playful performance

Mijn eerste brief aan Joris Weijdom in reactie op zijn videobrief is hier te lezen als pdf.

In three weeks Steve Paxton re-envisioned his performance Ave Nue together with 10 SNDO (School for New Dance Development) students. A very short period for such a project. So what did it bring us? The starting point of Ave Nue was not the movement, it was the space: a long hallway dissected in parts by pillars. Colourful pillars. Paxton decided that in stead of a gradual green-to-white hallway, which was used in the original piece in Brussels, he wanted the pillars to have the colours of the rainbow. This is the first major difference between Ave Nue 1985 and the re-envisioned Ave Nue 2009.¹

I visited the performance twice, during the dress rehearsal and the premiere. This article reports my experience of the piece by reflecting on both these performance and the rehearsals I visited in the weeks before. My aim is not to compare the two performances I saw, or to compare the 2009 version with the original one. I will try to give an overview of what Ave Nue was and has become.

Download this article as .pdf or click Read more »

Dit is de eerste brief in een lopende correspondentie tussen Joris Weijdom en Jochem Naafs. Klik hier voor een overzicht van deze correspondentie.

On December 6 and 7 Danslab organised Frame, a two day gathering of choreographers on artistic research, or if you wish: artistic explorative processes. To discuss this topic Danslab proposed to take two (related) types of knowledge as a starting point: embodied knowledge and subjective knowledge. Danslab asked me and two other students in Theatre Studies to join this discussion and write a report. You can read a small teaser here:

Processing Dance
Thinking outside the Frame – Research on choreographic research
By Jochem Naafs

Who defines the product?
What defines the product?
What is the knowledge of dance?

Why would these questions come up if you put about 25 choreographers and dance scholars in one room? I am not sure. Maybe it is because dance is not in any way really tangible. Dance is temporarily. This article reports my thinking and feeling during and after Frame – Research on Choreographic Research. My thoughts have been leading me towards the question what a choreographic product and choreographic knowledge is and can be.

Download the full report (.pdf).

The reports of Nina Aalders and Anoek Nuyens are available on the website of Danslab.

These weeks I am participating in a collaboration of students with Artist in Residence at the AHK Steve Paxton. We are re-envisioning his project Ave Nue.

Ave Nue was made in Brussels in 1985. It dealt with a 75 meter or so long space, in which two audience seatings with 50 or so people gradually were moved away from each other, and dance and projections happened in between. We are investigating this project with 10 SNDO students, 3 students from the Amsterdam Master of Choreography, 2 students of the MA Theatre Studies (UU) and 1 PhD Student (UU).

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Na een volle en hectische week van het Jessica-project is het morgen tijd voor Kikker op Zondag/Levend Lab. We hebben vijf groepen uitgekozen die hun project komen laten zien in Kikker. Van een ouderschapstest via een puddingabonnement tot een ‘Jessica di-eet’. In jet Jessica-project dient een maatschappelijk thema als uitgangspunt voor kunsteducatie. Aan de hand van dit project wil het lectoraat Theatrale Maakprocessen de vraag stellen hoe engagement onder kunststudenten gestimuleerd kan worden.

Aankondiging (download hier de flyer)
Voor de tweede keer organiseert het lectoraat Theatrale Maakprocessen een Levend Lab voor Kikker op Zondag. Deze keer staat het in het teken van het interdisciplinaire project Jessica dat in januari 2009 plaatsvindt. De zevenjarige Jessica werd dood aangetroffen in het huis van haar ouders, uitgehongerd en gestikt in haar eigen braaksel. Een week lang buigen alle studenten van de faculteit theater zich over de geschiedenis van dit meisje. Aan alle deelnemers van het Jessica-project wordt gevraagd haar in één week op zoveel mogelijke manieren een stem te geven.
Deze Kikker op Zondag zijn enkele interdisciplinaire projecten van de studenten te zien. Na afloop van deze performances en/of presentaties wordt door enkele gasten en de studenten zelf gereflecteerd op het project. Wat houdt het in om binnen een gegeven context te werken? Op welke manier kan engagement worden gestimuleerd op kunstacademies? En is er ruimte voor maatschappelijke thema’s in het onderwijs?

Georganiseerd door Joris Weijdom en Jochem Naafs van het Lectoraat Theatrale Maakprocessen.

Datum: 1 februari
Tijd: 14.30 – 17.30
Locatie: Theater Kikker, Ganzenmarkt 14, Utrecht
Kosten: € 7,00 (voor studenten € 3,50)

Sinds 2003 ben ik als vrijwillig redactielid en schrijver betrokken bij LEF. LEF is het jongerentijdschrift van de Vereniging ‘Ouders, Kinderen en Kanker’ (VOKK) en verschijnt 3 maal per jaar. Het tijdschrift wordt altijd samengesteld aan de hand van een thema zoals Dromen, Muziek, Sport of Liefde. Het richt zich op jongeren die leven met kanker, omdat ze het zelf hebben (gehad) of omdat ze een brus (broer/zus) hebben of hadden die kanker heeft (gehad).

