Choreographing the Self

Een tweedaags colloquium over de rol van choreografie in de productie van individualiteit.

Voor het colloquium Choreographing the Self nodigen het departement Culturele studies van de KU Leuven en STUK - Huis voor Dans, Beeld & Geluid verschillende internationale gerenommeerde theoretici en kunstenaars uit om samen na te denken over de rol van choreografie in de productie van individualiteit en collectiviteit. Samen onderzoeken zij hoe choreografie kan begrepen worden als een instrument om zowel de esthetische organisatie van beweging als de socio-politieke constructie van singuliere en collectieve identiteiten te analyseren en zoeken ze naar de verschillende kruisverbanden tussen deze ‘kleine’ en ‘grote’ vormen van choreografie. Met presentaties van Paula Caspão, Bojana Cvejić, Jason Read and Bojana Bauer.

Het colloquium Choreographing the self wordt georganiseerd in het kader van het vak Hedendaagse dans: theorie en analyse, dat wordt georganiseerd aan het departement Culturele Studies van de KU Leuven in samenwerking met STUK - Huis voor Dans, Beeld & Geluid. Hedendaagse dans: theorie en analyse is opgestart vanuit het Beleidsplan cultuur KU Leuven 2013-2017. Het colloquium luidt het startschot in voor een serie van events die zullen worden georganiseerd door beide instituten en die telkens tot doel hebben om toeschouwers, kunstenaars en theoretici samen te brengen rond dans en choreografie.

Dit colloquium vind plaats tijdens Extr'act - een gebalde tweedaagse met uitdagend werk van een nieuwe generatie makers.

PROGRAMMA 19/5

PROGRAMMA 20/5

Extra info 19/5

Card reading: across (self)choreographies of remediation - by Paula Caspão & Bojana Bauer

We take this invitation as an occasion to test our powers of cartomacy. We will embark on a game with a deck of cards covering several mediums, discourses, formats and modes of existence, to revisit – re-com-pose – some of our past, present or future research insights, finished and unfinished works, their traces, blind spots, ghosts and possible second lives. We won’t be searching for the perfect match or expecting to find true love. But we do hope that the journey across a limited kit of heterogeneous knowledge on choreographies of the self helps us interrogate, update and/or deviate them from the assumptions they may come with, as our card-graphies stumble onto one another and unwittingly reveal their future (im)possibilities. Call it fortune or story telling, therapeutic session or oracle, it is first and foremost intended as a set-up for knowledge-and-self-transplantation.

Extra info 20/5

Individuality as Metastability: Gesture and Affect - Jason Read

The concept of transindividuality, developed initially by Gilbert Simondon, and then developed into a social theory by such thinkers as Paolo Virno, Etienne Balibar, and Bernard Stiegler, not only makes it possible to overcome the dualism of the individual and society, it makes it possible to recognize that individuality is nothing other than the individuation of collective practices (just as collective practices are nothing other by the intersection of various individuations). The very things that form the basis of our individual identity, our particular gestures and ways of speaking, right down to ways of feeling, are nothing other than the individuation of common conditions, the actualization of generic possibilities. From this perspective the individualistic dimension of contemporary society must be seen as a sort of paradox, it is, after all, a collective condition. I argue that the way out of this paradox, of transforming our individual and collective condition, comes from recognizing not only the collective, but also the metastable conditions, of every individuation. Our affects, gestures, and imaginations, just like those of society, never cohere without tensions and schisms. The goal of politics (and also of art and philosophy) is to make these tensions not only explode, but to organize the conditions of new individuations, new collectivities.

The role of performance in individualist truth-games – Bojana Cvejić

If the current individualism could be qualified as a form of aesthetic ideology, and not as an ontological or epistemological stance on the subject and the self, then performance and performativity illuminate the techniques by which individuals constitute themselves. These techniques of the self are truth-games, in the sense that Michel Foucault defined the specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves and thus produce rather than discover truth. Drawing on a few self-narratives across the arts and knowledge work, I would like to discuss the role of performance, and particularly embodiment, in the persuasive power of the aestheticized practice of the self. The other concern of this brief investigation is to posit a correlation between the expansion of aesthetic individualism and the crisis of social imagination, manifested in the weakening of the social modes of action. In other words, in discerning how techniques of the performing of the self produce an individualist account of oneself, we might get closer to grasping how the erosion of social power and shared common concerns is correlated with, if not even conditioned by, the rise of individualistic views of personal independence, uniqueness, human capital and self-interest.

BIOGRAFIEËN

Paula Caspão is a researcher, intermedia artist and dramaturge based in Paris. She works internationally in several venues and situations, mainly intertwining choreographic, discursive and performative practices with other fields of thought, and experimenting research formats that merge dissimilar knowledge and methodologies. To welcome these intersections and emphasize the specific poetics and life forms implicated in any circumstances of research and/or composition, she founded Cabinet of T-Fi – an exploratory field of miscegenation between artistic and theoretical practices (in which T-Fi stands for Theory-Fiction, echoing the Sci-Fi of Science Fiction, as well as the Cabinet de curiosités). She holds a PhD in philosophy (epistemology and aesthetics) from the University of Paris-10, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in performance studies at the University of Lisbon, as well as an integrated researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, New University of Lisbon. Since 2015 the focus of her artistic and theoretical research delves into the ecologies, performances and poetics implied in the practices that constitute History, the Museum and the Archive, re-thinking institutions of preservation as socio-choreographic practices of reactivation and transformation, more than as modes of transmission. She is part of the collective baldio|Performance Studies,and the author of relations on paper (2013) and The Page As a Dancing Site (2014).

Bojana Bauer is a dance and performance theorist and a dramaturg. She is currently a lecturer at the University Lille 3 in France and has been teaching performance and dance theory extensively in universities and in dance and visual art schools, such as Ex.e.r.ce in France, ArtEZ and DasArts in Holland, National Academy of the Arts in Bergen and École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes. She is finalizing her PhD on dance dramaturgy at EDESTA-Paris 8 University. Bauer received professional dance training in Belgrade, Serbia, where she was a member of the National Theatre Ballet and moved on to work as a dramaturg with contemporary choreographers such as Latifa Lâabissi, Vera Mantero, Renata Piotrowska, and the visual artist Pedro Gomez-Egaña. Bauer's writings and essays are published internationally in journals and dance research collections.

Jason Read is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016).

Bojana Cvejić publishes and lectures in philosophy, performance theory, and dance. Her latest books are Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (Palgrave, 2015), Drumming & Rain: A Choreographer’s Score, co-written with A.T.De Keersmaeker (Mercator, Brussels, 2014), Parallel Slalom: Lexicon of Nonaligned Poetics, co-edited with G. S. Pristaš (TkH/CDU, Belgrade/Zagreb, 2013) and Public Sphere by Performance, co-written with A. Vujanović (b_books, Berlin, 2012). She is co-founding member of Teorija koja Hoda/Walking Theory (Belgrade), and (co)-author of more than a dozen theater and dance performances, created since 1996. Cvejić teaches at P.A.R.T.S. Brussels and FMK Belgrade, where she is associated professor of philosophy of art.