Goal(s): Implementing practice-based artistic processes/formats that allow investigations on the interrelationality of “content is form”; Elaborating on the relationship between immaterial and material aspects of choreography/dance and composition/music; Developing and promoting new modes of collaboration
The fourth RELAY encounter started with an integrated Feedforward/Feedback session during the travel from Bucharest (where the third encounter took place) to Cologne. This interlink took place through a travel score, picking up the threads of the Bucharest camp, and preparing grounds for the upcoming encounter in Cologne including the symposium and perspectively the upcoming fith encounter in Crete.
On the way to the encounter in Cologne students, mentors and staff engaged in a travel score. The score was sent out by Max Wallmeier and Maia Means and encouraged a consideration of the travel as part of the encounter. It asked the participants to notice their surroundings with different senses and write it down. They were then asked to record a message including the written words and send it to another participant, creating a chain of sound recordings that participants could listen to before everyone met (some for the first time). The chain of messages was built so that the senders and participants were unlikely to know each other from before, and crossed the different roles of student/mentor/staff.
In Cologne, two workshops happened parallel over the course of seven days. Every participant could only participate in one or the other. This curational choice brought up the reality of missing out (in this case the process of the other workshop). We were curious about how participants would deal with this reality: would they simply accept missing out? Would they invent and share ways to find out about what happened in the parallel space? Would they trust that they would get what they were supposed to get? Would frustration emerge? We witnessed bits and pieces of all of these options, consciously not giving a curated solution for the situation. On one of workshop days, the format “smuggling” invited each of the participants to bring something from the workshop they had attended, pose it into a designated space and let it be found by others (and find smuggled goods oneself, posed somewhere in the space by others). This proved to be a playful and efficient way of sharing and passing on some of the missed out materials. At the same time the format created a space and texture in itself.
Another curatorial choice was to place two workshop proposals next to each other that were consciously different in their nature in regard to thematic choices and to the methodological approach.
In the workshop “Invitation to Attend”, Claire Cunningham shared methods and scores central to her work opening up dialogues about and along her choreographic practice. In particular: on attending/attention and perception, on practices learned from normative-bodied artists, concepts of Crip politics – such as Crip time – and the phenomenology/lived experience of disability. Through talking, moving, watching, listening and documenting in a manner accessible to each participant, participants engaged in tasks looking at: attending to one's own attention; the connection between movement and language; communication and consent; and the potential within these scores in gaining ownership (or re-ownership) over one´s bodies and for new modes of noticing, moving and improvising.
The workshop “Space of Elision” - facilitated by Jan Burkhardt and Vera Sander - functioned as a continuation of the inter/un-disciplinary research process and was designed as a gathering-place for music and dance, the (un)spoken word, the art of sound, the art of movement, for the in-betweens and passing overs, scores, scripts, performance and discussions devoted to diverse explorations related to dance and music. Over the course of the LTTA, participants were invited to contribute to the workspace of creation, discussion, sharing - a location for a self-organized negotiation and sharing of artistic material, with technical equipment and assistance.
Besides the workshops, the ARTwork (facilitated by Maia Means and Max Wallmeier) was an ongoing event in Cologne`s encounter. From observations and reflections of the previous events, Wallmeier and Means adapted and tweaked the scores, setting and time frame for the ARTwork. In Cologne it took shape as a continuously changing sculpture, filling one of the dance studios with objects, sounds and movements, and giving space for the artistic proposals of the participants to entangle. During the first day, the Time Capsule was ceremonially opened by the Bucharest students, and all participants were instructed to engage with the materials and start gathering objects during silent walks in the buildings and the area around the school. During the week, the sculpture kept growing with remnants of the encounter’s other processes and workshops, and became a ground for exchange between the different working groups, as well as ideas and desires that otherwise didn’t get addressed during the event. Wallmeier’s and Means’s role was to ensure the continuity of the project and guide it along the lines of its intended outcome with daily scores slowly filling one wall of the sculpture’s studio. The intention of the ARTwork in Cologne was to provide scores and structures but let the contents come entirely from the students. The activities, methods and materials that constituted the ARTwork suggested sustainability by creating a structure for non-linear entanglements, with a focus on tasks for re-tracing, recycling and listening, as well as incorporating local and seasonal materials.
During all three events (workshops and the ARTwork installation), the relationship between immaterial and material aspects of choreography/dance and composition/music has been in the forefront, developing and promoting new modes of collaboration.
Additionally, during the course of the entire encounter, formats - f.ex. film lounge #inbetweens, nap room, somatic tuning-ins, a place for burning questions, seating area, smuggling - were prepared for the participants as a source for reflection, retrospection and care, a space for notes and things to remember, a source for finding out what goes on, for moving thoughts and bodies, for becoming aware of our surroundings and pay attention to how we move within them, how others move within them and how this can give rise to mindfulness and care. The idea was to accompany the workshops and to add to the participants’ practice. How does an encounter, a thought, a physical practice, a film, a citation, a smuggled good inform one’s practice, make one stumble or laugh?
The structure of the two parallel workshops that differed quite significantly regarding their themes and forms of collaboration was an approach to create a larger spectrum of experience through difference, and trust transmission by unconventional exchange formats such as the smuggling method, where participants of each workshop where asked to “smuggle” in an experience they had into the room and make it available for others, including the ones that were not part of their workshop.
Vegetarian food was provided by the neighboring restaurant, which ensured saving carbon emissions and extra travel times. Eating together two times a day was also an important part of the encounter, continuing the process on a social level.
(Connected) Methods and Tools: Modes of attention: f.ex. listening practices, noticing; Modes of conversation: f.ex. smuggling; Practices of feeding forward/feeding back: f.ex. meandering, relaying; Practices of sustainability: f.ex. recycling; Modes of collaboration: non-hierarchical/non-linear settings, inter/un-disciplinary artistic research
Participants: CNDB Anca Stoica, Neli Georgieva, Sergiu Diță, DASPA Anita Czako, Frida Billeskov Olesen, Hanna Lokøy, Lisbeth Ravn Riis, Maia Means, Max Wallmeier, Micaela Kühn, Simon Plancke, HfMT Carmen Pomet Serrano, Dmitry Remezov, Eduardo Loria Lazcano, Jan Burkhardt, Lili Oksanen, Natacha Huefken, Vera Sander, SIKINNIS Asimina Michelakou, Emmanuel Kokkinidis, Konstantinos Tsakirelis, Tsakalaki Evangelia, UNATC Amelia Maiorov, Andreea Duță, Dennis Mihai, Ioana Goia, UNMB Agnes Vranceanu, Alexandru Zaharencu, Bianca Diana Popa, Cătălin Crețu, George Pais, Lavinia Cristescu