“LEF is hét magazine voor jongeren die leven met kanker. LEF sluit aan bij jouw vragen en verwachtingen. LEF is positief en niet zielig. LEF geeft informatie, speelt in op je vragen en maakt alle onderwerpen bespreekbaar. LEF laat je weten dat je niet alleen bent. LEF is herkenning!”

Sinds 2006 verschijnt er in iedere LEF een column van mijn hand. Hieronder zijn twee columns te lezen die verschenen zijn in LEF. Read more »

Op dit moment ben ik samen met een groep kunstenaars in de buurt begonnen aan de voorbereidingen van een community art project. Onder de naam Spinoza presenteert: zullen we een aantal kunstprojecten starten in samenwerking met bewoners van het Spinozaplantsoen. In november en december van 2008 hebben we via een aantal teasers getest of er animo is in onze buurt voor dit project. De bewoners zijn erg enthousiast en we hebben er erg veel zin in gekregen.

Op onze website www.spinozaplantsoen.nl kun je zien wat onze plannen zijn en er is onder andere een verslag te lezen van twee teasers. Theeleut was een onderzoek naar de verhalen en de geschiedenis van de buurt. Buurtmarktkraam was een teaser voor een eetontwerpproject waarbij het ruilen van eetbare producten centraal stond. Daarnaast zijn er Buurtportretten: prachtige foto’s van en interviews met acht bewoners van het plantsoen.

December 5th and 6th The Post Show Party Show is coming to Amsterdam. Ivana Müller invited Michael Pinchbeck on behalf of Frascati to perform it as ‘supporting programme’ of her performance Playing Ensemble Again and Again. He was one of the participants of Springdance Dialogue last April. This performance was shown there and the intriguing combination of re-enacting the past and being in the here and now hit me. Pinchbeck seems to have found a fascinating way in which the past and the present get mixed up and reinvented. Here are two quotes from the text I wrote for Springdance:

“At the start of The Post Show Party Show, every spectator is offered a drink. In this performance, Michael Pinchbeck very clearly plays with the here and now. He mentions his own presence and his father’s as actors, as well as the audience’s presence. He combines this layer in the performance with an attempt at re-enacting The Sound of Music and the post show party after the amateur performance of the musical in which his parents met in 1970”.

“Memory, nostalgia and the personal play an important role in Pinchbeck’s work. In The Long and Winding road and Sit with me for a moment and remember, he invites the audience to accompany him in a car or on a bench for a one-to-one performance. If they ask, he talks with his visitor about his reasons for inviting them to join him. In The Post Show Party Show, Michael Pinchbeck returns to the past once more. In these performances, he does not tell a story about himself or voice his opinion about a subject. He tries to recount what has happened and how he relates to these events: always looking for what is left behind to see what is lost”.

The Post Show Part Show – Michael Pinchbeck
December 5 and 6: 19.30 in Frascati2
December 6: 18.45 Pinchbeck discusses his work with dramaturge Jeroen Fabius

Playing Ensemble Again and Again – Ivana Müller
December 3/6: 21.00 in Frascati1

In November 2008 PACT zollverein organised imPACT08. Some documentation is available on the website: PACT_impactdoku08.pdf

The interactive symposium started of with a lecture by Igor Stromajer and Bojana Kunst: Ballettikka Internettikka. In this lecture they spoke about the idea behind Ballettikka Internettikka and showed examples of different projects they did under this name. The idea behing BI is to use the internet to gain an audience in live (ballet) events. The advantage of the internet for broadcasting in combination with wireless internet access with both video and audio streams is that you can make a ballet almost anywhere, from the basement of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to a factory in Velenje (Slovenia) and show it everywhere at (almost) the same time. Stromajer and Kunst describe B.I. as “an ongoing artistic study of the internet guerrilla performance”.

One of my favorite pieces is Hydraullikka. The audience is the spectator of two robots being flattened into one by a large hydraulic press. The performance plays with the fact that it is easy to sympathise with antropomorf robots. Because you cannot do anything about the pressing you start to feel guilty and sorry. It reminds you of live footage from warzones of the news and the images of murder. This feelling accurs even when the video is not shown live.

The performance Mind out by Station House Opera was shown the samen night. Being out of your mind got a whole new meaning for me during and since that performance. Imagine that my body is thinking and saying what your mind is thinking and your body is doing. My body is doing what my mind is thinking, but my mind is in your body, so you are saying what I am thinking and doing.  In other words your mind is in my body and vice versa. This is the easy part. In Mind Out there are five persons. In the begining the order is clear: 1-2-3-4-5-1-2 et cetera. In this way five persons can poor themselves one cup of tea. “You take the pot” “And poor the water” You “take a tea bag” “…”. But after a while things are being mixed up. People are losing other people’s mind, bodies are disobeying their minds, bodies seem to control the mind of other bodies and give orders in stead of just saying what they are thinking. In the workshop on Sunday 1st, we learned to be mindless.

The third presentation was by two architects of OMA. OMA developed a plan for the redevelopment of the old Zollverein area where PACT Zollverein is based. We worked in small groups in the area that day to rediscover the site. “During IMPACT08, OMA architects Floris Alkemade und Alex de Jong will illustrate working processes and research strategies in architecture. Taking the Zollverein Master Plan as an example, they will look at how the arts can potentially use architectural thinking as a creative resource”.