ACT FESTIVAL (Bilbao, Spain) has launched the call for applications to participate in this year’s edition, which will take place between 2 and 5 November 2022.
The call is addressed to emerging artists who have a 30-minute performance piece.
The festival is interested in artistic proposals that take risks, that position themselves out of formal settings and explore new formats or stage languages.
General terms and conditions here
Deadline for applications: March 15
The National Center for Dance (CNDB) together with UNATC I. L. Caragiale-National University of Theater and Cinematography „I.L. Caragiale ”and UNMB – National University of Music Bucharest is kickstarting on February 3rd and 4th the international project #RELAY – Thinking Artistic Material in Music and Dance, carried out within the program # ERASMUS + together with Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (DE), Den Danske Scenekunstskole (DK) and Sikinnis Dance and Performing Arts Center (GR).
During the first project meeting on Friday, February 4, the local partners are organizing at the CNDB – “Stere Popescu” hall an introductory workshop, guided by university professors Andreea Duță and Cătălin Creţu, with UNATC – choreography section and UNMB students as participants.
The RELAY project will take place over the course of three years (November 2021 – November 2024) and aims at developing existing knowledge structures, contributing to new perspectives in the fields of dance, choreography, music composition and arts education. RELAY came to life from a current approach to contemporary dance, which uses movement to examine the supposed duality of material and immaterial. The project also looks at how dance and music can find common ground in this process of exploration.
In the absence of a framework – infrastructure, programs – that offers the possibility of a constant and accessible body training, as a basis and catalyst for creation and creativity, the National Center for Dance Bucharest initiates a program for artists in the dance community, based on the principle of sharing practices and participation.
More specifically, starting with February 8, we open the hall (or studio) in Bd. Mărășești 80-82 twice a week, for free physical training sessions in which anyone from the dance and performing arts community can participate and everyone is invited to contribute.
Thus, each session will be coordinated by an artist who will share their body training practices with the other participants. Coordinating a training session is done freely, by rotation and voluntary registration. Participation is free, without prior registration.
No taxes, no fees.
This program is not focused on directions of creation, research, composition, and it doesn’t directly target the artistic production and does not promote a body style or method, but is based instead on the plurality of proposals coming from the community, for the community.
Alexandra Mihaela Dancs, Paul Dunca/Paula Dunker, Smaranda Găbudeanu, Cristina Lilienfeld, Cristian Nanculescu, Virginia Negru, Răzvan Rotaru, Filip Stoica and Eliza Trefaș have already confirmed their participation and that they will also be coordinating training sessions.
Tuesday & Thursday, 10 am-12pm
[from February 8 to March 17] *
FREE DROP-IN TRAINING
Registration for training session coordination by e-mail to andreea.andrei@cndb.ro.
*with the possibility of extension and perpetuation, depending on interest and participation, adapted to the availability and schedule of CNDB spaces
Radar Sofia is announcing an open call for artists for three fully-funded residencies in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2022 under its year-long programme Distance and Resistance. Radar Sofia is a small artist-run organization that functions as a residency space, a production house and a platform for development of new dramaturgy.
Every year Radar Sofia proposes a curatorial line with a main theme and a series of guest artists – invited or selected through an international open call – who give a lecture or workshop sharing their methods and practices, and/or create a performance involving local participants in the work process. One of the aims of these curatorial lines is to develop the local artistic field through critical discourse, free non-formal education and new experimental formats, as well as to create opportunities for Bulgarian artists to form partnerships and collaborate with international professionals. Radar Sofia as an international place for experimental artistic practice has so far created and supported numerous spin-off projects coming up as a result of the residencies. You can look at the website for the full list of previous residents and projects (sections ‘news’ and ‘our residents’).
