On Dramaturgy in Contemporary Dance and Performance
By Bojana Kunst
19th-23th January 2009 / 13:00 – 18:00
worshop place: Yenikapı Sanat Üretim Merkezi, Istanbul
Embodied Context: On Dramaturgy in Contemporary Dance and Performance
“If we say that art is a public activity, we say also that it is never isolated from signification. Artists today work inside the dense network of historical, social, artistic and political contexts. At the same time these contexts are not only discursive, but also sensorial and embodied.
This multiple characteristic of the context is also one of the reasons why dramaturgy in dance has such a slippery position; it seems namely that it is very hard to grab it and say exactly what is it about.
»I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know how to name it«, Andrè Lepecki once told to Belgian producer Bruno Verbegt. »You are a dramaturg« he answered him.
In my lectures I will be disclosing the role and position of the dramaturgy with theoretical and practical examples. The workshop will present a shift from critical to inventive approach in contemporary dramaturgy and give the insight into the embodied and experiental aspects of dramaturgical work and their role in the process of performance making. We will be focused especially on the problem of the context, research and experimentation. We will reflect on collaborative approaches that understand working processes also as a way to produce knowledge about artistic processes.
In the workshop many practical examples will be presented. The lectures will also offer a possibility to participants to reflect on their actual practical work. The workshop is suitable for practitioners (dancers, choreographers, performance makers) and for dramaturgs and theoreticians.
The workshop will be introduced with a pre-workshop day, which will be especially important to open up common issues and problems. The format of the day is to establish the situation of meeting of all interested participants, where suggestions and proposals from the participants can be disclosed and some proposed issues from my side discussed. The format is more an intensive situation of discussion, connecting with the actual practice of participants and detecting the burning issues and questions which can be later analysed more precisely in January.
Bojana Kunst – CV
Bojana Kunst, ph.d. is a philosopher and performance theoretician. She is currently working as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts – Department for Sociology and as an assistant professor at the University of Primorska. She is a member of the editorial board of Maska Magazine and international editorial board of Performance Research. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications and she has thought and lectured extensively in Europe. She published three books, among them Impossible Body (Ljubljana 1999), Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial (Ljubljana, 2004). She is also working as a dramaturg (with Hooman Sharifi, Paz Rojo and Cristian Duarte, Mare Bulc, Nana Miličinski). She is leading the international seminar for performing arts in Ljubljana.
