MORNING
Keynote Lecture | Doing Dance Research | Scott deLahunta
I am currently working on the issue of ethical practices in technology development. For this presentation, I will provide the basis for why I think dance research has a place here. Some of the questions being asked by this event address the challenge of defining what dance research is. This seems to be a different problem than exploring what dance research can do. I have difficulty defining what dance research is in any general sense, and I would probably resist such a definition. I find it easier to imagine what dance research might do and why this might be valuable. Crucial to this imaginary are two ideas. One is that corporeality, the state of having or being a body, is a constant because everyone has a body. However, everyone’s body is different and this difference is a critical constant. The other idea draws on research into the contribution that skillful bodily practices, such as dance, make to the development of our intellectual and social life. In my experience, these two ideas make it possible for dance research to come together with other fields to work on societal and humanistic areas of concern. Perhaps a certain definition of dance research emerges when an interdisciplinary intersection provides context, but this leaves open the question about its intrinsic properties. Is there a form of basic dance research that can be undertaken on its own terms?
Panel 1 | Embodying Theory and Practice in Dance Research: Entanglements, Strategies, and Resonances | Anne-Lise Brévers and Kopano Maroga
In dance research, theory and practice are in a continual and entangled dialogue that navigates between discursive and embodied forms of thinking and expression. To assume this connection between theory and practice, however, immediately raises crucial questions that pertain to the concrete reality of doing artistic research in dance: how exactly does one translate practice into theory and vice versa?; according to what criteria is dance practice considered (or validated) as research?; what are the strategies and tools to embody dance practice as research? In this panel, Kopano Maroga, and Anne-Lise Brévers will discuss these questions based on their experiences with artistic research. As these panelists all move in the sometimes messy spaces between theory and practice from different backgrounds, their conversation will help to amplify our understanding of embodying theory and practice inside dance research.
AFTERNOON
Keynote Lecture | Tele-and counter- choreographies of fear | Sérgio P. Andrade
Through the critical choreographic approach I analyze the dissemination of embodied acts which iterates the current neoliberal, neocolonial, and neo-fascist articulation in Brazil. I consider bodily practices in online and onsite interventions, crossing public demonstrations, artistic experiences and my own scholarly-artistic-activist practice.
Video work by Igor Koruga | ONE, TWO, THREE, COMRADE, COME DANCE WITH ME
This video work is shaped through the dramatization of information from the life and work of various modern dance pioneers in Germany, the United States and the Balkans in the first half of the twentieth century. Structured in a collage of TikTok videos as a current form of digital and online distribution of knowledge, the information in the video and its script is provided through various formats, from academical lecture to the gossiping theory and speculation. Based on the theoretical-artistic research within the project “Dance till the new dawn”, tracing the historical moments that have been very important for the struggle against the commodification of art, with a special focus on dance and performing arts, the thematic framework asks: who has the right to art? To whom does it belong? Who needs it? The work is in Serbian with English subtitles.
Panel 2 | (Post)Socialist Bodies: Uncovering Legacies of Dance | Igor Koruga, Milica Ivic and Dunja Njaradi
Trying to dwell on the marginal position of the post-Yugoslav region, specifically today's Serbia, this panel will highlight some of the difficulties of understanding, writing and doing dance (research) from three different yet very intertwined positions. Dunja Njaradi will shed some light on the recent developments of dance research at Belgrade University of Arts and its nesting relationship with broader European dance research and education. Milica Ivić will trace a specific non-institutional development of contemporary dance in Serbia from the 1990s. From the perspective of a ‘guerilla’ or non-institutional researcher, she will underline the difficulties of the notion of institutionalisation of contemporary dance, when dance itself emerges entangled with political and economic changes. Finally, Igor Koruga will give a necessary perspective of a dance artist who is active both in local and European contexts. He will offer insight into a creative process that involves taking a stance on archival material in dance. The goal of this panel, therefore, is twofold: to offer a glimpse at one marginal ‘small’ history of dance and to offer a challenge to the dominant notion of marginality and difference in dance scholarship.
Panel 3 | (De-)Institutionalizing Dance Research: Conditions, Frameworks, and Affordances | with CoDa members Christel Stalpaert (Ghent University, BE), Laura Karreman (Utrecht University, NL), Annouk Van Moorsel (Royal Conservatoire, BE), Sarah Whatley (Coventry University, UK), Susanne Franco (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, IT) and Efrosini Protopapa (Roehampton University, UK)
For dance artists, the recognition of their practice as research is often dependent on being affiliated with specific institutions, most notably with universities and conservatoires. This condition requires not only the ability to seek for institutional support, but also to make strategic use of the procedural frameworks imposed by larger structures that sometimes seem at odds with the specificity of choreographic research. Nonetheless, being embedded within larger research environments also bears the potential of discovering new terrain, participating in wider communities of researchers, or creating more visibility and impact. This panel brings together several members of “CoDa | Cultures of Dance,” the Research Network for Dance Studies, who all are deeply familiar with how institutional infrastructures can either advance or inhibit the development of artistic research within different international contexts. In this conversation, we will reflect on the various ways in which research in dance can or ought to function within the broader ecosystem of both the arts and academia.