Social distancing, border closures, postponement of plans and projects, cancellation of festivals and residencies as well as a general sense of growing isolationism made us choose the theme of Distance and Resistance. If the situation with the pandemic only intensifies and makes visible what we’ve already been living through for a long time – a migration from the physical to the digital world, increasing work insecurity, social and physical distancing – then how does our artistic practice respond to these processes, how does it resist them, how does it offer alternatives and how does it distance itself from the ready-made solutions? Radar Sofia is the first and only residency in the Bulgarian context, focused on dramaturgy understood in a very broad sense. We ask you and ourselves: what can dramaturgy contribute to the world of today, how can it bring people together and how can it help re-imagine our contexts?
We believe the digital cannot be the only alternative during health and climate catastrophes, especially for artistic practices rooted in the live body and the meeting between people, that’s why we insist on offering physical residencies, live in Sofia.
(Radar Sofia)
There are three deadlines for the three different time slots as follows
The residencies last for a minimum of one month with a possibility for extension.
Radar Sofia will provide for each resident:
One-time stipend of 800 EUR
Up to 400 EUR for production/presentation (to be spent locally)
Up to 200 EUR for travel costs
We invite artists who are interested in the local situation in Sofia, want to show and share their previous work, interact with local communities, research and develop new ideas, as well as form long-lasting partnerships in Bulgaria.
Production is not a must but if you have an idea our team will support you in getting in touch with local institutions, finding the most suitable working and presentation space. Radar Sofia has a small studio but doesn’t have its own stage or bigger rehearsal room. However, it collaborates with a number of local institutions that can provide various options. A potential final presentation can take the form of a lecture, talk, performance, workshop, installation, exhibition, work-in-progress, etc. A return to Sofia at a later stage to finalize an idea with additional funding is also an option.
We accept applicants from all performative fields, with a special focus on dramaturgical thinking (understood as wide as possible), which is at the core of our practice at Radar Sofia, spanning across disciplines. We welcome performing arts makers, playwrights, dramaturges, directors, performers, choreographers, as well as visual artists and curators working with live art, performance art, relational aesthetics, interactivity, community engagement and other old and new performative practices.
The “Centre national de la danse x Cité internationale des arts” Residency is dedicated to choreographers and curators/programmers of performing arts residing outside French territories.
The purpose of this residency is to promote mobility and to expand artistic and professional networks. For the choreographer, it is an opportunity to be promote his/her work in France and nourish the research. The young professional already engaged in an artistic consulting function will be able to observe the operating modes and to experience the French scene.
With this program, the Centre national de la danse and the Cité internationale des arts commit themselves to support the laureate’s project by offering him/her a special support and a three-month residency in Paris and Pantin.
Deadline for applications: 06th February 2022 included
All the information and practical questions to read below (please consult these elements before submittng your application). Apply here!
This year, the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB) appointed Simona Deaconescu as the associate artist, supporting the projects developed by the choreographer in the international context.
In full international prominence, the choreographer has demonstrated her artistic maturity through her performances, her multimedia or performative installations and dance films, all of which are based on solidly documented creative processes and percussive themes for contemporary society.
Simona Deaconescu’s artistic universe intersects dance with film, science and technology, proposing performances, installations and dance films. Preceding the very beginning of the current pandemic, the artist started researching the historical dance epidemics in Europe and Africa, rethinking performatively the process of contamination and the connection with the microorganisms in our body.
Throughtout this year, CNDB will present 4 creations signed by the choreographer – premieres or recent productions – contextualized by discussions with local and international guests such as Mathilde Monnier (FR), Marta de Menezes (PT) and Vanessa Goodman (CA).
All through the program Simona Deaconescu – associate artist 2022, CNDB continues its mission to support contemporary choreographic creation and presents to the Romanian public important artistic productions, relevant as a theme for today’s world, while placing itself more and more visible and strong in the international artistic geography, connected by co-productions, the circulation of works, artists, ideas, and networking.
