Panel Discussion #2 Dance and Words

On Tuesday, 28th September, 2 p.m. (CEST), the Dance and Performing Arts Criticism in Europe project organised an open panel discussion that addressed alternative performance and writing formats, and the relationship between dance and words. The Norwegian dance critic Hild Borchgrevink, member of the project and curator of this panel, was joined in conversation by the Czech dance critic Lucie Hayashi, choreographer and dramaturge Jana Ryšlavá, British dance critic Ka Bradley and Norwegian dance artist Mette Edvardsen.

During the pandemic, dance took various forms. Unable to perform live in front of an audience, contemporary dancers were exploring alternative formats such as letter writing, dancing in empty museums, exchanging scores, creating public walks and handing over choreographic instructions for the audience to ‘dance’ or perform.

The host of the talks Hild Borchgrevink specifies: “The pandemic has put limitations on the practices of dance artists, dance critics and festivals. However, as the limitations ended up lasting for months and years, at some point all these practitioners started researching or even embracing the constraints: Could a performance turn into a chain of letters? Could dance criticism take the form of a shared readings, could losing the tracks of time and mutual withdrawal be transformed into new forms of quarantined exchange and collaboration? I am looking forward to discuss such strategies with our very competent panel.”

You can find the recording of the webinar here:

Host:

Hild Borchgrevink (NO) is a writer, artist, editor, and currently a PhD research candidate at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She writes on music and music theatre for the daily Dagsavisen and Scenekunst.no. She holds an MFA in art and public spaces from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, an MA in musicology, and an equivalent to a BA in creative writing and performative criticism. She was editor of Scenekunst.no. She has experience as a project leader of contemporary music festivals such as Nordic Music Days and Ultima.

Guests:

Ka Bradley (UK) is a commissioning editor at Penguin Classics and Penguin Press, and the Associate Text Editor at Springback magazine. Her theatre and dance reviews have appeared in the Observer, Time Out, The Stage and Exeunt.

Mette Edvardsen (NO) is a choreographer and performer. While some of her work explores formats such as video, books and writing, her interest is always in their relationship to the performing arts as a practice and a situation. In her project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a group of people dedicate themselves to memorizing a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books, whose readings take place as intimate one-to-one encounters where the “book” recites its content to the reader. Over time the project has developed into a bookshop, a publishing house and an exhibition format, workshops, lectures and talks and, eventually, a book released this summer by Mousse Publishing.

Jana Ryšlavá (CZ) is a performer, choreographer and dramaturge. She studied at the Dance department of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and at Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. She is the founder and artistic director of the Move Platform in Ostrava which organises, among other things, an international festival of contemporary dance, new circus and physical theatre in Ostrava, Valašské Meziříčí and Košice.

Lucie Hayashi (CZ) is a dance critic, lecturer, project manager and art researcher. She holds an MA and PhD in Dance Studies from Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and MA in Japanese Studies from the Charles University, Prague. She is the cofounder and editor of Taneční aktuality, the Czech Dance News webzine, where she publishes regularly. She works as a dance management lecturer and has been recently appointed as the Head of the Dance Department of the Music and Dance Faculty of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She is also a member of various professional organizations and donations committees for dance and movement theatre in the Czech Republic.