Books on the Dancefloor – The Oracle of Performative Research

Participatory installation & performance
Free entry

3 hr

Info

The Books on the Dancefloor format transforms the CNDB Media Library into a space of unexpected encounters and potential transitions. We invite you to participate in a process of cognitive and sensory deterritorialization of the physical library through a series of games, individual and collective actions, ingenious ways of reconfiguring the books and the ideas they contain, and the multiple exercises generated by all these intersections.

Because the spatialization of books, ideas and bodies creates a common meeting place between the words and the movements of the body.

Because the displacement of books from vertical shelves produces a network of references and resonances that opens a flow of ideas in a new horizontal, non-hierarchical dynamic.

Because the dismissal of the vertical position of knowledge involves the body in its many exploratory postures of it.

Because the informational and performative diversity brings together discourses, practices, artists and theorists from different fields, facilitating transdisciplinary events and actions.

Because the relationships between books and concepts create possible worlds through the body that operates with them and with its own critical thinking.

The Oracle of Performance Research

The exercise involves one-to-one performative readings based on a set of oracle cards that are based on issues from the journal Performance Research. These focus around several themes addressed within the publication, such as medicine, empathy, generosity, singularity, time, consumption, technology, etc. The aim of these performative responses is to establish a link between researching the performance and performing the research, mediating a dynamic exchange between academic research, theory, critical thinking and their application through bodily practices. An oracle card system represents a structure similar to tarot or other divination cards, a word derived from the Latin “divinare” which translates as “to predict, be inspired by the unknown”, a practice of discovering knowledge about the future or of understanding current relationships and circumstances. The Oracle of Performative Research is not about predicting the future in the sense of fortune-telling, but about reading into the content of the books so that they offer a new mindset for what we are already experiencing.

More info about the CNDB Media Library here.
The installation will remain open on 3 and 4 November at the CNDB Media Library from 4pm to 8pm.

With/by: Corina Cimpoieru, Renate Dinu, Paula Dunker
Co-author: Ilinca Micu
Graphic design: Cristiana Costin

Biographies

Corina Cimpoieru has a background in cultural anthropology and is currently working as a researcher and coordinator of the Media Library and Archive at the National Center for Dance Bucharest. In the last years, she has dedicated her time to identifying dance documents, researching in both private and institutional archives, in order to recover the history of Romanian dance and performance through archival practices that reconfigure their potential for contemporary projects: performing arts reenactments, dance and performance exhibitions, editorial projects.

Renate Dinu is a freelance performer in a continuous process of formation and transformation. After graduating in Economics, she did an Art and Visual Culture Studies MA. She has specialized in participatory practices and how they influence and are influenced by social realities, with a focus on their performative dimension. She took part in practice-led contemporary dance research laboratories, exploring posthumanist performativity, real-time composition and techno culture, as part of her training at the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB), where she is also an artistic consultant since 2018. From 2016, she has performed in conventional and unconventional spaces, galleries and festivals. She’s currently living in Bucharest.

Paula Dunker promises that her (artistic) work is based on the analysis of the systems of representation, production and creation. She mostly works with the body. Romanian contemporary dance’s daughter, sister of the local political theater, mother in the Bucharest queer clubbing scene, she is (together with Alex Bălă) the initiator of the techno-faggothique music genre. Confronting existing patterns, she helps build up possible new worlds and heal this one.

Produced by
The National Center for Dance Bucharest