I am happy and challenged at the same time by CNDB’s initiative for me to be an associate artist in 2022. I am happy because it really helps me to complete projects that I have been working on for several years, encouraging me to open my work process, to deconstruct and rethink it. It challenges me because CNDB has always had a strong discourse about what it produces and promotes. This critical look at my own artistic approach, self-questioning and openness to unknown and marginal social phenomena are things I learned from CNDB and which are now part of my character as a human and an artist.
Since this is the year in which I will work between Europe and Africa, between dance and film, between performance and installation, CNDB will be my connection spot – the place where I will develop information and experiences.
– Simona Deaconescu
Simona Deaconescu works interdisciplinary, at the border between performance, installation and film, examining social constructs, between fiction and reality, sometimes with irony and black humor.
She completed her bachelor’s and master’s studies at the choreography department of the National University of Theater and Film in Bucharest.
She received the danceWEB scholarship in Vienna (2014), the National Center for Dance Bucharest Award (2016), was nominated as an Aerowaves Artist in 2018 and 2022 and as Springboard Danse Montréal Emerging Choreographer in 2019.
For the last two years, she has been a resident artist in the European projects Moving Digits and Biofrictioni, and in 2022 she became Forecast Mentee, under the mentorship of the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier.
Her works have been selected and presented on dance and theater stages, cinemas, galleries, museums and architectural sites, reaching audiences in Europe, North and South America.
In 2014, she founded Tangaj Collective, and since 2015 she has been the co-founder and artistic director of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival.
https://www.tangajdance.com/
Born in 1962 in Madrid, La Ribot is one of the most inventive and prolific performance artists, both a dancer and a choreographer. In 1975 she began studying classical dance in Madrid. In 1986, together with dancer Bianca Calvo and a group of artists and dancers, she founded Bocanada Danza. In 1993 she started working on the development of her extensive performance project Piezas Distinguidas, which she continues to this day.
The two volumes are indispensable materials for researching the work of an artist who has constantly positioned herself critically, radically, in direct confrontation with social and political issues, oppressive normative models, conventionally imposed beauty standards, idolized or demonized images of femininity, structures of hierarchical production.
The first volume is an archive of the creator-researcher, a collection of poems from performative pieces made by the artist or from the books that inspired her, a collection of observational photographs or performances, a collection of actions that she notes accurately and emphasizes with markers of different colors, a collection of thoughts, drawings, quotes. The first volume is the opening to the creative laboratory.
The second volume includes several analytical essays dedicated to the creations of the artist.
Adrian Heathfield writes about the meticulousness with which La Ribot builds her entire appearance repertoire in Panoramix, from the sequence in which the body is stretched with its back to the audience, moved only by successive spasms, to the arrangement of objects. Heathfield also discusses the difficulty of capturing the artist’s actions in an analytical vocabulary, of writing about the event of fragility she insitutes.
Jose A. Sanchez offers a unique perspective of analysis, emphasizing the tradition of a gallery of comedians – Buster Keaton, Joan Brossa – with whom La Ribot is related in the aesthetic and ethical approach of the material she works with. Sanchez talks about the “humor” of the artist, about the oscillation between gag, playful and serious.
Laurent Goumarre begins his essay with a comparison between the immobility of Isadora Duncan and that of the choreographer La Ribot. While Duncan stood motionless for hours, waiting for a gesture to be born, she turned the immobility of the lying body into a gesture of resistance, transforming horizontality into a state of suppression for the flow of movements.
Gerald Siegmund invites us to look at Piezas Distinguidas as emblems of absence in which objects and the gaze on objects have a very, very special place, sometimes in the absence of a body that can order them. In “Candida Iluminaris”, between a doll in clothes, a watch, a sign that says “Don’t touch!”, La Ribot takes off a sock, then one of the pink shoes, then the yellow sweater, until she remains nakes. and collapses next to a broken chair. Her downfall is a prelude to her absence.
