cologne
OPENING – 'everything around the work is the work' (1st encounter)
LTTA1 • Participants: 49
The first RELAY encounter in Cologne started with a keynote by choreographer and dancer Claire Cunningham to inspire the working phase and to draw attention to aspects of the relationality between form and content. The overall arc of the following labs - hosted at the four different partner cities and each held and created by and with students and mentors of the partner institutions - was the artistic investigation of the relation between form and content in artistic processes within music and choreography/dance.
Discover on this page the documentation of the RELAY project. The RELAY encounters are positioned along the geographical landscape of our partner sites in Heraklion (Greece), Bucharest (Romania), Cologne (Germany) and Copenhagen (Denmark). You can either browse the clustered 'geographical‘ documentation page for an overview or explore the detailed documentation of each encounter by clicking on the respective headlines.
LTTA4 • Participants: 32
In our fourth RELAY encounter in Cologne, structuring two parallel workshops with significantly different themes and forms of collaboration was intended to create a broader spectrum of experience through difference. The inevitability of missing out prompted us to consider how participants would navigate this reality. Would participants invent and share ways to find out about what happened in the parallel space? By providing additional sources for reflection, retrospection and care, we asked how an encounter, a thought, a physical practice, a film, a citation, a ‘smuggled’ good informs one’s artistic practice.
LTTA2 • Participants: 29
The second encounter, taking place in Copenhagen, was conceptualised using the major principle of RELAY, understood as transitional. Instead of adding further content to the project, the activity explored what artistic (im)materials the project’s form could produce. It was the first physical meeting with all RELAY partners. We could finally find ourselves together meeting, exchanging and witnessing the project unfold. The transitional features of ‘relaying’ were tested, which gave us the opportunity to adjust our ideas and course, where needed, for the future activities.
april 29 – 30, 2023
ME1 • Participants: 181
The first RELAY symposium in Cologne was conceived as a platform to share RELAY project results as well as networking examples of knowledge and practices both within and beyond the university. The event collaborated with the German Dance Archives Cologne as well as with practitioners and lecturers from the fields of dance and music, inviting them to share their expertise and offer insights into artistic practice.
ME2 • Participants: 32
The second RELAY symposium was held in cooperation with the conference of International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts (IETM) in Aarhus and gave the possibility to share both questions and findings that RELAY had produced so far and to enter in dialogue around the project’s stakes, benefits and challenges.
vienna
'RELAY-ing' (3rd symposium)
july 26 – 28, 2024
ME3 • Participants: ??
Our third and final symposium was held in collaboration with Impulstanz Wien, the largest European festival for contemporary dance. As part of the LACE Symposium, RELAY's findings, tools, and methods were shared through practical, hands-on formats. This included a "Deep Dive," which began with a project presentation on RELAY, followed by three parallel workshops, and a "smuggling" session where participants exchanged insights, findings, and methods explored during the workshops.
august 22 – september 1, 2023
LTTA5 • Participants: 40
The fifth RELAY encounter in Heraklion was divided into two different phases: an outdoors phase in the first week and an indoors phase in the second week. Workshops on and within historical sites approached material culture and historic evidence as sources for thinking artistic material through the concept of fortification, providing stimuli for the artistic material created in the second week. Here community meetings provided additional input: the RELAY participants and members of the Sikinnis community interacted with each other in workshops, sharing work with amateur dancers of different age groups and capabilities and negotiating how to participate in the production by not only 'consuming' dance and music material.
LTTA3 • Participants: 26
In Bucharest, the third RELAY encounter was sustained by all three hosting art institutions (UNMB, UNATC and CNDB). Walking in groups between the venues became a daily practice for the participants and a format by itself. It served to get an embodied understanding of the spatial as well as infrastructural factors of this geographical triangle. Through a collaborative learning-by-practice and creation process, this encounter focused on how artistic information created within specific environments is passed on from one body to another and how it is extended and modified by ‘contamination’ - creating a trace, leaving a mark.
