HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

Walking Theory @Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers presents:

“Performative Technologies of the Group”
a workshop at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Ile de France
April 5-11

How can choreography and performance be used as instruments to form a group of individuals ad hoc who will collaborate on a project? What are the techniques of forming a group body of workers who never worked before? How does a worker exercise the skills of immaterial labor required for a “successful” collaboration: flexibility, communication skills, “openness,” curiosity in the other, non-conflictual problem-solving? How do individuals develop tactics to “dance” together in a group of equals? 

The workshop will simulate two distinct, but comparable situations of contemporary forms of labor: building a team of business workers, and gathering a group of performers for a project that relies on collaboration of all members. The aim of the workshop is to explore “group technologies” in the two different contexts: simulated situations with role-playing, games and exercises of group formation, individual and mass gestures etc.

Conceived and organized by Walking Theory (Bojana Cvejic)
Led by coaches Siegmar Zacharias and Christine De Smedt, and Bojana Cvejic
Filmed by Marta Popivoda and Maja Radosevic
Coordinator Virginie Bobin

The workshop is part of the project «How to do things by theory» (2010-2012) by Walking Theory collective comissioned and produced by cultural center Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

With: Antonia Baehr, Bojana Cvejić (TkH), Ole Frahm (Ligna), Isabell Lorey, Torsten Michaelsen (Ligna), Marta Popivoda (TkH), Nicolas Siepen (b_books), Ana Vujanović (TkH) and Siegmar Zacharias

In the frame of TkH [Walking Theory] residency “How To Do Things By Theory” at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris (2010-2012), the theoretical-artistic platform from Belgrade started a research about “Performance and the Public”.

Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism.

For their OPEN DAY they featuring heterogeneous artifacts: movements, images, laws, habits, writings in various formats, e.g. “sharp thoughts” or “running commentaries” debate that include a few artists and scholars as guests and collaborators in this research phase.

PROGRAMME
16.00-19.45 Social Choreography and Social Drama, introductory lecture by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić, Yugoslavia: How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda (selection from video archives, screening with discussion), Sharp Thoughts with Antonia Baehr and Siegmar Zacharias

19.45-20.30 dinner break

20.30-23.00 The Occupy: Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy, lecture by Isabell Lorey, public interview with Ligna collective, Running Commentary by Nicolas Siepen on Shifting/Sitting by Aernout Mik.

Antonia Baehr (photo: Marta Popivoda)

“If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of my body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed”. This would be a concise statement of the social choreography thesis, as Andrew Hewitt develops it in Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (2005). Social drama, as developed in social anthropology by Victor Turner‒with significant contributions by Arnold van Gennep, Richard Schechner, Roberto Esposito, etc.,‒serves as a rhetorical counterpart to social choreography. Social choreography and social drama then become interpretative tools for exploring the performances in the public and social spheres on the basis of their claim that social order isn’t just reflected but is enacted and rehearsed as an aesthetic order. The two interpretative models focalize bodily gestures and movements, organization of bodies in time and space, mise-en-scène, and dramaturgy of public gatherings and mass social events and thus discuss the functions of “liminality” and “communitas” in shaping social community between the public and the private spheres.

In this phase of the research “Performance and The Public”, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism. On January 7th 2012, they organize an Open Day featuring heterogeneous artifacts of the studied: movements, images, laws, habits, writings in various formats, e.g. “sharp thoughts” or “running commentary” debate that include a few artists and scholars as guests and collaborators in this research phase .

Program:

Introductory lecture by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić (4pm),  How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda (selection from video archives, screening with discussion) (5.30pm), interview with Dana Yahalomi from Public Movement (6.30pm), “sharp thoughts” debate around the Occupy Movement by Julie Heintz and Vanessa Theodoropoulou (8.15pm), running commentary by Franck Leibovici on “Communitas” / “Raw Footage” by Aernout Mik (9pm)

(dinner break: 7.15 pm ‒ 8.15 pm).

With Bojana Cvejić (TkH), Julie Heintz, Marta Popivoda (TkH), Franck Leibovici,
Vanessa Theodoropoulou, Ana Vujanović (TkH) and Dana Yahalomi (Public Movement)

More information

www.tkh-generator.net
www.leslaboratoires.org
www.howtodothingsbytheory.info

Walking Theory at hetveem theater:
PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC
OPEN DAY #1

What is public space, and do we have one, or several, today? Is it only that which we produce, but can’t own? Who governs the public space today? Who are “we” who address the public space as “our” concern? Are we as citizens, especially artists and intellectuals, politically challenged or even dispossessed to the extent that we cannot conceive of the public as the site of action today?

With these questions, Ana Vujanovic, Bojana Cvejic and Marta Popivoda, from the collective Walking Theory (Teorija koja Hoda) from Belgrade, have begun a two-year long theoretical-artistic research about performance and the public, within their project “How to do things by theory” in les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris. They focus on contemporary forms of social choreography and social drama, “artivism”, biopolitical technologies of self-performance in public, etc. Their research involves examining and fabricating heterogeneous artifacts of artistic and everyday practices: movements, images, laws, habits, discourses… Their perspectives are informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neo-liberal capitalism.

On July 1^st, 2011, Walking Theory in collaboration with hetveem theater and les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers organize an Open day as part of the first phase of their research, featuring a few artists, scholars and activists as guests and collaborators in discussion, lecture, and video-presentation.

Program

16.00 – 18.00
The Word of Host; Bojana Mladenovic
Performance and the Public: Mapping Out  A Research; introduction by Ana, Marta, Bojana
Can We Only Perform the Public Now?; lecture by Ana Vujanovic and Bojana Cvejic 
Yugoslavia: How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body;
Marta Popivoda’s selection from video archives. Screening with Discussion

18.00 – 19.00 Dinner

19.00 – 22.00

Aernout Mik: Communitas; Running Commentary with Bojana Kunst
Private – Public: Undoing the Binary; sharp thoughts with Igor Dobricic (proponent) and Sigrid Merx (opponent)
A Response; Joe Kelleher
Netherlands: When the State Expels Art from the Public. A Debate

www.tkh-generator.net
www.hetveemtheater.nl
www.leslaboratoires.org
www.howtodothingsbytheory.info