The Centre for the Humanities and Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, in collaboration with Springdance, proudly present writer and curator Adrian Heathfield as the first CFH Festival Creative Fellow. Adrian Heathfield’s Festival Creative Fellowship will be connected to a series of Springdance/CFH Salons that will explore issues at the intersection of contemporary dance practice and current theoretical developments. The Salons are aimed towards researchers, practitioners, students and others interested, to stimulate the discourse around dance, performance, bodies and space.
The key idea for this year’s Salon Programme is leading Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen’s seminal creation Live, a duet for a dancer and a cameraman. Now that the use of live video on stage has become commonplace, it is hard to imagine the impact made by Live when first performed in 1979. Vice versa, in 1979 nobody could imagine the impact that the developments heralded by Van Manen’s Live would have on the development of contemporary dance. Looking back now, Live appears as a milestone in contemporary dance history. The Springdance/CFH Salon programme proposes van Manen’s Live as a starting point for an exploration of the meaning of live and liveness in the context of the mediatization of culture. Three Salons will provide a contextualization of Live and liveness within cultural history and interdisciplinary theory. These Salons will be followed by special programme during Springdance, which will include among others a performance of Live by the Dutch National Ballet, a public discussion with Hans van Manen and a lecture by Adrian Heathfield.
Salon I
Wednesday January 20, U-Theater Studio T, 16.00-18.00h
During the first Salon, a recording of the original performance of Live was screened and followed by responses by and discussion with dance critic and historian Eva van Schaik, choreographer Daniel Almgren Recen and dancer Bojana Mladenovic (who recently created a remake of Live), and media theorist Nanna Verhoeff.
Salon II
Wednesday March 10, U-Theater Studio T, 16.00-18.00h
Writer and curator Adrian Heathfield (Roehampton University) is the first CFH Festival Creative Fellow. Adrian Heathfield will speak with Maaike Bleeker (Theatre Studies, Utrecht University) about the performance Live in the context of the history of liveness in theatre. Heathfield will draw connections with his own texts and performances in which the reflection on liveness takes a key position.
Seminar on Performance, Temporality and Duration
Tuesday March 9, 14.00-17.00.
On the day before the second Salon, Adrian Heathfield presents a seminar on Performance, Temporality and Duration. This seminar is open to MA, RMA and PhD students, researchers and others interested. Participation requires preparatory reading. Please contact info@theatrestudies.nl.
Salon III
Thinking in and out of Step: The Argument from Dance
Lecture by Maaike Bleeker.
Wednesday April 14, U-Theater Studio T, 16.00-18.00h
Prof. Bleeker (Theatre Studies, Utrecht University) will look at the relationship between dance and media from the perspective of Deleuze’s Cinema Books. Deleuze conceives of cinema as the organ for perfecting the new reality” of modern life because cinema allows for movement to be part of how things are shown.
“We were never in the same rhythm, we were always out of step”, thus characterizes Deleuze his long term collaboration with Guattari in the introduction to What is Philosophy? In this last book they wrote together - and in which the question of art as a mode of thinking plays such a central role - Deleuze describes their collaborative thinking in terms of dance, yet only to disqualify them as dance partners. For Deleuze cinema, and not dance, is the example par excellence of art as a mode of thinking. Central to Deleuze’s account of cinema is movement and how the articulation of movement transforms as a result of the mobile camera and montage. This transformation is what turns cinema into “the organ for perfecting the new reality” of modern life. Van Manen’s Live stages this transformation as a duet of a cameraman, holding a mobile camera, and a dancer. This lecture takes Live as a starting point for an exploration of the potential of Deleuze’s theory of cinema as a perspective on the relationship between dance, thinking, and mediatization.
About the first CFH Festival Creative Fellow: Adrian Heathfield
The Festival Fellow Programme is a cooperation between the Centre for the Humanities and The Department of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University. The main festival is taking place in the city of Utrecht and Adrian Heathfield is the first of a line of fellows around whom a range of activities will be planned. Heathfield writes on, creates and curates performance. He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing 2004) and Small Acts: Performance, The Millennium and the Making of Time (Black Dog Publications 2000). He co-edited the box-publications Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini Live 1997) and On Memory, an issue of Performance Research (Vol. 5, No. 3, Routledge 2000). His essays have been published in numerous books and journals. He co-curated Live Culture, a four day performance series and two day symposium at Tate Modern, London (2003) and the performance series Small Acts at the Millenium. He has worked with many artists on critical and creative collaborations, including talks with Franko B, Sophie Calle, La Ribot, Jerome Bel and Richard Maxwell, dialogues with Peggy Phelan and Alan Read, and workshop projects with Goat Island, DV8 and Forced Entertainment. He has taught theory and performance practice in institutions across Europe and America. Currently he is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton University, UK. See also www.adrianheathfield.com
