MODE05

Jan Ritsema is buying an old girls convent, near Reims (FR) dating from 1830, with 80 rooms, 8-10 rehearsal spaces, theatre space, 1,2 ha walled garden, unfortunately a chapel and offices. This, what he calls a Performingsarts Forum (paf) should be a critical and productive site for the creation, research and development of theatre, dance and connected areas.

to everybody -

there is a server problem at the moment, so the access to the wikis is impossible. we excuse for this inconvenience and keep working on the problem.

best,

m

sitting in an evening of ztb Berlin (contemporary dance association Berlin), talking about mode05. it just got clear to me that mode05 took place at a point in dance history after the term and practice of choreography has been exploding over the past 10 or 15 years. we all know that. now we are at a point that this practice is extremely open and difficult to define. or even moreso, we are unwilling to define it. so we are floating. and we want to float.

Since April 20, Daniel Aschwanden, Peter Stamer and I are in Beijing where we meet and work with a dance company that has toured in Asia and in Europe.

today i joined an open session of the work group on "specificity of choreographic practice". what seems interesting to me at this moment of mode05 is, that there are several attempts at defining or describing terms and processes that concern choreographic, dance and educational practices.

Here are my first toughts on motivations for mode05 from about a month ago:

When I got interested in studying dance, I could only find programmes that would interest me in the Netherlands. In Germany, there was not a single programme that would treat dancers/choreographers as artists from the beginning on (and not only after having undergone a rigid physical and/or intellectual practice) and offer theory, practice and space for own work as well as for reflecting oneself within various contexts. Still, such programmes are rare in Germany, if at all they exist. For me, co-organising mode05 is an opportunity to help change this situation plus the benefit of organising a sort of international think tank on the issue. Effects that go beyond the situation in Germany are more than welcome to me.

Since the beginning of the week, I have been trying out the wikis. It is great fun not only to fill them with content but moreover to find out about connecting the wiki pages among each other, creating a network of text. It seems to me that this network is already meaningful in itself, creating content... although I am not quite able to say yet in what way.

There is no ideal dance. There are rather movements and actions, some of them habitual or everyday, others carefully chosen-for or acrobatic.
There is no ideal choreography. There are rather individual processes of choice making.
There is no ideal school. There are rather varying desires, needs and instigations for learning.