Three-day laboratory – fifth edition

Info

Between 3 and 5 March 2023, the National Center for Dance Bucharest is organising the fifth edition of the “Three-day laboratory”, a programme designed to promote dialogue and collective reflection and to support artists in their creative process. The Lab proposes an extension of the dialogue with the performing arts community through presentations by several specialists from different disciplines and areas of activity. In this year’s edition we propose as a theme for discussion the issue of power relations – in society and in the artistic environment.

About the presentations and guests:

Movement Workshop The Body as a Political Tool of Expression // Sigal Zouk

In the workshop we will explore our bodies in the studio space, we will witness and monitor perception, creation, potentialities, meaning-making and the loss of meaning that occurs along the way. What has become or will become obsolete in the performing arts? And what would be the new possibilities for researching and sharing body-based arts?

Sigal Zouk is a dancer/artist who has been working in Berlin since 1997 and teaches in several European dance institutions and departments, such as Tanzfabrik Berlin, HZT, ZZT Hochschule für Music und dance Köln, DDSKS Copenhagen, DOCH Stokholm, Cullberg Ballet Stokholm, Academia de danza e performance de București, Ponderosa. She holds the “best performer” award at the Dortmund Festival 2010, as well as “dancer of the year”, named by Tanz Magazine in 2011.

Presentation and workshop An unexceptional introduction to decolonial aesthesia // Ovidiu Țichindeleanu

Decolonial thinking emerged in the 1990s in the Global South, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, encompassing over time social movements and institutions, cultural and academic workers, educational institutions, museums, artists, but also politicians and scholars from all over the world. Today, it is a challenge facing many institutions around the world. It calls for changes in repertoires, archives, curricula and pedagogical methods, in line with changing audiences and fairer, democratic changes in the way the economy, society and culture are organised. What is specific to the decolonial gesture, however, is not only criticism, but the movement towards alternatives and a different culture of appreciation, based on a pedagogy of listening. This movement towards transformative knowledge and a new articulation of hope is called decolonial aesthesia. In the first part of the seminar we will do an exercise in listening to internal voices, establish some international and local benchmarks and a common vocabulary, and in the second part we will take part in a joint reading of a text in which Fabian Barba, a dancer of Ecuadorian origin, recalls and theorizes his own decolonial itinerary in contemporary dance, ending with a conversation.

Ovidiu Țichindeleanu is a philosopher, translator and cultural theorist. He writes on critical social theory, decolonial thought, intercultural philosophy, historical theories of the senses and perception, history of philosophy, Eastern Europe and the cultural history of post-communism. Collections Coordinator, IDEA Design & Print, Publishing (www.ideaeditura.ro); Editor, IDEA art + society. PhD in Philosophy, Binghamton University, State University of New York (2009). Since 2012 teaching at the International Summer School, The Decolonial Summer School at University College Roosevelt, Middelburg, now Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School, VanAbbe Museum Eindhoven. From 2015-2019 he co-founded and taught at the International Summer School in Telciu.

Screening of the documentary Les Indes Gallantes // Philippe Beziat

30 hip-hop, krump, break, flexing, voguing dancers reinvent the baroque opera Les Indies galantes, composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1735. The film, directed by Clément Cogitore and choreographed by Bintou Dembélé, integrates questions of racism, classism and colonialism by staging an unexpected encounter between urban dance and opera music, thus raising the boundaries between urban performance and political realities. The colonial overtones of this 18th-century opera, which portrayed non-Europeans as ‘exotic slaves’, are erased, and the dance floor is ceded to those to whom it rightfully belongs: to those who walk freely through the streets of cities demanding emancipation from violence, from power, from toxic stereotypes, and from groundless rules about what dance, art, democratic representation, freedom, and life itself should and should not be.
The trailer for the film can be viewed here.
The film is made available by the French Cultural Institute Bucharest.

Untitled – presentation based on video fragments from the CNDB archive, followed by free discussion with participants// Mihai Mihalcea and Corina Cimpoieru

On the third day of the workshop, Corina Cimpoieru and Mihai Mihalcea will present some video excerpts from the CNDB archive, with the aim of inviting participants to a free discussion on how performances and choreographic works by Romanian authors reflect practices and power relations in the field of performing arts.