Symposium
ENERGETIC FORCES AS AESTHETIC INTERVENTIONS:
Wahrnehmungspolitiken von Körper/Szenen
22. - 23.06.2018
Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin in den Uferstudios
(Studio 11)
DE / Das wissenschaftlich-künstlerische Symposium des DFG-Forschungsprojekts Transgressionen: Energetisierung von Körper und Szene erkundet historische, zeitgenössische, ästhetische und praxeologische Zugänge zum Energetischen. Wie Energien mobilisiert, gelenkt und adressiert werden, prägt die Wahrnehmungspolitiken darstellender Künste. Energetische Prozesse durchziehen Tanz, Performance Art und Installationen. Sie transformieren den Körper, rufen spezifische Zustände hervor und drängen als choreographische Konkretisierungen auf Intensitäten.
Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass in zeitgenössischem Tanz und Performance energetische Zustände nicht mehr als bloße Bedingungen von Formen, sondern als eigene ästhetische Intervention auftreten, stellen sich eine Reihe von Fragen: Welche Manöver der Mobilisierung, Aktivierung, Initiierung, Regulierung, Lenkung und Eindämmung von Kräften lassen sich erkennen? Wodurch werden energetische Prozesse zu ästhetischen Kräften und was macht sie für Choreographen interessant? Welche Funktionen, Potentiale und Versprechungen gehen mit dem Energetischen einher? Und wie lassen sich Energetisierungen in Tanz und Performance beschreiben und analysieren? Das wissenschaftlich-künstlerische Symposium geht diesen Fragen im Zusammenschluss von praxeologischen, ästhetischen, historischen, diskursanalytischen und gesellschaftspolitischen Perspektiven nach.
ENG / The scientific-artistic symposium organized as part of the DFG-research project 'Transgressions: Energetic Processes of Body and Scene' explores historic, contemporary, aesthetic and praxeological approaches to the energetic. The ways in which energies are mobilized, directed and addressed do shape the perceptual politics of performing arts. Energetic processes cross dance, performance art and installations. They transform the body, evoke specific states and, manifesting as choreographic structures, push towards intensities.
In contemporary dance and performance, energetic processes no longer seem like mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. Following this observation, several questions arise: Which manoeuvres of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation and containment of forces are perceptible? How do energetic forces emerge as aesthetic interventions and what draws a choreographer's interest toward them? What kinds of functions, potentials and promises accompany the energetic? How can we describe and analyse energetic processes in dance and performance? The scientific and artistic symposium addresses these questions integrating praxeological, aesthetic, historic, discourse-analytic and sociopolitical perspectives.
Mit Beiträgen von Sabine Huschka (Berlin), Barbara Gronau (Berlin), Susanne Franco (Venedig), Meghan Quinlan (California), Lucia Ruprecht (Cambridge), Gerald Siegmund (Gießen), Christina Thurner (Bern), Susan Kozel (Malmö) und den Choreographinnen Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir (Reykjavík, Island/Berlin) und Kat Válastur (Berlin)
Konzeption/Conception: PD Dr. Sabine Huschka in Kooperation mit Prof. Dr. Barbara Gronau
Gefördert von / Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Konferenzsprachen: Englisch / Deutsch
Conference languages: English / German
Please note that all lectures whose title appear in English will be held in English,
all those whose title appear in German will be held in German.
Anmeldung / Registration
Für die Vorträge ist keine Anmeldung notwendig. Für den Workshop am Samstag melden Sie sich bitte an bis zum 15.06.2018 unter: Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein!
No pre-registration for the lectures required. Please sign up for the workshop until the 15.06.2018 via email to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein!
