Participation and choreographic collaboration in an expanding field

This workshop is an invitation to experiment with dance compositional practices that, inspired by Brazilian indigenous thought, may establish Temporary Eco-sensitive Communities. Through eco-somatic connections, this immersive practice starts from recognizing that the sensory perception of oneself and the environment intertwines during movement. Dance becomes a way of relating to the movement of organic and inorganic beings, thus to different modes of existence. In my PhD, I'm experimenting with this approach to composition, informed by the tactile-kinesthetic sense, as a strategy for investigating environmental controversies and composing future scenarios, inspired by Bruno Latour´s book Politics of Nature. This workshop includes moving with the materialities and perceptions of water, tactile-kinesthetic improvisations, and VR immersion, leading to a collective performative experience of playing the game Politics of Nature in Movement. At the end, we will deconstruct the experience highlighting the sensorial movement relationships to oneself, the environment, and our temporal community. We will work with notions of body-environment, coexistence, otherness, and imagination/wonder.

Deborah Dodd Macedo is a dancer, choreographer and teacher from the highlands of Brazil. Currently a Ph.D. researcher in Performing Arts at the University of Brasilia, she studies movement composition processes from an ecocentric perspective. She is a dancer/choreographer with Teatro do Instante and a member of the collective Politics of Nature. She holds a Master's diploma from UnB and a Maîtrise in Performing Arts - Université Paris VIII. She has two specializations from the Universidade Moderna de Lisboa (Perceptual Pedagogy of the Movement and Somato-psychopedagogy) and a diploma in Dance Education (92Y Harkness Dance Center).

Alice will present some of the scores she is working with in her ongoing research, Togethering, through practice and conversation.

These scores are conceptual, poetic and social: they suggest experimenting with ways of being with each other, in an attentive and non-normative co-presence. Dance is approached as a way of noticing and valuing the present and the infinite differences that constitute our coming towards each other. The scores remove the possibility of measuring or verifying our relationships, demanding instead an engagement with what is not known, in the other and in our shared situation.

She will then facilitate a conversation based on the shared experience of these dances, focusing on the function of mysterious prompts, speculative engagement and the politics of positing sameness or difference.

Alice Chauchat ponders in practice on politics and ethics of togetherness by dancing, choreographing, teaching, making frames for acting together and writing, in and outside dance studios. 2010-12 she co-directed the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, 2017-20 she was a guest professor at HZT Berlin 2017-18 guest professor at JLU Giessen, since 2018 she's a seminar mentor for DASchoreography Amsterdam. Since 2014 her work under the umbrella title “Togethering” takes the form of dance scores whose practice and performance process the knowledge and complexity of collaborative practices, or simply being in the world with other people, into choreographic forms.

In this presentation, Solveig Styve Holte will share experiences and questions from the creation process of the choreographic work HORDE (2021) made together with choreographer Ingri Fiksdal.

HORDE took shape as a paid summer job for 8 girls between 15-18 years old, recruited from county Gamle Oslo. It was developed in collaboration with the youths and costume designers Elnaz and Mahtab Gargari, composer Rohey Taalah, and dancers Amie Mbye and Hawa Janlo. It premiered in October 23rd and 24th 2021 as part of CODA Oslo International Dance festival and the opening of the new MUNCH in Bjørvika Oslo. In 2022 HORDE was created for Kilden Teater in Kristiansand, and performed in Ravnedans. 

HORDE is a choreographic work that wants to question who can access art and artistic work today, both through practical organization as well as artistic expression. The initiative is motivated by a common interest for a larger diversity within all parts of the professional art field. Who can imagine themselves as artists in the future and who access professional art today? Holte questions choreography as a tool for organizing, and opens up discussions about the co-authorship and intersubjective relations happening both in the choreographic process and the performance. 
 
Solveig Styve Holte is a dancer, choreographer, and research fellow at department of Dance at Oslo National Academy of the Arts from 2019-2025. In her choreographic practice all existing material and dance historical archive is given new bodies, corporeality, and different futures. Her research aims to broaden and challenge the understanding of authorship, history writing and intertextuality in dance and choreography. Holte creates performances for museums, galleries, theatre, and outdoor spaces, as well as in being in the editorial team for the three anthologies KOREOGRAFI (2016/2018/2021). She is based between Oslo and Folkestad, where she is working towards developing YKS, a choreographic centre.

This session will be a conversation, hosted in the way that Gillie led Chisenhale Dance Space’s Coffee Mornings when she initiated the series in 2010. These sessions began with a list of questions - a long list - that would be a sort of buffet from which participants could choose to guide the conversation. In this session, Gillie will begin with a list of questions related to the topics of the symposium, inflected by her own interest in dance, choreography and participation. We will talk about and respond to these questions, but we will also generate our own lists of questions to feel ourselves amongst proliferating and multiple networks of enquiry, overlapping and incomplete.

Dr Gillie Kleiman works with and in dance and choreography, creating performances, texts, events and pedagogical encounters. Gillie’s work has a persistent interest in both the figure and the activity of the non-professional, and many projects have involved participation of non-professional collaborators or of the audience. In 2020, Gillie initiated a new cycle of thinking and working about fat and fatness. Alongside Gillie’s artistic practice, she is Head of Higher Education at Dance City, an adviser to Jerwood Arts, a Trustee of People Dancing, and an accredited trade union representative. Gillie lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Laura Navndrup Black will share principles and practices drawn from the artistic research project Imagining (the Imagination of) the Other, which approaches the child-adult relation as aesthetic subject.

Taussig (2002), invites us to imagine a continuous mirroring loop; a figure of eight that goes between child and adult, where the adult takes fascination in what she believes the child is fascinated with and the child in turn notices what catches the adult’s imagination and corresponds accordingly. This enquiry attempts to disrupt our imagination of the Other through continuous choreographic questioning. Approaching the child-adult relation head on, we ask ourselves: what do I want to know about the child and what does she want to know about me? What kind of practical choreographic questioning will we have to invent to find out? This questioning is not intended to provide answers, but rather to generate a keen curiosity towards other ways of working, relating, to seeing and being seen; to performing and making performance.

Laura Navndrup Black is a Copenhagen-based choreographer working with dance, installation and education. Equally concerned with participation, pedagogy and performance in both global and local contexts, her current research concerns the construction of choreographic challenges which allow intergenerational groups of professional and non-professional performers to collaborate. Laura holds a BPA (hons) from Northern School of Contemporary Dance, a post-graduate diploma in Dance Partnership from Statens Teaterskole, an MRes in Performance and Creative Research from University of Roehampton and is currently undertaking ph.d. research at University of Agder. Laura is Head of the Dance and Participation Master's Programme at The Danish National School of Performing Arts.