André Lepecki writes about the choreographer’s ability to create a critical discourse on the limits of performative representation, alternating micro-gestures, extreme instinctual gestures with actions that test endurance. La Ribot permanently builds bodily and objective relationships on two levels: vertical and horizontal, between pictoriality and corporality.
La Ribot / Volum I, II (published by Merz & Center nationale de la danse, published in 2004) is available at the CNDB Media Library.
The CNDB Media Library, as a documentation resource, includes a collection of books and periodicals, as well as an extensive video collection. It contains not only titles from the history and theory of dance, critical thinking and performance theory, but also includes a varied collection from different areas: feminist studies, artist books, as well as numerous magazines and catalogues. The video collection includes both international productions of choreographers, dancers and contemporary dance companies, as well as dance films and video art works. We invite you to discover it, and for this purpose we have invited artists to make recommendations.
After Umeå, Barcelona, Pilsen, Aarhus, Sofia and Paris, Springback Academy will once again offer aspiring dance writers the chance to be mentored in the fundamentals of quality dance criticism in the action-packed environment of Spring Forward. Aerowaves annual festival will take place this year in Elefsina (Greece) on 28 April – 1 May 2022, hosted by the European Capital of Culture in Elefsina and DAN.C.CE UNITIVA.
We are now looking for up to 10 people with a lot of enthusiasm and some prior experience in writing about dance. The participants will be mentored by our team of leading critics including Donald Hutera (The Times), Sanjoy Roy (The Guardian), Kelly Apter (The Scotsman) and Laura Cappelle (New York Times).
Under their guidance, participants have the chance to create, shape and share conversations about dance and hone their critical writing skills. Springback Academy is a fast-track way to gain experience and technique in responsible, effective, attractive dance criticism as well as to explore and understand the opportunities that digital publishing has to offer.
PLUS – In March 2018, Springback Magazine was launched. The publication’s contributors are drawn exclusively from writers who have participated in the Springback Academy programme and form part of the ever-growing community of ‘graduate’ writers.
For examples of writing from previous years, visit Springback Academy online. For a quickstart guide to writing dance reviews, download the free PDF.
Apply before before 24:00 (GMT) Sunday 23 January 2022!
Find full application details and link here.
For enquiries, please contact: Springback Academy director Oonagh Duckworth (sbapplications@aerowaves.org).
Good luck!
After another year in which the performing arts were severely affected by the pandemic, the awards offered this year by the National Center for Dance Bucharest brought into question the pitfall of considering culture and artistic creation as being “non-essential”. This year’s edition of the CNDB Awards highlighted the role of art, recalling that it is what allows us to understand the present and to imagine a better future, while it creates well-being in our daily lives.
This year, the CNDB Awards were given, as usual non-hierarchically, to three winners. The event presented last night, December 12, by the actor Alex Bogdan could be watched online, marking the end of the “Three Days Laboratory”, a format designed to support artists in their creative process, in which, at CNDB’s invitation, choreographers and dancers from all over the country participated.
The first CNDB Award was given as a form of encouragement for “New Voices in Contemporary Dance”. The prize was awarded to Eliza Trefaș, a very young artist who is already showing her presence in several artistic projects on the Romanian choreographic scene, but also in international contexts.
The second award was granted for the outstanding contribution in the construction of contemporary dance and was received by Ștefania Ferchedău, freelance cultural manager, co-founder of the Institute of the Present and a professional with a long experience in developing projects in the fields of performing arts, management and politics, but also in education and cultural intervention, some of which contain international cooperation as an important component. Ștefania Ferchedău has been accompanying many different artistic phenomena for many years now. She is a researcher, editor, writer and creator of ideas, contributing to exhibitions and publications and creating contexts for others and their creations, so that they appear in the best possible light. She is not just an administrator, but a woman with vision, who with sensitivity and knowledge contributes to the design and implementation of many consistent projects in the field of visual and performing culture, without which the local scene would be much poorer.
