Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage presents Elixir on Digital Stage: Longevity in Dance, an eclectic mix of bold, playful and poignant films that challenge perceptions of dance and age.
In our new 2024 programme, alongside global premieres, you can enjoy dance film commissions by artists Louise Lecavalier, Aditi Mangaldas and Paco Peña, and documentary The Exchange. This film follows a collaboration between Company of Elders and ZYC (ZooNation Youth Company), creating a dance show together choreographed by Chaldon Williams.
Elixir on Digital Stage: Longevity in Dance is a celebration of life through dance, and the inherent desire to keep on dancing.
Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele. Common Grounds: Malou Airaudo, Germaine Acogny
How do we express our changing bodies and minds as we grow and age?
Elixir Festival challenged perceptions around dance and age with works by iconic artists from around the world alongside inspiring performances from dancers drawn from our local communities in north and east London.
View the programme of workshops, films and talks here.
In partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, with which Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia has been creating the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archives since 2018, we organised the seminar Dance Histories in Practice – Selected Aspects of Archiving and Historicization of Dance. This seminar aimed to share good practices, standardized and innovative methodologies, and approaches to dance archiving with our collaborators, as well as various multi- and trans-disciplinary derivatives through which archival documentation was historicized, recorded, and transformed (covering visible and invisible aspects of dance work from the studio to education and completed stage works). The seminar sought to address dance works, problems, issues, and solutions that dance archiving and historicizing confront us with, focusing on their temporal and material aspects. At the seminar, we shared our internal working problems and evolving decisions with the public, opening up our work to further questions.
The starting point for the project was the question: ‘How can archiving dance become an artistic practice?’ Koruga’s explorations led to a transgenerational exchange with six former dancers and performers, who now primarily work as choreographers and directors in the local independent dance scene: Nela Antonović, Anđelija Todorović, Jelena Jović, Tanja Pajović, Boris Čakširan and Sanja Krsmanović Tasić. Together, these six artists create an “archive in motion”, embodying movements, experiences, memories and oral histories from the many artistic works they created during their long careers, which remain insufficiently documented and are in danger of being forgotten – especially at a time when there is no official institutional framework for archiving the local dance scene.
By questioning the physical, social, emotional, economic, ideological, and other (mostly invisible) vulnerabilities behind their cultural and artistic work, they also re-examine the tactics, principles, (re)positioning, and contradictions of their survival and resilience as a form of resistance, criticism, and solidarity amidst the turbulent socio-political circumstances of the past forty years.
What do their bodies reveal and conceal? How does the impermanence of the archive reflect the impermanence of the dance itself? How does independent dance endure as a relevant social, cultural, and political tool for reshaping the social body? The attempt to create a definitive history will undoubtedly fail. The only question is, for whom?
Madeline Ritter, the artistic and executive director of Dance On, gives a talk on the theme of “Movement as Memory”. The talk is part of the programme of public events around the exhibition “THIS MAY BE THE PLACE. Performing the museum” curated by Javier Arozena. Ritter talks about how in dance, knowledge is passed on in a very direct way from generation to generation, from body to body. If this fragile chain is interrupted, the knowledge is lost forever.
The presentation by the German artist duo WILHELM GROENER is a playful hybrid between lecture and performance. It reflects their current artistic research, which is entitled “performing archive”. The rhythms and connotations of the archive provide the structural threads from which visuals, body, sound and space are woven into a performative fabric with multiple narratives and enduring transformations.
WILHELM GROENER: In 2001, the visual artist Mariola Groener and the dancer Günther Wilhelm combined their names to form the WILHELM GROENER label. For the artist duo, their Alter Ego is a kind of third space in which their multi-layered work is created in constant expansion, friction and transformation. So far, WILHELM GROENER’s oeuvre covers 25 stage works, numerous stations of their ongoing performance project 33 SKIZZEN, several video works, art editions, publications and exhibitions.
