Invitation Encounter & Exchange Sessions

Tuesday 15 September – Encounter & Exchange Session #2

Location        Erkerfoyer      Schouwburg (Schouwburgplein 25)
Schedule      
16:15              Doors open 
16:30-17:45    Encounter & Exchange Session #2
17:45-18:00    Break
18:00-20:00    Artistic Encounter Hooman Sharifi 

With the main question “ How To Gather Together? “,  we will continue with our conversation as makers of Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam. The first part of this gathering we will reflect on the shared document and we will date each other up with the last developments each of us from our position in the performing arts field. 

Artistic Encounter with Hooman Sharifi

The Artistic Encounter with Hooman Sharifi is part of this Encounter & Exchange session. We invite you to be part of the try-out of Hoomans culinary performance and be witnesses of his creation process as makers. Hooman will work towards a culinary version of his performance The Dead Live On In Our Dreams. In this ode to well-known dramaturg and thinker Marianne Van Kerkhoven, he will receive us at a long table in the hall of the Schouwburg Theater Rotterdam while he serves self-prepared food, dances and narrates. A small meal is included in this programme. 

Hooman is a choreographer and founder of Impure Company. His performances are of tremendous physical power. As spontaneous as they sometimes appear to be, their intensity is the result of meticulous consideration and choreography, a movement between theatre, dance and visual art. For Sharifi, like hardly any other contemporary choreographer, the motto is “art is politics” – and politics, to him, means social perception and commitment not by means of superficial analysis or easy-to-read representation of supposedly political topics. Instead he goes deeper, searching for the emotions and structures behind group hierarchies, violence, power and abuse.

Born and raised in Iran, Hooman arrived solitarily in Norway at 15 and is now a Norwegian citizen. His experience in dance start with hiphop and streetjazz and later followed the technical training of classical and modern dance. He graduated from the National College of Ballet and Dance in Oslo in 2000. 

#artandpolitics #artistic-encounter #culinair-performance 

Saturday 19 September – Encounter & Exchange Session #3

Location:        
Studio, William Boothlaan 8 
Schedule:        
13:45 doors open
14:00-17:00 Welcome by PTR & The Working Method by Enkidu Khaled
17:00-17:15 break
17:15-18:15 Graffiti workshop by Naomi King
18:30-19:30 dinner (provided by PTR)
20:00 TANZ by Florentina Holzinger (Schouwburg, tickets are taken care of)

The Working Method

Can art really save the world? For Belgian-Iraqi theatre-maker and performer Enkidu Khaled, living through the Iraq war, this became an urgent question. His award-winning performance is a unique form of creative exchange. Based on extraordinary events he witnessed years back, he invites the participants to join him in analyzing and simplifying the complex process of making theatre from personal experience.

 In four easy steps he creates a new performance every time, showing how memory, association and tiny fragments of ideas can become a story and how simple decisions can have devastating effects. The name Enkidu means ‘reason’: his method is trying to make sense.

Part lecture, part performance, part workshop, Working Method moves seamlessly from the lightest of conversation to emotional punch. Engaging and honest, it questions how life and theatre interact. 

#collective-trauma #story-telling #time-travel 

Graffiti workshop by Naomi King

In collaboration with PoW WoW Rotterdam, we will have an artistic encounter with Rotterdam-based DJ, graffiti artist and illustrator Naomi King. While we hold cans in our hands and work towards a collective mural, she will give an insight about her artistic practice, the dynamics of Graffiti art in Urban Context and introduce some technics of mural making. 

Naomi has her own company Naomi King | Illustration & Design and works as an illustrator, graphic designer, animator and muralist. Her personal work is a visualisation of memories, dreams and other things she has saved in her sub consciousness. Drawing is a way for her to analyze all these things. It’s a way to organize her thoughts and her vision on life itself.

Naomi loves the hidden symbolism and meaning behind everyday objects and that fascination often plays a part in her designs and illustrations. With a varying style and colored pencils, spray-cans, acrylic paint or pen & ink, she creates a delicate world in which humans and nature are intertwined.

#muralsite #nature #human #rotterdamstreetart 

How to apply for the Encounter & Exchange Sessions

The Encounter & Exchange Sessions have been specifically designed for the makers of PTR. Because of Covid-19 restrictions we would like to ask you to register for these events, so we make sure that we keep track of the number of people joining. 

You can do so by sending an e-mail to suzan.slinger@theaterrotterdam.nl and mention for which program(s) you’re applying. Please beware that for 19 September we have a limited capacity of 15 participants and that there’s a first come first serve policy. If you have any questions, you can direct them to Suzan as well. 

More information about the Art of Performing Week and the programmes that are part of the Encounter & Exchange sessions can be found here. 

About Welcome To Our Guesthouse Lab #2

As Covid-19 is not leaving anytime soon and become a part of our daily life, we approach a new edition of our artists - in residence programme Welcome To Our Guesthouse. With this edition, we focus on the challenges that we as makers, cultural workers and public are facing during this pandemic: the interconnected nature of our actions, responses and decisions have caused different impacts local en international. If It is the uneven conditions that controle to a large extend how we work, create art and live, ”How to gather together?" becomes a key question in our current shared moment. Considering we are all different branches of a larger performance art community, we have thought about further questions for us to consider within our exchange that could combine our focuses, actions and expand our future perspectives.

From this starting point and with the main attitude of learning by doing we designed a Lab Week in collaboration with the Art Of Performing Track of Theater Rotterdam. During this second edition of Welcome To Our Guesthouse Lab Week, the makers of Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam meet regularly for performances and series of sessions called Encounter & Exchange, where we collaborate with artists Hooman Sharifi, Enkidu Khaled and Naomi King.

Looking forward to welcome you! 

Warmly, 

Team Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam 

The artist-in-residence programme Welcome To Our Guesthouse - organized by Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam - is a part of ACT, a European cooperation project on ecology, climate change and social transition. In an era of climate breakdown, pandemics, mass extinction and growing inequalities, we join our forces in a project on hope: connecting broad perspectives with specific, localized possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we ACT.