The third prize awarded by CNDB was also granted for the outstanding contribution to the development of contemporary dance and went to Jan Burkhardt, German artist and international pedagogue, a connector of people and institutions from different geographical areas, a creator of opportunities and frameworks and production of knowledge. Jan Burkhardt is the one who supported the Romanian contemporary dance scene by coordinating the workshop program of the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance and the one thanks to which the academy benefited from the presence of international teachers. Jan Burkhardt continues to create links between structures, artists and institutions from several countries and it is also due to him that in 2022, CNDB together with the National Theater University “Ion Luca Caragiale” and the University of Music Bucharest will participate in a large international cooperation project called “Relay”.
Last but not least, many thanks went to the audience that was alongside CNDB once again this year and that gives meaning each time to the entire cultural sector.
Ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher, Ioan Tugearu (November 19, 1937, Babuc, Bulgaria) studied dance with Floria Capsali and Mitiță Dumitrescu, later graduating from the Choreography High School “Floria Capsali” in Bucharest, the University of Sciences and Arts “Gheorghe Cristea ”and UNATC.
He was part of the first class that graduated from university dance courses for choreographers – initiated by the Ministry of Culture in 1975.
Ioan Tugearu was the Lead Principal of the National Opera in Bucharest (since 1965), and from 1977 he begun authoring dance pieces, while also working as a teacher at the High School of Choreography in Bucharest.
Ioan Tugearu danced, home and abroad, in numerous roles, including the main male roles in choreographies by Oleg Danovsky, Tilde Urseanu, Vasile Marcu and Floria Capsali.
He also performed contemporary dance roles in “Tunnel” after Ernesto Sabato, choreography by Mihaela Santo (1994) and in “Portrait of Dorian Gray”, choreography by Răzvan Mazilu (2004).
A CNDB 2021 production has been selected in the international program Aerowaves Twenty22! The performance that got selected is Coreomaniacii, concept and choreography by Simona Deaconescu, which was created together with the students of the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance.
Choreomaniacs is a performative docu-fiction, chronologically following the events that marked the “dance epidemy” in the summer of 1518, in Strasbourg – a mass dystopian manifestation, which affected several hundred people. The show discusses the way we choose to look at dance, starting from a series of testimonials from the scholars of the period, a mix of pseudoscience, theology and medieval science-fiction, in contemporary movements. The focus is on the way the epidemic spread was documented, the events being told from the point of view of the watcher, never from the point of view of the one who lived them.
Simona Deaconescu
Felicitări Simonei Diaconescu și întregii echipe de creație: Vlaicu Golcea (muzica), Alexandros Raptis (Light design), Diana Dragu, GCongratulations to Simona Diaconescu and the entire creative team: Vlaicu Golcea (music), Alexandros Raptis (light design), Diana Dragu, Georgia Elza, Laura Murariu, Robert Popa, Adrian Popița (interpretation) and Laura Trocan (production)! For more information about the show, click here.
The Twenty22 program includes dance performances from 12 European countries and shows once again the richness of the emerging dance scene through the diversity of themes and aesthetics approached. For the complete list of Aerowaves Twenty22 artists, click here.
The National Center for Dance Bucharest announces that it won the ERASMUS+ funding for the project RELAY, together with its partners Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (DE), Den Danske Scenekunstskole (DK), SIKINNIS Dance and Performing Arts Centre (GR), National University of Theater and Cinematography “IL Caragiale” and the National University of Music Bucharest.
The RELAY project will be carried out over a period of three years (November 2021 – November 2024) and aims at developing existing knowledge, while contributing with new perspectives to dance, choreography, music composition and arts education fields.
RELAY emerged from a current approach in contemporary dance, which uses movement to examine the supposed duality of material and immaterial. The project also looks at how dance and music can find common ground in this exploration.
