postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK I

1 January-31 March 2015

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Audrey Cottin
Danny Neyman
Hektor Mamet
JeremiahRunnels
Kleoni Manousakis
Mavi Veloso
Philippine Hoegen
Samah Hijawi
Sara Santos
Tinna Ottesen
Yaari Shalem

Research End Presentations

Damla Ekin Tokel
Hans Van Wambeke
Rareş Crăiuţ
Stef Meul 

Research Centre Researchers

Adriana La Selva
Cecilia Molano
Mala Kline
Ruth S. Noyes,
Veridiana Zurita

Partners

PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

Ana Hoffner
Antonia Baehr
Daniel Blanga-Gubbay
Elke van Campenhout
Emma Cocker
Eric Thielemans
Lilia Mestre
Mariella Greil
Nikolaus Gansterer
Pierre Rubio

Coordinators a.pass

Elke van Campenhout
Nicolas Galeazzi

Mentors

Geert Opsomer
Kristien Van den Brande
Peter Stamer
Pierre Rubio

‘CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS’
curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

14 / 01 -19 / 03 / 2015

‘PERFORM BACK SCORE’
Weekly Practice by Lilia Mestre

This score is a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?
The aim is to develop systems to practice the staging of philosophy, critical exposure and the rhetorics inherent to any body, object, word, situation. It is a working score. Taking as a principle that the artwork raises questions and doesn’t give answers I would like to propose a Q&A in 9 sessions where we can just perform. The series of performances will function as replies that raise (an)other(s) question(s) or problematic (s). This score will also be a documentation practice that questions performance as a document.

05 / 01 – 09 / 01 / 2015

‘REPERTOIRE’
Workshop by Eric Thielemans

For the last couple of years my artistic practice became more research based and reflective, and my work was touched by that evolution. The workshop deals with the notion(s) of repertoire. Of what stuff are they made? How did they come about? It will be a first time for me to adapt the questions and reflections to a wider and multidisciplinary field of expertise and practices.
Repertoire(s) is a research and reflective workshop in which I see us all, like a bunch of passionate amateur entomologists , observe, index, taxonomize, and share the constitutive phenomenons of our life with our craft and the repertory of skills, tools, techniques, practices that we use to build that life. Furthermore we will investigate various strategies and ways to weave the sensibilities, disciplines and practices of each participant together into meaningful wholes or collective spaces and cosmologies.
First the focus will lie on each of us individually. After that we will dive into group related observations. How do we behave as a group? What’s the repertoire of the group? Off course this separation individual-group is artificial and not always easy to keep but I think it will give us a strategy, plan, focus and ground during the work.
At the end of the workweek, we will propose a showing of the work in which there will be place for each individual to share and propose some of his/her findings and reflections in whatever way suitable as well as there will be group propositions.

19 / 01 – 23 / 01 / 2015

‘PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY / SUBJECTS / OBJECTS’
a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout

‘Performance / Performativity / Subject / Object’ is a b-workshop: it covers some of the basic knowledges we share on an (almost) daily basis in a.pass, and that need some in-depth attention. In this block we will read texts and discuss the problematics from the point of view of objects and subjects: how does an object perform its objectness and how does it perform us. In other words: how does the object perform our subject-ness? And how does the subject perform the object? Or: how can we replace our subjectness by objectness and what does that entail?
In other words, although the basic performativity texts like the ones of Judith Butler and the speech act theory of Austin will certainly play a role in the backseat, in these reading sessions we will concentrate more specifically on object oriented philosophies like the ones of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, the ‘queer phenomenology’ of Sara Ahmed, go deeper into the concept of ‘compositionism’ as coined by Bruno Latour, and study the continuity between materiality and immateriality by reading some from ‘Action and Agency in Dialogue’ by François Cooren.

02 / 02 – 06 / 02 / 2015

‘TOOLS FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH – BECKETT’
a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner

The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research. Each day we will focus on a different category from Beckett’s work in order to transform it, translate it and develop a better understanding of the way we as artist, performers and choreographers can use them in the present.

23 / 02 – 27 / 02 / 2015

‘CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES – DEVIATIONS FROM THE LINE’
workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Emma Cocker

How might one devise a system of notation alert to the real-time circumstances of the practicing within practice, foregrounding process, and emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live)? What forms of notation could be developed for articulating that which resists articulation, for that which is pre-articulation, or a form of representation for the non-representational? How can a form of notation communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without rendering them still or static, without fixing that which is contingent as a clearly readable or literal sign?
To explore the performative character of notation, we practice kinetic as well as graphic modes of inscription, expanded tactics beyond apparent physical limitations (of the mind, the hand, pencil, and paper), attending to the integration of time, sound, movement, and narration. We propose the concept of the choreo-graphic figure, for investigating how the embodied practice of choreographic performance (in an expanded sense) might become a tool of inscription and notation in itself. The choreo-graphic figure is conceived as a notational event, incorporating the potential of both movement and materiality, a sense of both temporality and spatiality. Our shared quest is both for a system of notation for honoring the process of figuring (as a live investigative event) and for “choreo-graphic” figures for making tangible and communicating these significant moments within the unfolding journey of collaborative practice. We seek modes of notation between the lines, interested in the interval or gap between the choreo + graphic, sign + non-sign, visual + textual, extensive + intensive, embodiment + disembodiment, movement + materiality, being + becoming.

02 / 03 – 06 / 03 / 2015

‘CONDITIONS FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN (LATENT PERFORMANCES)’
workshop by Daniel Blanga-Gubbay

Instead of thinking of the possible as an empty space, we should maybe see it as a space designed with conditions. Latency names the state of something ready to happen, ready to emerge. Within this space, something will happen: can we still be responsible for creating this space, without taking care of its result?
This workshop puts first into question what does mean an act of transformation. Well beyond the notion of performing arts, performance can perhaps simply be thought of as any act that can modify the coordinates of the given. If we imagine reality to be a surface made of endless inclinations that determine movements and trajectories within it, then the proper task of performance is perhaps that of constructing the gesture that can refigure the surface for a while, releasing unimagined lines, opening up gaps between the permitted and the possible.
How is it possible to go beyond the idea of creating something to suddenly create a space ready for the emergence of something unspecific to happen? By merging theory and practice, working both through interventions in given and constructed space – and through the categories of space of accident, risk, love – these days investigate not only the question “what is the condition for the emergence of an action”, but eventually “what does it mean to create (and abandon) a space filled with unforeseen possible actions?”

09 / 03 – 14 / 03 / 2015

‘WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME’
workshop by Antonia Baehr

In this workshop, we will investigate how scores can function as a constitutive factor for kinship relations. We will write scores as gifts to each other, and I will share some of the “make-up productions” working methods with you.
We will make ourselves familiar on a practical level with the use of scores for performance. We will read and execute a number of found scores: historical ones (from John Cage’s Songbooks for ex.) and contemporary ones (from the projects Laugh, and Abecedarium Bestiarium, among others), some infamous and others entirely unheard of. We will write, interpret and perform scores for each other, pass them on, turn them literally upside down while swapping roles and places.
Between the hierarchical pyramidal structure to the collective, there is an endless plurality of forms of collaboration possible. This workshop examines the boundaries between score/interpretation, rehearsal/performance, director/performer, and audience/presentation. This workshop’s focus is an investigation through praxis.