performance as subject, refusal as right
2016
lecture accompanied by scripted illustrations and performance
30’
What happens when dance detaches from and refuses to enact specific certainties? What happens when dance refuses to indulge expectations of service? What happens when dance wants to counterclaim the notions of preparation, presence and touch? What happens when dance refuses to phrase, cue, demonstrate or take part in the idea of illusion making, not because of escapism but for the chance to confront the given constraints with a deeper than the obvious sense of mobility? This could be perhaps the first step to start asking how to move beyond the obvious. Or how to move what does not seem to easily move.
full text here
Performance by: Astarti Athanasiadou & Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos
Presented at:
Nonperformance as Method Symposium, curated by Ypatia Vourloumis, Green Park, Athens, GR | October 2016
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This one day conference engaged with the theme of “(non)Performance as Method” in order to explore the ways in which artistic and cultural practices, by way of their myriad processes, articulations, and forms offer methods and blueprints for compositions of social life. More specifically, the conference studied performance practices that work against and through particular sets of constraints (economic, social, material etc), and was particularly interested in engaging with historical and contemporary (and potential) examples of artistic practice meeting political practice. Thus, in addition to an in-depth engagement with examples of certain strategies, actions and enactments, while always emphasizing practice as method and theory made material, we also grappled with practices of refusal, which is to say, thinking about the questions raised by those performances that refuse to perform in a certain way, that refuse certain calls to perform. Therefore the question of (non)performance as practice also becomes one of collaborating, improvising and living otherwise.
written by Ypatia Vourloumis
