Within Practice Jeanine Durning and Shirley Harthey Ubilla 5 October 2024

Programme

Conversation programme Dansens Hus Elverket

Saturday 5 October 13.00 - 16.30

In this year's edition of Within Practice, the festival's thematic dialogues are gathered during a listening afternoon at Dansens Hus Elverket. The day starts with a lecture by the researcher Georg Döcker where he drills down into the concept of practice meanings in the field of dance.The afternoon will then be followed by two conversations where we invite prominent dance artists to speculate and share their perspectives and insights into the artistic trends they see in the dance field right now.

Mr Georg Döcker 

Georg researches, teaches and writes about theatre, dance and performing arts. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Roehampton ("What Was 'Practice'? Performance Practice - Social Practice - Practice-as-Research", funded by the University of Roehampton and the AHRC Techne Consortium) and is simultaneously undertaking a post-doctoral project at Paris Lodron University of Salzburg ("Towards a Genealogy of Feminist Spectacle after Florentina Holzinger", funded by the OeAD Ernst Mach Grant).

"I'm going to talk a bit about the socio-economic contradiction that this specific form, contemporary dance (and contemporary art in general), has come to address through the living concept of "practice". In dance and the performing arts, it has become customary to highlight the critical and political issues of "practice", as a way of rejecting a project and product-driven logic of production in the performing arts, in favour of a continuous process.

While this narrative has its merits from a genealogical perspective, I would suggest that "practice" is rather part of another conflict that deals with the temporal and subjective dimensions of contemporary productions: since capital and surplus production are based on a fictitious logic of infinity (completely unleashed by the seemingly infinite availability of information), "practice" is in a distinctly processual relation, navigating through different forms of processual regimes. It is the "daily" in "daily practice" that seems to be the key to understanding how "practice" both parallels and ultimately resists capitalist infinity (including its fascist effects of recursion), proposing instead, emphatically, a "shared practice."

Shirley Harthey Ubilla 

Shirley Harthey Ubilla, 1986, is a Chilean-Swedish performer and choreographer based in Estocolmo. Her choreographic work focuses on lesbian desires, Latinx identity, distorted power structures and queer reality. As a non-binary racialized butchflata, she is aware of the fact that bodies matter, and this along with themes of abjection, exaggeration, eroticism and humour are recurrent in her artistic work.

Shirley is interested in exploring the space in between; when something is about to turn into something else. It believes that this space has the potential to make us question what boundaries are and what happens when they are dissolving. A common thread in its work has been to seek out and develop practices of resistance with emancipatory possibilities. Constantly striving to decolonise gender, Shirley has a strong belief that making art is a fragile, awesome and cruel way of navigating how to live in this world!

What does it mean to explore resistance in a way that includes both celebration and healing? Is it possible to reject a cistem of thought rooted in a Eurocentric structure? Throughout my work, I have sought and developed practices of resistance with emancipatory possibilities. As a starting point, I have always used my own experiences as a nonbinary butch dyke of colour. My need to reject the Eurocentric perspective led me to do things that were both physically and mentally exhausting.

Now I have changed direction to a context that includes self-care and healing. In my practice, this means that the tentacles of my ancestors have been given the opportunity to break free and become entangled in relationships that I was previously unaware of. Their ability to reach through time and space will shape my presentation.

Jeanine Durning

For over 25 years, Jeanine Durning, born in 1967 in New York, has been exploring bodies' ability to organise themselves and wrestling with their relationship to time, space and place through choreographic experiments, performance, practice-based research, teaching and mentoring.

The New Yorker has described her performance work as containing both "the potential for philosophical insight and theatrical disaster". Since 2010 Jeanine has been engaged in the ongoing project non-stop, which is the basis of her research. On regular occasions since 2010, she has also performed her characteristic solo ingestion (which is based on her nonstop speaking practice), across Europe, the USA and in Canada. Jeanine has had the privilege of collaborating with several choreographers, including Deborah Hay since 2005.

She has also worked as a performer, consultant, choreographic assistant and coach. Between 2020 and 2023, Jeanine was a rehearsal director for the Stockholm-based contemporary dance company Cullberg, performing and touring works by Deborah Hay and Swedish choreographer Alma Söderberg. As a teacher, mentor/advisor and through the creation of her choreographies, Jeanine has had the opportunity to share her experiences worldwide.

Her recent choreographic collaborations include Candoco Dance Company (London) in the work Last Shelter (2021), with Norrdans (Härnösand) in the work Everlasting - a new love (2023), and with a group of independent American performers in the work The Invitation Situation (In 2023, Durning collaborated with writer/editor Jenn Joy and designer Sherri Wasserman on a book project, supported by MANCC and The Mellon Foundation, that focused on Durning's practice, non-stop.

With a bag in hand (or some other unwieldy object), I enter a room reminiscent of other rooms I have visited. I ask a question in a direction I usually don't want to face: where am I and where am I going?

Specifically designed for Within Practice, I seek to respond to the invitation to consciously reveal practice while being inside and immersed in it, in the shared space of the encounter with others, while asking fundamental questions such as: what are we doing, where are we, where are we going, what happens when we get there, where are we in relation to what, who, where, when and for how long. Somewhere between doing things and being things, between drawing material from past works and addressing the present, I will test (striving for detail and precision, while accepting that it may not happen) the speed of movement, speaking, deciding, interfering, tracking, perceiving, locating, changing, placing, responding, sensing, making meaning, imagining, listening, composing, speculating, and using other strategies to create presence.

 "And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space."

- Pattiann Rogers, excerpt from Achieving Perspective