Where does the dance go when it is danced? 27 April 2017

Programme

During the anniversary week, the Cullberg Ballet is organising an international seminar on a contemporary dance company's relationship with its artistic heritage, archive and future.

Transience is one of the hallmarks of dance art. Dance takes place in time and space, occurs in a limited encounter between dancer and audience, and can hardly be captured and preserved in a material form. Sure, there is video, film, forms of notation, all of which are attempts to capture movement. But the movement itself, which emerged there and then, is gone forever. Marina Abramovic recently commented on re-enactments of performance works: "It is a living art. If you don't re-perform that, it becomes a photograph in a book or a bad video".

The transience of dance art makes it difficult to archive and relive. After a dance performance, the experience follows the audience home. It becomes part of memories, mixed with the individual's imaginations, projections and distortions. In the dancers' bodies, dance lives on as a bodily memory. What do we need to do with a choreographer's legacy? Recreate the choreographies? Reclaim the vision of dance? Research and study them and prepare a way into the future with new works, with new dance?

The seminar will focus on these questions and try to find answers.

Scheme

9.00-9.45 Registration

9.45-10.00 Welcome speech by Annelie Gardell (Artistic director, Dansens Hus) and Gabriel Smeets (Artistic Director, Cullbergbaletten).

10.00-10.30 Opening speech by Thomas Thorausch (Deputy Director, Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln) Ah how fleeting, ah how insubstantial...? Some thoughts on the art of archiving dance.

10.30-12.00 Panel I.
A personal conversation about the legacy of Birgit Cullberg and Pina Bausch with visits to memories, family matters and responsibilities, social issues, organising the future and more.

Moderator: Anna Efraimsson (Senior Lecturer in Choreography DOCH, Producer/Curator). With: Salomon Bausch (Executive Director Pina Bausch Foundatıon), Mats Ek (Choreographer/Director).

12.00-13.15 Lunch break (at cost price)

13.15-14.15 Panel II.
We reflect on the dancer as a carrier of a personal movement archive, derived from working with one or more choreographers. The panel offers reflections on how the view of the individual dancer as an archive relates to heritage, both for the dancers and for the field at large.

Moderator: Magnus Nordberg (General Manager/Producer, Nordberg Movement). With: Susan Kozel (Professor of new media, Malmö University), Agnieszka Sjökvist Dlugoszewska (Dancer, Cullbergbaletten), Rani Nair (dancer/choreographer).

14:15-14:30 Break

14:30-16:00 Panel III.
Penetrating and interweaving the past, present and future. Archives are both always already there, always what is yet to come. The panel questions how our archives are potential modes of world building; how they normalise, legitimise and aestheticise gestures, movements and bodies, how they make some bodies visible while leaving others absent. In dialogue, we will explore the role of projection and speculation in archival practice: the queer potential of the past, immaterial history and imaginary bodies.

Moderator: Sandra Noeth (Dramaturge/Curator and senior lecturer at DOCH). With: Manuel Pelmus (Choreographer), Zoë Poluch (Choreographer), Eike Wittrock (Curator/Dance Historian, University of Hildesheim).

16:00-16:30 Summary by Gabriel Smeets + Q&A session