Ort / Location
Studio 11, Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT) in den Uferstudios │ Uferstraße 23 │ 13357 Berlin
Abstracts
22.06. 10:30 - 11:15 Uhr Barbara Gronau (Berlin):
How to talk about energy? Konzepte der Energie in den Künsten
Über Energie zu sprechen, heisst einen Schlüsselbegriff menschlicher Kultur ins Auge zu fassen, an dem sich entscheidende Umbrüche im Welt- und Selbstverständnis des Menschen ablesen lassen. Bezeichnenderweise tauchen Begriffe des Energetischen in den Darstellenden Künsten seit über einhundert Jahren auf und haben sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten verstärkt und ausdifferenziert. Ob im Schauspiel, im Tanz oder in der Performance-Art – mit dem Begriff der Energie werden neben den immateriellen und medialen Bedingungen künstlerischer Darstellung auch deren Effekte zu fassen versucht. Der Vortrag entfaltet zentrale Punkte des Energiediskurses in den Darstellenden Künsten des 20. Und 21. Jahrhunderts entlang von drei Merkmalen: (a) dem Umgang der Darsteller mit ihrem Körper, (b) der Suche nach neuen Wirkungen auf das Publikum und (c) der Befragung des Begriffes ‚künstlerische Arbeit’.
22.06. 11:15 – 12:00 Uhr Christina Thurner (Bern) Freitag, 22.06.:
"...ich suchte und entdeckte endlich auch den Sitz aller Bewegung" Diskursfigurationen des Energetischen in Tänzer_innen-Autobiografien
Während Isadora Duncan ihre „Tanzstudien“ in ihren Memoiren als nach innen gerichtete energetische Praxis beschreibt, als Suche nach dem „Sitz des inneren Ausdruckes, von dem aus die seelischen Erlebnisse sich dem Körper mitteilen und ihm lebendige Erleuchtung verleihen sollen“, meint die Balanchine-Ballerina Tony Bentley in ihrem Dancer’s Journal: „All our physical energy is the overflow of spiritual feelings”. Für Tanzwissenschaftler_innen stellt sich in Anbetracht solcher Voten die Frage, wie mit Selbstaussagen von Tänzer_innen zu energetischen Erfahrungen umzugehen ist. Wie wird ‘das Energetische’ jeweils diskursiviert? Wie wird es in Bezug auf (unterschiedliche) Tanzverständnisse und ‑phänomene beschrieben? Welche Erkenntnisse lassen sich aus solchen Aussagen im Hinblick auf tanzwissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen mit körperlichen Kräften generieren? Und wie? Mit dem Fokus auf Diskursfigurationen des Energetischen soll das bisher von der Tanzwissenschaft vernachlässigte oder aber weitgehend unkritisch verwertete Quellengenre ‘Autobiografie’, d.h. (eigene) Lebensbeschreibungen von Tänzer_innen, epistemologisch befragt und exemplarisch (anhand von Beispielen aus dem 20. Jahrhundert) produktiv gemacht werden.
22.06. 12.15 – 13.00 Uhr Lucia Ruprecht (Cambridge):
'That jerking into now’: Reflections on the Onceness, All-at-Onceness and Alwaysness of Gesture
If this symposium enquires into the potential of energetic forces to become aesthetic interventions, this paper begins by considering gesture as an aesthetic intervention into energetic force. Gestures, as defined by Walter Benjamin in his essays on Bertolt Brecht, emerge through interruption, as so many still moments that are cut out of movement flow. In this modernist account, the political power of gestures derives from their exposure as repeatable, quotable, and ideally changeable; but it also rests on their potentiality, on the turning into gesture of the ultimately violent act by temporally stalling or manipulating its thrust. The political dialectic between movement and stillness which forms the core of modernist gestural thinking will be tested, here, against two temporally distant but associatively close works: Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series (c. 1980) which seeks the high impact moment – ‘that jerking into now’, as he says – in the onceness of the energetic photographic pose; and Boris Charmatz’ 2017 10000 Gestures that multiplies such onceness in the refusal to repeat. Radically transient gestures, performed all-at-once, give way to alwaysness: ‘the chaos of expenditure is so perfect that it verges on immobility’, writes Charmatz on his piece.
