During the Olympics in Rio 2016 the Japanese team unexpectedly won the silver medals in the men's 4x100 metres Relay Final.The surprising part was that individually all team members ran slower than their competitors and the secret to their success was instead their work with optimising the hand overs of the baton from one runner to the next, saving them precious seconds in the tight race.
RELAY is a three-year EU-funded research project supported by the Erasmus+ programme 'cooperation partnerships' that focuses on developing the artistic and educational fields of choreography, dance and music.
The story mentioned above can be seen as an analogy of the project's aim: favouring collaboration, the in-betweens and the passing-overs between artists, the collaborating institutions, the programmed events, and the public it gets in touch with. RELAY has grown out of four different contextual grounds. All of these are geared towards sustainable conditions for the practitioner's work/life balance and longevity in career, as well as increased awareness of local contexts and situated knowledge.
The exposition here gathers findings, reflections and insights into the principles and methods of RELAY as well as obstacles and (creative) failures.
The five sections relaying, multitude of perspectives, transformational practices, on sustainability and on learning invite you to dive deeper into the contexts of RELAY and form the grid of this ARTicle.
The ToolCloud provides access to tools, scores and practices and invites you to use and adapt them for your own practice(s).
The ARTwork provides the documentation of an developed and continuously transforming artistic material, which travels and is handed over from person to person throughout the entire project time.
relaying
The concept that named our project – RELAY – is based on deep trust in the transiting and transmissive foundation of both artistic production and knowledge development. RELAY underscores a fluid and processual element in the intersection of art and education. Not only does the actual production and development of knowledge and artworks depend on collective – and therefore transmissive – efforts, but the future life of those productions depends on how they are shared. For example, a dance technique only lives through those who practice it. A piece of music is passed on (through ear, instrument technology, or score) between practitioners, producers, and listeners.
Every hand-over gives the possibility for development, re-iterations, and productive misunderstandings.
multitude of perspectives
Often, solving a problem depends on changing the perspective from where you approach it. You can do this by deliberately switching minds or by borrowing or contaminating concepts and ideas from related or different fields.
Music and dance are very similar and very different at the same time. You can find commonalities or specific differences depending on which perspective you choose to look at them from.
Here you will find seven themes for reflection that encourage to look at artistic approaches from different angles, propelling new ideas, creative and pedagogical impulses.
transformational practices / material from the “in-between”
When we started the RELAY project we wanted to contribute to the existing knowledge in the field. We formed a project that both created a context for generating artistic materials and expressions and at the same time investigated the relationship between immaterial and material aspects of choreography/dance and composition/music. It potentially strengthens the position of choreography and composition in particular, and art in general, as a source of innovation. The material action tested in the RELAY served reflecting existing hierarchy relations through formal and content-related resistance. Strategies of rupture, disruption and error, of the accidental, provisional, unstable and temporary generate the being of material from the "in-between". In this section you will find examples of transformational approaches tested in the RELAY project.
on sustainability
What is sustainable in the practical context of artistic work? Are there principles and tools we can identify, cultivate and eventually help multiply, or do things fully depend on the specific individual and collective constellations, preferences, conditioning?