which individualise the self by performance. "Technologies of the self" hark back to Michel Foucault and designate a mode of action that an individual exercises upon one's self and uses to produce subjectivity. They encompass a system of techniques, from truth games to corporeal praxes of the care of the self. This workshop will explore the aestheticized notions of self-transformation and resistance as well as mechanisms of spectacular commodification and New-Age consumerism.
Where: The Stables, 19 Duke St, Richmond
Date: 26 February - 2 March
WORKSHOP INTENSIVE
THEM, RELOADED with ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES
THEM is Ishmael Houston-Jones's seminal work examining intimacies and violence between men, made amidst the rising tides of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-'80s. Through the process of reconstructing and transmitting THEM to a younger generation of dancers, Houston-Jones will excavate unregistered details about the work and the context in which it was originally created, in resonance with the Australian context, while uncovering powerful resonances with the present.
Where: Temperance Hall, 199 Napier St, South Melbourne
Date: 5-9 MARCH
WORKSHOP FOR EVERYONE
HOW TO LIKE DANCE with WITNESS (ALISON CROGGON & ROBERT REID)
Every work of art is an invitation, but sometimes we don't know how to respond. We have expectations about what art is and what it expects from us, often without being conscious of them, that get in the way. Fully responding to work can be a process of unlearning, putting away our expectations so we can get closer to our own experience. This is a workshop series for general audience members who would like to do some unlearning as they learn, programmed around the performances of the Keir Choreographic Awards. We'll be beginning with some basic questions: What does it mean to be an audience member? How do we experience performance? And how do we articulate our experience afterwards? Join Alison Croggon and Robert Reid, co-editors and founders of the critical website Witness Performance, in a series of workshops designed to enhance your experience of performance.
Where: Dancehouse
Date: 4-11 March
MASTERCLASS WITH MEG STUART
In this masterclass, improvisation will be used as a strategy to explore body memory and physical and emotional states. The class will be lead through an investigation of the borders between knowing and not knowing, abstraction and intention, image and action. Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines and navigates the tension between dance and theatre. Her work revolves around the idea of an uncertain body, one that is vulnerable and self-reflexive. It is analogous to a constantly shifting identity and constantly redefines itself while searching for new presentation contexts and territories for dance.
Where: Upstairs Studio, Dancehouse
Date: 22 MARCH
LECTURE
THE PERFORMING OF THE SELF: AESTHETIC INDIVIDUALISM
Bojana Cvejic
"Searching for the ways in which one performs oneself in current capitalist society, we repeatedly stumble upon art. The individual that is found in the figure of the artist; the value of autonomy sourced from the unique person and her life; the performative techniques of self-fashioning, self-expression, embodiment and sensorial/affective experience; the artistic-like intensity of experience — all these elements gesture toward the historical authority that the arts, and lately dance in particular, wield in aesthetic matters of self-understanding. Add to that new digital technologies and social media platforms, through which subjects produce their self-image and shape their lives via aesthetic expression. The predictions of the late 1960s to early 1970s that 'everyone is an artist' and that 'in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes', have crystallized. This talk will focus on 'aesthetic individualism', the term I am developing in my research carried out with Ana Vujanović and Marta Popivoda, which draws on truth games and bodily techniques from dance and performance, to examine modes of subjectivation in an experience economy." - Bojana Cvejić
Where: The Reading Room, Fitzroy Town Hall
Date: 2 March
DIALOGUE
ON SCORES FOR THE DEAD & THE POLITICS OF DANCING
Ishmael Houston-Jones in dialogue with Phillip Adams
Ishmael Houston-Jones's artistic practice, his curation and his teaching are inseparable from his activism. He makes provocative work that has examined and memorialised the impact of AIDS on numerous communities as well as work that fiercely supports queer artists and/or artists of colour. In this conversation with long-time Melbourne friend Philip Adams, they will be talking AIDS, loss, scores for the dead, the context of politics, the politics of dancing and potential prologues for the end of everything.
Where: Temperance Hall, 199 Napier St, South Melbourne
Date: 4 March
CONVERSATIONS
CHOREOGRAPHY. NOW
A series of facilitated conversations aimed at contextualising the deep and subtle connections that the choreographed body fosters, in its multiplicity of forms and meanings, with the social, the ethical and the political.
SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY – REDEFINING AGENCY
with Luke George, Bojana Cvejic, Mick Douglas in conversation with Jana Percovic
Coined by Andrew Hewitt, 'social choreography' looks at how bodies and habits are organised in society. By addressing performance as a form of social choreography, this conversation will examine how choreography can be understood as a tool to analyse both the aesthetic organisation of movement and the socio-political construction of singular and collective identities, new forms of coming together and our capacity as artists and arts workers to reinvigorate political imagination and new modes of agency.
POLITICS OF THE PERFORMATIVE – GENDER & IDENTITY
with Eszter Salamon, Brooke Powers, Jacob Boehme, Sarah-Jane Norman and Quinn Eades in conversation with Lauren Rosewarne.
As we encounter new incarnations of conservatism, patriarchy and racism, understanding gender and its relationship to identity, materiality, ideology and discourse has become imperative. The gendered body has always been central to art. How do artists work with issues of gender identity, specificity and performativity today? What new frames of meaning, potentialities and subjectivities do these issues bring? How are gender narratives shared and what modes of inclusion, collectivity and connection can they enable?
THE MANY & THE FEW - ASSEMBLING THE POLITICAL
with Gabrielle de Vietri, Jill Orr, Chris Hanig and Liz Conor in conversation with Andrew Fuhrmann
What kinds of corporeal politics are possible today? Far from presuming one definition of the political body, this conversation is interested in exploring (bodily) activism, its circumstances/modes/contexts of emergence as well as its embodied choreographies. The panel will investigate the new capacities, modes of agency and forms of coming together, which activism is able to generate or provoke today. We will also endeavour to map out the geographies of resistance, and the performative assemblages of the body politic, as expressed through protest, transgression, rebellion, subversion, appropriation and modes of dynamic transformation.
DECOLONISING PRACTICE – RESPONSIBILITY REINVENTED
with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Laurie Uprichard, Mykaela Saunders and Anastasia Kanjere in conversation withLaniyuk Garcon-Mills
Decolonising practice in the arts looks at building awareness of and resistance to Western neo-colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative and hegemonic taxonomies of power and discourse as they permeate/infiltrate the arts praxis. The speakers – artists and arts workers– will discuss modes of disabling white privilege, dealing with cultural misappropriation, towards embracing multiplicity and diversity, and reinventing notions of care and responsibility with/through art.
ON SPECTATORSHIP – FROM RITUALS TO AGENCY
with Branch Nebula, Govin Ruben and Anne Marsh in conversation with Robert Reid
How is contemporary choreography received, witnessed, and experienced today? Choreography has reframed its modes of spectatorship in recent years, which have re-modelled its modes of connection and engagement with the audiences. This has been brought about through a shift from the passive traditional seated frontal black box set up, to standing durational performances in atypical spaces, where the viewer choreographs the space as much as the performer, to active physical forms of participation where spectators become the very actors. This conversation will look at some of the non-conventional mechanisms of experiential engagement, and the implications of these modes of production, the ethics of these new rituals as well as the new frames of agency and materialities they may open up.
Where: Studio 221/Dance Building, Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St. Kilda Road
Date: 5-9 March
WRITINGS
SCRIBE is led by artist and curator, Leisa Shelton in collaboration with local artists/scribes, whom you will be seeing at Dancehouse all throughout the season. They will be inviting you, the audience, to engage in short intimate one-to-one encounters, to capture your feelings, impressions and experience of the works you have just seen, which they will then capture in writing. This is a poetic invitation unfolding subtle or invisible layers of how we engage, feel and resonate with dance.
WITNESS is an initiative of writer, poet and critic Alison Croggon and director, playwright and theatre historian Robert Reid. It is a new curated site for critical discussion of the performing arts that will launch in March 2018 and aims to be a sustainable foundation for high quality, stimulating critical discussion that isn't subject to the whims of the media industry. WITNESS critically reviewed each of the 8 commissioned works and led a live online critical forum for the KCA audiences to engage with. READ THE ESSAY HERE
The Keir Choreographic Award Dancehouse Public Program was presented by Dancehouse in partnership with Faculty of the VCA and MCM | University of Melbourne, Abbotsford Convent, Lucy Guerin Inc., BalletLab and Temperance Hall, City of Yarra, Critical Path, Goethe Institut Australia and with additional support from The Keir Foundation.
Program curated by Angela Conquet in collaboration with Philipa Rothfield, Ashley Dyer and Audrey Schmidt.