22.06. 14.15 – 15.00 Uhr Gerald Siegmund (Gießen):
Mobilzation, Force, and the Politics of Transformation
This paper focuses on Randy Martin’s concept of mobilization that he proposed in his 1998 book Critical Moves. In his book, Martin focuses on dance’s infinite capacity to mobilize people to both produce dance and to assemble for dance, which for Martin is also a political process. Being the grid rather than the movement, being the potential to move rather than movement in space and time, energy and mobilization align. Both are rallying calls for change and transformation, for different articulations of bodies and social kinesthetic energies. It is here that Martin’s concept of mobilization meets the much older concept of the imagination or, Einbildungskraft, as an anthropological category more specific to the field of the arts. They both are impersonal non-subjectified vehicles for an open process of doing and undoing bodies. Drawing on some examples form the field of dance, this paper will investigate this relation.
22.06. 15:00 – 16:00 Uhr Meghan Quinlan (University of California):
Gaga as Metatechnique: Learning in a Neoliberal Dance Market
This lecture explores the classroom structures and pedagogical interventions found in Gaga classes to interrogate the ways in which learning happens in these classes. Specifically, I will demonstrate the ways in which Gaga blurs the boundaries of technique, choreography, and improvisation in an attempt to teach students not necessarily how to create strict forms from techniques such as ballet, but how to approach movement. I argue that this is particularly well suited for student development in the contemporary neoliberal dance market, and explore the ways in which Gaga can train dance laborers to be prepared to meet the aesthetic, economic, and political demands of the current moment.
22.06. 16:30 – 17:15 Uhr Susanne Franco (Ca’ Foscari Universität Venedig):
Dynamics, Eukinetics and Effort. Past and present of Rudolf Laban’s vision of movement
My presentation aims at framing the historical context in which Rudolf Laban developed his theory of movement, with particular attention to the concepts of dynamics, eukinetics and effort. I’ll examine the complex linguistic level of his theoretical approach, partially in German and partially in English, and how his perspective on movement is related to scientific and philosophic discourses of his time. The second part of the presentation will focus on the influence that this vision and theory of body movement has exerted on modern and contemporary dance shaping the way we still look and think about energetic forces and their aesthetic dimensions.
22.06. 17:30 – 18:30 Uhr Kat Válastur (Berlin):
Approaching Movement Language and the Body in Rasp Your Soul (2017)
Addressing the specific force field emerging from the choreography of Rasp Your Soul (2017), the talk investigates the special kinetic perception and dance language produced by the body moving inside that field, expanding in time and space, rendering different intensities perceptible. In our digitalized times, flawless faces and bodies in the stillness of the advertisements and in video games feel like a high resolution death. And yet all of this is followed, at the same time, by a perverse need for wanting regardless of the danger that this glossy artificiality might affect you like a malicious virus. How does this co-existence create new narratives for our bodies? Perceiving our bodies today as data receivers, constantly exposed to inputs, how do we relate to these inputs and how they affect and shape who we are? How do we experience this extension and how does this extension reflect back on us? Elements of artificiality and physicality, of the fictional and the real merge into a multi-layered symbiosis of different forms of becomings. How does this uncanny feeling that occurs in our vernacular living reality feed a dance work?
23.06. 10:00 – 11:00 Uhr Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir (Berlin) / Susan Kozel (Malmö):
Full Drop into the Body – the work of Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir
What does it mean to intervene? With bodies? Through somatic processes? Embedded within wider political, social and artistic contexts? This lecture will open out the work of choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, revealing the energetic qualities of her body practices, her composition processes and her choreographies. In dialogue with Professor Susan Kozel, Guðjónsdóttir will discuss the nuance of her practice with fascia and somatic states called “Full Drop into the Body.” Alignments will be fostered between phenomenological research into affect and the shifts in perception, motion and experience that characterise Guðjónsdóttir's deeply transformative work. Some "after-effects" or memory traces of the aesthetic processes in the form of archiving and visual media design will be discussed, where emphasis is placed on how her somatic choreographies can be remembered and ripple outwards in various materialisations.
