Sumários
“What do you do when you get in the studio?” On searching, having, and letting go of methods...
17 Maio 2024, 09:30 • José Maria
In the past two decades in Europe, we have witnessed an explosion of methods in performance-making, an invention spurred by a rise of critical consciousness of, and experimentation with how we work and how the work works. It started off as a rebellion against silent apprenticeship in a masterclass and the sterile luxury of an empty room in which the dancer was expected to reinvent themself. It is 2024, and while the methodological turn has run its course, questions are pending. How do we sort out a myriad of existing methods that have accumulated in the dramaturgical experience of makers, performers and dramaturgs alike? When do you choose to choose.a method, and when are you chosen by it? In what situations are you compelled to loosen the grip or entirely give up the method? What do we mean when we say ‘method’, and why are some methods better treated as ‘procedures’ with material and others ‘operations’ with spectatorship? When and for whom does the distinction matter? Material for these sessions is practical, not to be read beforehand.
“We work with a matter that resists us...” On the dramaturgy of material
16 Maio 2024, 09:30 • José Maria
Dance dramaturgy, as I practice it, begins in the studio, in a working situation where ‘material’ generates a creative process, and the moment is pregnant with potentiality and expectation for all involved. What does the material want from me? How to gauge its mode of action, context and historical present? How to train sensitivity to the questions of access and belonging of ‘materials’?
“We work with a matter that resists us...” On the dramaturgy of material
15 Maio 2024, 09:30 • José Maria
Dance dramaturgy, as I practice it, begins in the studio, in a working situation where ‘material’ generates a creative process, and the moment is pregnant with potentiality and expectation for all involved. What does the material want from me? How to gauge its mode of action, context and historical present? How to train sensitivity to the questions of access and belonging of ‘materials’?
“Nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore...” Staking out positions and contexts of performance-making
14 Maio 2024, 09:30 • José Maria
Reading: Kunst, Bojana. “The Transfer of Care: Discomfort of Artistic Freedom” (From The Life of art: Transveral lines of care Maska, 2021), Transversal text, 2023. Bojana Cvejić, Dramaturgy at Work, seminar, May 6-17, University of Lisbon, Syllabus
Comrade, Ally, Friend Seeking figures and group technologies in belonging collectively
13 Maio 2024, 09:30 • José Maria
In situations where performance work intersects with a strong urge to orient oneself politically in the public sphere, and communities arise and divide up around diverse social and political concerns, artists in Europe (also elsewhere) are pressed to ask how they politically belong with others in crisis. Who is your friend or comrade, for whom are you an ally or mediator? Or as the queer theorist Lauren Berlant asks in their posthumous book On the Inconvenience of Other People: “With whom can you imagine sharing the world’s sidewalk?” Various terms for the political relations of belonging are on offer, circulating between cultural critics, social activists, cultural workers and artists on the scene: allyship, political solidarity, comradely love, intercession (mediation), or simply friendship, to name but a few. In this partial and incomplete outline, we will attempt to distinguish the lineage and the current usage of several such notions drawing on recent texts in cultural theory, as well as in informal discourses. This cannot be more than a partial and incomplete outline, whose main ambition is to register the current temperature of struggles, alliances and conflicts in the words that separate or federate subjects of art and cultural politics in Europe.