The radically experimental dance piece “Story” (1963) by Merce Cunningham is one of the most memorable works in modern dance history. In the historical work, the dancers were able to make decisions about space, time and the sequence of their movements. In the first part of the evening MAKING DANCES at Kampnagel, this historical masterpiece of postmodern dance is reimagined by the Dance On Ensemble. Based on fragmentary archive material (a single film recording, choreographic notations, anecdotal reports), the dancers integrate new elements into the indeterminate structure of the piece. At each venue, a local artist now takes on the historical role of Robert Rauschenberg, whose décor at the time consisted of objects he found near the theatre. In Hamburg, the work of Hamburg-based visual artist Anik Lazar will be part of the stage choreography. The second part of the evening is a contemporary, choreographic response to “Story”: French choreographer Mathilde Monnier responds to Cunningham’s work with “never ending (Story)”, using the poetry of David Antin, a contemporary of Cunningham/ Cage, as a starting point.
On 24 April 2023, Cultural Studies (KU Leuven) and STUK House for Dance, Image & Sound host Dancing diaspora: Opening up European Contemporary Dance, a symposium that brings together speakers from different theoretical fields with dance scholars, practitioners and interested audiences to think about dance and diaspora cultures.
Despite its air of neutrality and inclusivity, European contemporary dance has for a long time systematically excluded choreographers of colour and dance styles that originate within culturally diverse communities, or has included them through mechanisms of cultural appropriation and exotification. In the last 10 years however, choreographers of colour have increasingly claimed their position in the European field of dance. Building on different cultural experiences and references, these choreographers have introduced new choreographic strategies and have drawn attention to underrepresented aesthetics and forms of (embodied) knowledge.
Speakers:
Funmi Adewole (performer, dramaturge and dance researcher), Fabián Barba (choreographer, performer and dance researcher), Cecilia Lisa Eliceche (mother, dancer, choreographer and campesina).
Research seminar
The Symposium is followed by the Research Seminar Dancing diaspora: Rethinking Contemporary Dance discourses on Tuesday April 25th. Organised by the KU Leuven, Ghent University and Antwerp University, the Seminar welcomes (PhD) students and academic researchers as well as artists, dramaturges and practitioners who are engaged with the theme.
CT#7 focuses on the notion of dance practice. Since the 1960s, everyday dance practice has been established as a type of everyday dance work where dance artists explore their work and occasionally share the results of this exploration with the public.
With this event, we provide affirmation and visibility to dance practice, and its practitioners examine what dance practice can and could become in our wider environment at this moment in time? In addition to Deborah Hay, four of her collaborators from different periods of her and their work are invited to Choreographic Turn #7 to expose the notions, forms of work and outcomes associated with dance practice.
Curated by Lou Forster, a mobile exhibition by the CN D Paris.
The first retrospective exhibition on Lucinda Childs was held in 2016 at France’s National Dance Centre (CND Pantin) under the curatorship of Lou Forster as part of the Festival d’Automne in Paris. It was based on the American choreographer’s archives, which are located at the CND. The exhibition we are now presenting is an adaptation produced on the occasion of the constellation dedicated to Lucinda Childs. The exhibition features her graphic works (choreographic scores, drawings, diagrams), as well as unique documents from artists with whom she has collaborated. The overall purpose of exhibiting these documents is to offer a journey of discovery towards the formal invention of dance which, in the words of the choreographer, is “nothing personal”, showing how dance transforms the places it occupies. It is a collection of documents that traces Childs’s career from her first steps at the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s to her involvement in New York’s alternative scene and finally to her theatre work in the early 1980s.
Curator Lou Forster / Exhibition Mounting and Archive Manager Laurent Sebillotte (CND) / Document Researcher Juliette Riandey (CND) / Producers Chloé Pérol, Auréline Roy (CND) and the Mercat de les Flors team / Technicians Mercat de les Flors team
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