Kurzbiographien der Referent*innen
Susanne Franco is Assistant Professor at the University Ca’ Foscari Venice. She has authored Martha Graham (L’Epos 2003) and Fréderic Flamand (L’Epos 2004), and edited the special issue Audruckstanz: il corpo, la danza e la critica, in Biblioteca Teatrale (n. 78, 2006). With Marina Nordera she edited Dance Discourses. Keywords in Dance Research (Routledge 2007), and Ricordanze. Memoria in movimento e coreografie della storia (UTET Università 2010). She has been also the editor of the book series “Dance for Word/Dance Forward. Interviste sulla coreografia contemporanea” (L’Epos 2004-2011). She is currently research associate of CTEL (Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Epistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts vivants: Littérature, Musique, Théâtre, Danse) at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. As curator she collaborates with the Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice), the Foundation Pinault (Venice), and together with Roberto Casarotto has curated dance events for the Hangar Bicocca (Milan).
Barbara Gronau ist Professorin für Theorie und Geschichte des Theaters an der Universität der Künste Berlin und Sprecherin des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs »Das Wissen der Künste«. Zu ihren Forschungs- und Publikationsschwerpunkten gehören Schnittstellen von Bildender Kunst und Theater, Theorien der Agency und Performanz sowie Epistemologien des Ästhetischen.
Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir has created and toured internationally her performance work since 2010. She lives and works in Berlin and started her on going collaboration with Professor Susan Kozel in 2017. In 2013 her work started taking shape from her on going in-depth research into a methodology that accesses physiological and emotional sub-worlds. She has developed a new genre of performative body language, and an original working method that directly informs her creative outcomes.
Susan Kozel is a Professor with the School of Art and Culture at Malmö University in Sweden. She is known for her artistic and philosophical work applying phenomenology to a range of kinaesthetic, affective and somatic practices. Publications include Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (The MIT Press, 2017). Current artistic work explores archiving and memory, including in AffeXity: Passages & Tunnels with Jeannette Ginslov, and Somatic Archiving with Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. (http://livingarchives.mah.se)
Gerald Siegmund, Studium der Theaterwissenschaft, Anglistik und Romanistik an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, ist Professor für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft an der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten zählen Theater seit den 1960er Jahren, Theatertheorie, Ästhetik, Entwicklungen im zeitgenössischen Tanz und im postdramatischen Theater im Übergang zur Performance und zur bildenden Kunst. Zuletzt erschienen die Monographie Jérôme Bel. Dance, Theatre, and the Subject, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Meghan Quinlan is a US-based dance scholar researching the circulation and politics of Gaga, the improvisatory dance language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. She earned her PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside and has since taught at universities in California and Georgia. Her work has been published in journals such as Dance Research Journal and TDR: The Drama Review.
Lucia Ruprecht ist affiliated Lecturer am Department of German and Dutch der Universität Cambridge und Fellow am Emmanuel College. Ihre zahlreichen Veröffentlichungen befassen sich mit Tanz, Literatur und Film, darunter als Autorin Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) und Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and the Culture of Gestures at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (OUP, im Druck), als Herausgeberin Towards an Ethics of Gesture (special section of Performance Philosophy, 2017), Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (2003), Cultural Pleasure (2009) und New German Dance Studies (2012).
Christina Thurner ist Professorin für Tanzwissenschaft am Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der Universität Bern. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Tanzästhetiken und -diskurse vom 18. bis 21. Jahrhundert, Tanzhistoriografie und -kritik, Autobiografien. Jüngere Publikationen: Rhythmen in Bewegung. Äußere, eigene und verkörperte Zeitlichkeit im künstlerischen Tanz, Hannover 2017; Tanzkritik. Materialien (1997-2014), Zürich 2015.
Kat Válastur is claimed as one of the most exciting choreographers in the Berlin dance scene. Her works are defined by the creation of a distinctive dance language. Through her groundbreaking works notions of fragmented narratives, time lapses and virtuality emerge. Highly intense atmospheres are created, challenging the senses and the rules of ordinary perception. In 2017 after her retrospective “We were better in the future” at HAU hebbel am Ufer, she started working on a new circle of works with the title “ The staggered dances of beauty”. The first work of the circle Rasp Your Soul premiered on the 2nd of November 2017 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer.