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Venues: MACBA, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Mercat de les Flors

This three-day conference will focus on choreography but will include participants from the fields of visual art, art history, performance studies, cultural studies, dance and philosophy. A series of lectures will alternate with conversations, discussions, panels and coffee breaks. Participants will experience the exhibition Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy at the Fundació Tàpies as well as other significant works. The purpose of the conference is to introduce different perspectives and identify a point of departure for a discourse specific to choreography as an expanded practice away from artistic research and towards the production of other worlds.


In the last few years the term 'choreography' has been used in an ever-expanding sense, becoming synonymous with specific structures and strategies disconnected from subjectivist bodily expression, style and representation. Accordingly, the meaning of choreography has transformed from referring to a set of protocols or tools used in order to produce something predetermined, i.e. a dance, to an open cluster of tools that can be used in a generic capacity for both analysis and production.

The conference will result in a major anthology.

With: Bojana Cvejić, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Graham Harman, Ana Janevski, Emma Kim Hagdahl, André Lepecki, Xavier Le Roy, Maria Lind, Isabel de Naverán, Luciana Parisi, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Mårten Spångberg, Francisco Tirado, Christophe Wavelet and others.

An event organized by the University of Dance and Circus Stockholm, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, and the Mercat de les Flors, with the support of the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, on the occasion of the exhibition Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Devised by Mårten Spångberg.

To accompany this conference, a reading group will meet at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies on alternate Thursdays at 6.30 pm. Attendance is free and open to all, texts will be both in Spanish and English. More information here.

Choreography is today emancipating itself from dance, engaging in a vibrant process of articulation. Choreographers are experimenting with new models of production, alternative formats, have broadened out the understanding of social choreography considerably and are mobilizing innovative frontiers in respect of self-organization, empowerment and autonomy. Simultaneously, we have seen a number of exhibitions in which choreography is often placed in a tension between movement, situation and objects. Choreography needs to redefine itself in order to include artists and others who use choreographic strategies without necessarily relating them to dance. At the same time, it needs to remain inclusive of choreographers involved in practices such as engineering situations, organization, social choreography and movement as well as expanding towards cinematic strategies, documentary and documentation and rethinking publication, exhibition, display, mediatization, production and post-production.

In short, choreography is currently experiencing a veritable revolution. Aesthetically, it is turning away from established notions of dance and its strong association with skill and craft, to instead establish autonomous discourses that override causalities among conceptualization, production, expression and representation. At the same time it is gaining momentum on a political level as it is placed in the middle of a society to a large degree organized around movement, subjectivity and immaterial exchange. Choreography is not a priori performative, nor is it bound to expression and reiteration of subjectivity; it is becoming an expanded practice, a practice that is political in and of itself.

Bojana Cvejić is a performance theorist and practitioner. She has collaborated in works with/by Jan Ritsema and Xavier Le Roy, among others, and has been involved in a number of educational programmes, including P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, as well as organizing independent platforms for theory and practice in performance, like TkH Center in Belgrade and PAF in St. Erme. She teaches at Utrecht University and is completing her PhD at CRMEP in London. She is author (with A. T. De Keersmaeker) of A Choreographer’s Score (2012) and has published widely in several journals and anthologies.

Dorothea von Hantelmann is an art historian based at the Freie Universität in Berlin where she has been a member of the collaborative research project 'Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits'. Hantelmann has worked intensively on the meaning of 'performativity' for visual art as well as the history of museums and exhibitions. Her recent publications are How to Do Things with Art. On the Meaning of Performativity for Visual Art (2010) and Die Ausstellung. Politik eines Rituals (edited with C. Meister, 2010).

Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of numerous books, among them The Quadruple Object (2011), Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2011), Circus Philosophicus (2010), Towards Speculative Realism (2010) and Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005).

Ana Janevski is Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the MoMA, New York. She was previously based at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2011 she curated We Can’t Promise to do More than an Experiment: Experimental film and beyond in Yugoslavia in 60s and 70s at MACBA. Janevski has also co-curated with Pierre Bal-Blanc the performance exhibition The Living Currency.

André Lepecki is Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is author of Exhausting Dance (2006) and editor of Planes of Composition (with J. Joy, 2010), The Senses in Performance (with S. Banes, 2007), Of the Presence of the Body (2004), and the forthcoming Dance (2012). He has curated numerous festivals and exhibitions including the award-winning re-staging of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. In 2010 he co-curated the Archive on Dance and Visual Arts since the 1960s for the exhibition Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Xavier Le Roy holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Montpellier, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has been artist-in-residence at the Podewil in Berlin, and associated artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier. His latest works such as the solo Le Sacre du Printemps (2007), the group piece low pieces (2011), and production (2011), created together with Mårten Spångberg for exhibition spaces, produce situations that explore the relationships between spectators/visitors/performers and the production of subjectivities. He recently premiered a piece for exhibition spaces, Retrospective at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.

