Performance collective BADco. and the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) are co-organizing a symposium in the Theatre’s Sound Studio, club Booksa and Vladimir Bužančić Gallery 16.-17. June 2017, bringing together leading theoreticians and artists working in the field of performing arts and dance.

The topical notion of the symposium is the 'turn'. First, obviously, turn is the element of human movement and choreographed movement in particular. It has different quality and effect as part of the everyday, sleep and dance registers. It turns on itself to remain the same or to bring in a change. Second, there's the cyclical coming-and-going of re-turns, encompassing frequential motion from the smallest to the cosmic scales. Then there's turning and re-turning of poetry, of enjambement, whereby poetry turns onto itself, unfolding ever deeper structures of Jetztzeit instead of temporal progression. Finally, there's turning and re-turning of repetition of social structures that blocks and births political change.

The turn is never simply a turn. It is always both drenched in movement and its cesure, an opaque whirl and a spin of nuance, a revolution announcing itself while unable to break away from its own eternal return. The repetition of the turn confronts us with unfolding time, with that what escapes our gaze, with our ‘business as usual’, with our will to disrupt, and again.

Among the participants are Ramsay Burt, a leading dance theoretician, Bojana Cvejić, dramaturg and philosopher, Anders Paulin, Swedish theatre director, plus Una Bauer and Nataša Govedić from the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb.

Schedule:

16. June 2017

11.00 Lecture: Bojana Cvejić (HNK)

12.00 Discussion: Bojana Cvejić, Anders Paulin, Goran Sergej Pristaš (HNK)

17.00 Book presentation: Ramsay Burt, presented by Una Bauer with Dina Ekštajn, Aleksandra Mišić, Lovorka Puk-Tomić and Iva Višak (Booksa)

17. June 2017

11.00 Lecture: Ramsay Burt (HNK)

12.00 Discussion: Ramsay Burt, Nataša Govedić (HNK)

13.00 Lecture: Anders Paulin (HNK)

14.00 Final discussion (HNK)

18.00 Exhibition: BADco. & Marko Tadić (Vladimir Bužančić Gallery @ Culture Center Novi Zagreb, Remetinec)

Summaries:

 Bojana Cvejić

Turning the screw, turning the knob

 The proliferation of “turns” in the artworld today (second performance turn, affective turn, speculative turn, forensic turn and so on), and the speed of their aging resembles the delivery of “old news.” The usage of the word “turn” gestures at modesty and opportunistic caution. Epistemic breaks, paradigm shifts, doing a march or putsch are too grandiose motions for the remit of changes we imagine. Even when we try to turn the screw, we might be only turning the knob…

Regardless, I will speak of yet another currency that might pass as an unnoticed turn, the somatic and, more broadly, the aesthetic. I will address it from the perspective of hyperindividual aestheticization of everyday life. What do we understand by performance and “artification” in experience economy with its sensual logic of value? Which stances could contemporary performance take in regard of experience, intensity, somatics etc. once these notions begin to overdetermine work, business and social life in global capitalist society?

Ramsay Burt

Book presentation: Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre and the Commons

Life, the political, responsibility, public good, ungoverning, open - these are the key terms of the new book by Ramsay Burt, British historian and theoretician of dance with an impressive academic oeuvre. The unusually titled Ungoverning Dance is devoted to the deep interweaving of social and esthetic convention and formation. By carefully analyzing key progressive contemporary dance authors since the 1990s, Burt points out the social and political potential of a dissolution of esthetic and artistic forms that question power relations by suggestion the possibilities of a reestablishment of social and political equilibrium, one brutally disrupted by the current anti-social trends.

The book will be presented, in conversation with the author, by Una Bauer with Dina Ekštajn, Aleksandra Mišić, Lovorka Puk-Tomić and Iva Višak.

Anders Paulin

Caesura: The Empty Transport.

I would like to present some aesthetic associations and reflections arising from Hölderlin’s notion of the caesura. This moment is a space of suspended time, a momentary disruption of progress and rhythm, which according to Hölderlin, is the disruptive event in Greek tragedies brought about by Tiresias, the blind seer. Hölderlin describes it as " essentially empty and the most unbounded of all." Or, in words of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe “the caesura is, on each occasion, the empty moment - the absence of ‘moment’ - of Tiresias’s intervention: that is to say, of the intrusion of the prophetic world.” We might want to think the turn from the perspective of Hölderlin's caesura, that which makes possible a radically different condition to the present itself; an open-ended passage.

Ramsay Burt

Catch me if you can

This presentation takes as its starting point dance performances and video dances that consist largely of the physical movement of turning. It explores the ways in which being in process of turning hinders attempts to fix and identify a particular way of moving and being and hence makes it difficult to be associated with a recognisable, normative ideas about identity. In L’insurrection qui viens, the Invisible Committee recommend fleeing from visibility, while, in The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben argued that the possibility of not taking up an identity whatever is a threat that the State cannot come to terms with. From a post-colonial point of view, the Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant spoke of the right to opacity. This presentation examines the potential of choreographed turning for avoiding capture.

Participants’ biographies:

Bojana Cvejić has widely published in performance theory and philosophy. She has been the director, performer or dramaturg in a number of works since 1996. Her most recent books are: Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in Contemporary European Dance and Performance (Palgrave, 2015), A Choreographer’s Score: Drumming and Rain (with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Mercator, 2013) and Public Sphere by Performance (with Ana Vujanović, Bbooks, 2012). She is Associate Professor of Dance Theory at KHIO National Academy of Arts in Oslo and member of TkH (2001-2016).

Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University, UK. His numerous publications include Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (2006), Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, Race and Nation in Early Modern Dance (1997), The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle and Sexuality (1995), British Dance: Black Routes (2016) (co-edited with Christy Adair), Writing Dancing Together (2009) (with Valerie A. Briginshaw). He’s lead a research project on British Dance and the African Diaspora with Christy Adair culmination in an exhibition at the Liverpool International Slavery Museum in 2013. He is founder editor with Susan Foster of Discourses in Dance. Since 2008 he has been a lecturer at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels.

Anders Paulin is a Swedish theatre director and dramaturg. His work for the stage includes: Wild Duck at Nationaltheatret in Oslo,, Parzival at Backa Teater in Gothenburg, Mephisto at Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, and the continuous artistic research projects Neither You Nor Me (with Anders Mossling) and Three White Soldiers (with Johan Forsman).

Una Bauer had completed studies in comparative literature and philosophy, worked for several years at the Center for Drama Art, Zagreb assisting the theatre program and published on theatre and dance in various publications. Upon receiving a PhD scholarship she then moved to London where she lived September 2006 - early 2010. Her PhD from Queen Mary University of London is on the idea of neutrality in contemporary dance theatre. She publishes on the portal kulturpunkt.hr or in the Gordogan journal supporting in-depth understanding of culture and art they embody. She has published the book Come Closer: on theatre and other joys (Priđite bliže: o kazalištu i drugim radostima, Novi Gordogan, 2015).

Nataša Govedić is theatre and performance scholar, editor, writer, teacher, student, critic, dramaturg, collector of impossible ideas.