POST-DANCE-ING

Eva Mohn, Josefine Wikström, Reggie Wilson, Jeanine During

We 23.10.2019, 10:00-17:00, MDT

Th 24.10.2019, 10:00-17:00, MDT

Fr 25.10.2019, 10:00-17:00, MDT

MDT, Cullberg, Danscentrum Stockholm and DOCH would like to welcome you to be a part of our new conference POST-DANCE-ING.

We long for a conference with an unconventional format that emphasises conversation, as well as supports the potentially different languages available to this conversing.

A conference with five in-depth conversations that spiral deliberately, intuitively and decidedly into other spaces and configurations, possibly into other forms.

So we invited five thinkers to each propose a starting-point. And five invited “Conversation Partners” then formulate and prepare a response to these “Starters”. This in-depth conversation is then taken further by a panel that is requested to react and discuss on the spot. This conversation then continues for those attendees who wants to, in a circle in another room. Followed by a final step in a room with no protocol, no choreography, simply an open space where the conversation takes its necessary form. If you want to, you follow the same conversation through all these steps. Or you can choose to stay in the first room where the same procedure with Starter, Conversation Partner and panel starts over with a new topic and new participants. This plunging into the Alice hole repeats five times and overlaps. Just like in the real world.

Post-dance with a twist.

Participants: Mette Edvardsen, Reggie Wilson, Jeanine Durning, Eva Mohn, Josefine Wikström, Erdem Gündüz, Konstantina Georgelou, Karina Sarkissova, Eva Meyer-Keller, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Tamara Alegre, Ilse Ghekiere, Julia Giertz, Halla Ólafsdóttir, Alice Chauchat, Agnes Quackels, Rickard Borgström, André Lepecki & Eleanor Bauer.

23/10 9.30-17.00
24/10 10.00-17.00
25/10 10.00-16.00

The conference will be live streamed, and the documentation will be online for 30 days.

A brief history of the project:
In 2015 we (at that point André Lepecki (DOCH), Gabriel Smeets (Cullberg) and Danjel Andersson (MDT) put together a conference with the intention to open up a discussion on contemporary practices within the field of dance without stumbling into the usual traps (we almost always inevitably end up talking about lack of funding when we talk about projects or about what dance is when we talk about choreographic practices). We framed this intention as a conference titled “POST-DANCE: Beyond the kinesthetic experience and back”. This conference was instantly sold out and we streamed it (with the help from Riksteatern) live with thousands of views.

We did not say what Post-dance was but asked the participants to speculate with us. In 2017, we (Mette Edvardsen, Mårten Spångberg and Danjel Andersson) edited and published a book with texts from the conference and new thinking on Post-dance. It turns out that what we dreamed of doing (to open up discussions on contemporary practices within the field of dance) with the launch of the non-concept container (that is Post-dance) is now happening and our conference has become the starting point we hoped for. There is no way to have an overview of all that has been happening since then. We know that they want to translate the book into both Russian and Portuguese and we know that there was a master’s thesis written by a Norwegian in Denmark (Amanda Øiestad Nilsen). Oktoberdans festival in Norway hosted a seminar, the festival Block Universe held a sold out Post-dance conference in Tate Modern in London. The scenes in Moscow and Vienna held seminars. Amsterdam and Oslo also did in combination with a launch of the book. And there have been launch events for the book in more than 10 different countries. There is an unauthorized Post-danza.pdf circulating on the internet and there remains great demand for the now out-of-print book (2000 copies).

POST-DANCE-ING

There are now many conversations on what Post-dance is and/or is not. We would like to push the conversation a bit further by asking: What about the -ing? If we knew what Post-dance was/is (and we do, no?) what and where is the -ing? The do-ing, the post-dancing, the practice-ing if you will. We – Zoë Poluch (DOCH), Gabriel Smeets (Cullberg), Tove Dahlblom (Danscentrum), Danjel Andersson and Sara Bergsmark (MDT) – have invented a concept for an event in MDT in Stockholm for up to 150 participants. We will live-stream (again with the help from Riksteatern) the conference, a recording that will be available for only 30 days. We are also planning a new publication. The event takes place 23rd-25th of October 2019 in MDT/Stockholm.

Curated by: Zoë Poluch (DOCH) Gabriel Smeeds (Cullberg) Tove Dahlblom (Danscentrum) Sara Bergsmark (MDT) Danjel Andersson (MDT/Dansehallerne). Post-Dance-Ing is made possible thanks to Life Long Burning – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe project (2018-2022) supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. MDT is supported by Swedish Arts Council, Stockholm City, Stockholm County Council. POST-DANCE-ING conference is also supported by Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Goethe Institute. Live streaming supported by Riksteatern.