Maria Lind is the director of Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Until 2010 she was director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and before that she was director of Iaspis in Stockholm and of the Kunstverein München. She is the author of Selected Writings (2010) and co-editor of The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008), Curating with Light Luggage (2005), Collected Newsletter (2005), Taking the Matter into Common Hands (2007), as well as the report European Cultural Policies 2015 (2005). She received the 2009 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement

Isabel de Naverán is a writer working around contemporary choreography and a member of ARTEA. With Leire Vergara, Beatriz Cavia and Miren Jaio she created Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao, a platform inspired by the desire to bridge the gap between practice and theory. Its aim is to build a space of sustained discourse and hybrid situations where an exchange of ideas can take place and artistic projects can be materialised. She has a PhD in Visual Arts and is the editor of Hacer Historia. Reflexiones desde la práctica de la danza (2010).

Luciana Parisi is senior lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London. Her research looks at the asymmetric relationship between science and philosophy, aesthetics and culture, technology and politics to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change. Her interest in interactive media has led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. She is the author of Abstract Sex (2004) and is currently completing Contagious Architecture, Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (forthcoming).

Goran Sergej Pristaš is a dramaturge and associate professor at the Academy of Drama Art, University of Zagreb (where he is the president of the Centre for Artistic Research) and co-founder of BADco., a performing arts collective. He was previously programme coordinator in the Centre for Drama Art (CDU) and editor-in-chief of Frakcija, a magazine for the performing arts. One of the initiators of the project Zagreb - Cultural Kapital of Europe. With his projects and collaborations he has taken part in the Venice Biennale 2011, Documenta 12, ARCO and numerous festivals and conferences.

Mårten Spångberg is a performance-related artist, choreographer and theoretician based in Stockholm. He has been active on stage since 1994, and since 1999 he has created his own choreographies. With the architect Tor Lindstrand he initiated International Festival, an interdisciplinary practice merging architecture and choreography/performance. Since 1996 he has organized and curated festivals internationally. He initiated the network INPEX in 2006, with which he also published The Swedish Dance History (2010). He has thorough experience in teaching both theory and practice. Between 2008 and 2012, he was director of the MA program in choreography at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. His first book Spangbergianism was published in 2011.

Francisco Tirado is a lecturer in Social Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is full member of the Group for Social Studies of Science and Technology (GESCIT). His main research interests cohere around four main topics: science and technology studies, power relationships and political action in new socio-technical contexts, citizen participation in techno-scientific controversies and medicine and biopolitics. He is the author of several articles and books on science and technology and power relations in new socio-technical contexts.

Christophe Wavelet is a researcher and writer on choreography living and working in Brussels. He was a founding member of Quatuor Albrecht Knust, a collective producing groundbreaking reconstructions of choreographic works mainly from the 1960s. He headed the International Research Dept. at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris (1999-2002) and was artistic director of LiFE, Saint-Nazaire (2007-2010); he has also curated numerous events and exhibitions.

Xavier Le Roy "Retrospective", 2012

Programme

Wednesady 28, Friday 30 and Saturday 31 March 2012.

Wednesady 28

Mercat de les Flors
9.00 pm: Le Sacre du Printemps by Xavier Le Roy (Ticket is required)
Friday 30

Fundació Antoni Tàpies
10.00 am: Introduction and Dorothea von Hantelmann
11.00 am – 2.00 pm: Open discussion on Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy, with Bojana Cvejić, Chistophe Wavelet, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Isabel de Naverán, Laurence Rassel, Mårten Spångberg and Xavier Le Roy
MACBA
5.00 – 10.00 pm: Graham Harman, Luciana Parisi, Francisco Tirado

Saturday 31

MACBA
11.00 am – 2.30 pm: Mårten Spångberg, Ana Janevski, Maria Lind
5.00 – 10.00 pm: Goran Sergej Pristaš, Bojana Cvejić, André Lepecki
Due to the general strike to take place in Spain on 29 March, La Sacre du Printemps will not be performed at the Mercat de les Flors on that day. Dorothea von Hantelmann's intervention has been postponed to the morning of the 30th.

This programme is subject to last-minute changes.

MACBA Public Programs
Tel. (+34) 93 481 46 81
programespublics [at] macba [dot] cat


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