RELAY addresses the close relationship between dance and music, treating dance as a material for choreography and musical composition. Dance is traditionally seen as an ephemeral art form, even more so than music, both sharing the same immaterial form. RELAY starts from dance as a practice to generate artistic material through which it pervades into the theme of the mutual relationship between form and content, between material and immaterial.
The project is developed during a series of meetings organized together and hosted by the institutions participating in the project, where students and project teams from partner countries meet in processes of education, research, creation and transmission of knowledge.
Théâtre de la Ville Paris and terrain Company/Boris Charmatz, together with Hermès, are launching the call for applications for the seventh edition of DANSE ÉLARGIE 2022.
”During these strange pandemic times, have you often imagined yourself elsewhere? What about now? You have no idea anymore of what “normalcy” means? You would like to move, literally and figuratively? What if, this year, taking part in a dance competition were an excuse to get together and champion that which is dear to us? To experience our ideas? Our struggles? A space to present our hopes? To show the ineffable, the unheard, the ostentatious, the apparent, the understated?”
DANSE ÉLARGIE that competition. It is a call to artists from all over the world, from every field, without age limits, to introduce utterly original projects to be staged. To all those who birth art across the world, in the here and now, we invite you to be your moment, your era, your aspirations. To dare anything that dances, in the broadest sense of the term To invent future movements.
You will be seen by an enthusiastic audience experienced professionals a jury of high-flying artists. More than a competition, it is a rallying cry, a merry, unifying moment, a feast of ideas.
Two immovable rules:
The suggestion of the call is to expand formats, to remove them from patterns:
”Pull away from the habour, aim for the high sea. Plumb the depths of your mind and ideas. Begin to be free.”
Where and when?
The competition will be held on 25 and 26 June 2022 at Théâtre de la Ville – Espace Cardin – Paris.
How to enrol and participate?
Through online registrations here, until 31 December 2021. For rules and regulations, click here.
Choreographer Andreea David, together with the TechnoFields collective, is expecting the public at Văcărești Natural Park for a series of encounters in nature, during which forms of collective dance will be passed through the filter of contemporary art, to be transformed into landscape. microRave – Attempts to become a landscape is an invitation to forever disappear from the anthropic framework, taken over by the energy of the leaves that make their way through the cracks of the concrete slabs or by the shoot that pierces the ruins of the forgotten districts.
Is it possible for the Other, and everything around us in general, to become a sensitive extension of who we are? Is it possible to project ourselves beyond the perimeter of our own body through voice, sound and gaze? Can we deconstruct individuality so that once dissolved in what we now call nature, can we live as part of an organism larger than ourselves? Or, at the opposite end, to become no man’s land, perhaps the emptiness between entities, in what remained unshaped in the anthropic environment? Possible answers alternate in the trance of a repetitive dance, a reflex-response to the ritual rhythm of the music. You don’t control your body, just dance! What would it be like to perceive yourself as always being there, as if the word landscape never existed? A group of people transforms into a unitary and permeable organism, as the former individuals lose their socio-cultural identity, becoming nobody. It then loses its contours, to gradually turn into a landscape. The dancers merge with the plant density, the voices of the plants and the songs of the birds, with discreet noises that become sound textures and electronic music sequences. We mix with the place where the landscape breathes, speaks through countless voices, moves, sits, flattens, creates volumes, vibrates. We lose ourselves in an objective space, which nullifies any socio-cultural attribute, receiving us as simple forms of life, along with trees, grass, snails or birds. The dance floor transforms into a perimeter of infinite possibilities of transformation, and reproduces the mechanics of salvation. Far from technological tyranny, the dancer abandons themselves in a generic and impersonal desert, trust-falling into motion.
