cologne
OPENING – everything around the work is the work
february 3 – 5, 2022
LTTA1 • Participants: 49
As a means to inspire the creative phase and in order to draw attention to aspects of the relationality between form and content, the first learning teaching training activity (LTTA) was kicked off with a keynote talk by choreographer and dancer Claire Cunningham. 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.
cologne
april 24 – 30, 2023
LTTA4 • Participants: 32
In our fourth learning teaching training activity (LTTA4), structuring 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. The reality of missing out raised questions about how we would deal with 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, makes one stumble or laugh.
In-between
seminar with Claire Cunningham
From January 30 - February 3, 2023 the seminar "Choreography of Care" with Claire Cunningham and students from the BA dance program at HfMT Cologne took place, exploring methods of RELAY in connection to care.
copenhagen
may 16 – 20, 2022
LTTA2 • Participants: 29
The second learning teaching training activity (LTTA2) 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.
In-between
time capsules
Time Capsule Cologne - Copenhagen (February & May 2022)
Artistic Material produced by students from music and dance in Cologne traveled as a Time Capsule to Copenhagen. Material from the Time Capsule unfolded and developed into new artistic material shared in a jam.
Time Capsule Copenhagen - Bucharest (May, September & November 15-18, 2022)
Artistic Material produced by students from music and dance in Copenhagen traveled as a Time Capsule to Bucharest. Unfolding the Time Capsule students from the UNMB elaborated the materials and created music composition as an outcome of this relay practice.
travel scores and Time Capsule Bucharest - Cologne (September & November 2022, April 2023)
On the way to LTTA4 in Cologne, all Relay participants – 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 meeting. 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 can listen to before everyone meets each other (some for the first time) on the first official day of the LTTA. 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.
The Bucharest students brought the Time Capsule of the sculpture that was created during the ARTwork sessions of LTTA3. They received a score for how to engage with the capsule during the travel, and they had time to prepare a “opening” of the capsule on the first day of LTTA4 in Cologne, which served as the initiation of the ARTwork in this 4th iteration.
On the way back from LTTA4, all participants again received a similar travel score. This time they were asked to send the recording back to the person they received a message from on the way to Cologne, an encouragement to notice the difference of tone and impact of a personal message when having spent time in the same context for the last seven days.
travel scores and Time Capsule Cologne - Heraklion (April & August 2023)
On the way to LTTA5 in Crete, the Relay participants again received travel scores on the way there and back, asking the recurring participants to pick up where they left off, and give new participants a way into the week and project.
The Cologne students brought the Time Capsule of the sculpture that was created during the ARTwork sessions of LTTA4. They received a score for how to prepare for the “opening” of the Time Capsule, which served as the initiation of the ARTwork of LTTA5.
The travel score was again sent out to all participants on their journey back as a way to round up the meeting and as an encouragement of reflection.
cologne
april 29 – 30, 2023
ME1 • Participants: 181
The first Multiplier Event (ME1) was conceptualised as a Symposium, sharing RELAY project results as well as networking examples of knowledge and practice fields in and outside the university. It collaborated with the German Dance Archives Cologne as well as with practitioners and lecturers from the dance and music field, inviting them to share their expertise and give insight into artistic practice.
In-between
seminar on RELAY principles
The seminar “RELAY principles” (as part of the curriculum BA Dance at HfMT Cologne from June 5-7, 2023) focused on the practical exploration of methods and tools that can serve in finding, developing, sharing and archiving our artistic material. Participants were invited to share examples from their own practice, but also concrete questions and needs that we will negotiate with each other in lab-like formats.
aarhus
june 13, 2023
ME2 • Participants: 32
The second Multiplier Event (ME2) 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.
heraklion
august 22 – september 1, 2023
LTTA5 • Participants: 40
The fifth learning teaching training activity (LTTA5) 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.
bucharest
LTTA3 • Participants: 26
In Bucharest, the third learning teaching training activity (LTTA3) 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, LTTA3 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.
In-between
lecture “Of Potentials, Processes and Visions – Passing on”
The lecture “Of Potentials, Processes and Visions – Passing on” was part of the International Conference "Contemporary Trends in Dance Art", Ulan Bator Mongolei and held on October 3, 2023.
In this lecture elaborated on the key aspects of the project RELAY and introduced RELAY as a best best practice model for how to create spaces that resonate in their complexity and polyphony, ordering divergent and multidirectional approaches, evoking encounters and creating a web of the body and movement stories.
In-between
lecture "(in) betweens"
The Lecture "(Da)Zwischen - Untersuchungen einer transdigitalen Praxis der Unschärfe" on November 16, 2022 was part of the lectures series „Metamorphosen des Menschen – Durchdringungen von Mensch, Natur, Kunst und Technik" at HfMT Cologne.
In this lecture Jan Burkhardt (Dance), Sergej Maingardt (Composition), Vera Sander (Choreography) elaborated on cross-disciplinary methods and strategies fostering working in the in-between (music and dance, analogy and technology, human and non-human).
In-between
cross-disciplinary seminar “RELAY sound+movement materialities”
The seminar “RELAY sound+movement materialities” with both students from music and dance (BA and MA from HfMT and UNMB Bucharest) took place from November 14 - 18, 2022.
In this cross-disciplinary seminar participants from the fields music and dance encountered the following topic: (In)Between - Investigations into a trans-digital practice of blurring. They explored sound and movement-material as well as compositional and choreographic structures focusing on transferability, intertwining, reversibility and principles of handing over in creative procedure. Additionally, they not only questioned the relation between human being and substance but also between machines and the digital enlargement of humanity. The lab provided time to both - work and reflect - on the process + findings + strategies of sensing, making, performing and archiving material. During the course of the week, the participants had the opportunity to create, work, resonate, transform with(out) their material(s) (or not) which served as a basis for art making as well as further discussion, deepening and expansion of thoughts.
