The Series of Encounter & Exchange Session:

Studio Vist: Samara Hersch / Body of Knowledge 
As an invitation we will borrow our bodies collectively to participate in a    
process of a research around remote performance.
 

and then the doors opened again – unfolding the archive / Simone
Basani
On April 8, 2020, in the middle of the first Covid-19 wave in Europe, artist David Weber-Krebs invited his colleagues around the world to participate in a collective act of imagination. He asked them via e-mail to imagine the future of theatre from that specific moment when theatres were closed and it was not clear how and when, and even if they would open again.

This invitation brought forth 75 visions by artists, scholars, curators and spectators who gave their response to the question, !What will happen on your first theatre visit after the lockdown?”. Their responses were published as a compilation of visions in a handbook for theatre after Covid-19, edited together with dramaturg Simone Basani: and then the doors opened again.

From March 2021, starting from the content of the book itself, Weber-Krebs and Basani have engaged spectators in different countries to think further about spectatorship. New speculations, reflections and narrations have been produced through a series of collective workshops, individual talks and walks through cities.

These materials are going to be unfolded in Rotterdam. Simone Basani invite/s a group of spectators to gather for a three-days workshop. In this research workshop, every spectator takes care of a question or a key-concept coming from the materials of a previous spectator in order to challenge it, explore it, articulate it. Every spectator (or sub-group) can choose the medium they find the most coherent for this exploration: fiction or essay writing, choreoography, sound / light installation, institutional critique.

Biomyhtography / Kopano Maroga
Using the literary techniques of biomythography (coined by Audre Lorde) and critical fabulation (coined by Saidiya Hartman) this workshop seeks to translate these literary techniques into techniques for developing performative strategies. How can these systems of enmeshing biography, historical archive, mythology and fabulation act as a mechanism to jeopardise the status of the event, to displace the received or authorised account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done" (Hartman, 2008). What can this  destabilisation produce in the way of a "slippage" of assumptions and rigid
 meaning making and identity making processes.

Practicals 
This workshop will consist of a presentation on the processes described above of 45 minutes followed by a physical exploration of these techniques in 40 - 50 minute sessions. Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable clothes to move and dance in, to bring a bottle of water and something to write on and with

Our Skin / Rita Vilhena & Yael Karavan
Rita Vilhena and Yael Karavan will guide the local community in a performative action with the intention of raising awareness and motivating the creative thinking of the participants on the theme of the film: how we influence each other - Body-Earth, Earth-Body.

The presentation of the film Our Skin on the 7th of October will be accompanied by a performance that results from a workshop with the community for all ages. This project is part of the universe of public art, with the intention of reaching out to all people, regardless of their financial   means, class or artistic inclinations. We intend to bring back nature to different urban spaces, where it once existed and thus remind us that we  are not independent from it.

13:29 (solar noon)

19:03 ( sunset )

Dreammachine/ Tools For Action+Floor in collaboration with Mala Kline

The provisional title of the work is Dreammachine, referencing the interactive sculpture of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville from 1960: a cut-up cylinder with a light bulb inside that turned around. The result is a
 stroboscopic effect of 78 pulse per seconds that let your brain activity  synchronise with the frequency of the light flashes. The ´scientific` result is a state of wakeful relaxation as your bioelectric brain activity calms down to the frequency of so-called alpha waves. Here we will be part of an  research led by Tools For Action + Floor and Mala Kline.

Mala Kline uses Saphire™ to facilitate individual and communal dreaming in order to create unique singular worlds weaved from and generated through the language of our dreaming. Her work is a constant practice of presence, an ongoing return into the creative space where dreaming and the here and now, juxtaposed, continuously penetrate and inform each other