In the Văcărești delta there is an edge, and its concrete slope with 21 degrees of inclination. There is spontaneously growing vegetation in the 30 years since plans to build a reservoir were abandoned. The vegetation outlined a meadow. From the perspective of the edge, the contoured glade looks like a scene. The TechnoFields collective will refer to the “nature scene” by investigating its “nature”. In a plant-dream, in which the voices of plants are heard, they mix in rhythms and take control. Using specialized equipment, Sillyconductor will take over and process the electrical impulses of the surrounding plants, which will then be transform into musical notes, rhythm, bass and arpeggios, essential elements of electronic dance music, creating a self-sustaining generative system.
The TechnoFields meeting will take place on Saturday, October 16, at 15.00.
Access to Văcărești Natural Park is from Asmita Gardens.
The interventions of the artistis are non-invasive and will not have a negative impact on the landscape, species or habitats.
Artists: Andreea David, Maria Baroncea, Eliza Trefas, Oana Maria Zaharia, Maria Mora, Sânziana Pintean, Eve Cousin, Sillyconductor
The costumes are provided by Andrei Dinu, Paula Dunker and TechnoFields.
Supported by
arta, The Institute, Radio România Cultural, Radio București FM, IQAds, DigitizArte, Teletext, Revista Arta, Modernism.ro, Zile și Nopți, Daily Magazine, Feeder, Spotmedia, IQool, Smark, Ziarul Metropolis, Telekom Electronic Beats, Centrul Național al Dansului din București, Revista Zeppelin și Munteanu
Perform Europe is an EU-funded project which aims to rethink cross-border performing arts presentation in a more inclusive, sustainable and balanced way. Sustainability through innovation is the first publication of Perform Europe. This report brings together the main learning points we have drawn from the Perform Europe process, since its start in December 2020. The Perform Europe process so far highlights the urgency to rethink the current system of touring and distribution support in Europe, in order to make it more balanced, sustainable and inclusive.
The report calls attention to the current issues and imbalances in the European system of cross-border touring and presentations of the performing arts, and articulates a vision on how to bring change.
To view the full report, click here.
For the article source, click here.
In October, the National Center for Dance Bucharest launches the project (In)Visible Bodies and Stories.
Until recently, the history of Romanian dance seemed to be more about the sum of absences and invisible gestures, rather than a series of material evidence. However, since its establishment, the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB) has carried out projects to recover Romanian history and to reactivate the collective memory. Some of the remaining traces were recovered from personal archives and carefully inventoried in the CNDB Archive. The project “(In)visible bodies and stories” takes place during October and is a continuation of the project “Dancing walks”, in which CNDB invited people to go for a walk with dancers who guided them through several transformative exercises regarding the relationship with one’s own body, with space and the environment.
“(In)visible bodies and stories” adds a new dimension and offers the audience a series of performative tours guided by 10 artists/performers in the field of contemporary dance that activate the choreographic memory of Bucharest. Starting from the experience of their own body and the relationship with the city, the artists will guide the participants to the spaces where, over time, dance has made its presence felt in the life of the Capital. The memory of the creators, the energies and stories that contributed to the construction of today’s choreographic culture, will be reactivated by texts, images, enactments and story-telling. The living body thus becomes a mobile archive that connects spaces/places, histories/events and people from Bucharest, who marked the history of Romanian dance. Each tour lasts between 2 and 3 hours and involves visiting three such places.
CNDB is not proposing a historical approach to formal memory recovery, but acts performatively, engaging participants in a process that involves them physically and emotionally. CNDB offers participants a process of questioning their relationship with the city and a series of exercises to activate their body memory. The dancer’s body, seen as a mobile archive, transmits rewritten fragments of history to the participants and inscribes them in their bodies, renewing the ways of preserving, presenting/representing and circulating knowledge.
The artists invited by CNDB to support these performative guided tours are: Denis Bolborea, Catrinel Catană, Simona Dabija, Simona Deaconescu, Paul Dunca/Paula Dunker, Virginia Negru, Andreea Novac, Maria Mora, Valentina De Piante, Arcadie Rusu.
Project co-financed within the program “București – oraș deschis” 2021.
