SoSe 21: Disruptive constellations – Practices of reinterpretation
Anne Collod
Information for students
Aufgrund der aktuellen Pandemielage und der Einstufung Frankreichs als Hochrisikogebiet für COVID19 findet der Unterricht bis auf Weiteres rein digital statt. Der Online-Unterricht wird innerhalb der bestehenden Kurszeiten angeboten.
Opening Presentation Academy of Arts (online) Time: tba
Teaching Freie Universität Berlin (online) 3 blocks of five days, 5 hours per day, 14:00-19:00
- Week 1: 19 to 23 April 2021
- Week 2: 3 to 7 May 2021
- Week 3: 14 to 18 June 2021
Rehearsals Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg, Exhibition Hall 3, 28 to 30 June 2021
- First day: 11h-17h
- Second and third days: 11h-17h30
Performance 1 July 2021 Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg, Exhibition Hall 3
Evaluation 2 July 2021 Freie Universität Berlin (online)
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Anne Collod’s work develops around the theme of utopias of the collective and questions being together in dance in different contexts. Her approach combines research, creation and recreation of choreographic works based on the traces they leave, namely Labanscores. At the beginning of the 2000s, she had a crucial encounter with the American choreographer Anna Halprin, pioneer of American post-modern dance, and started a long-term collaboration with her. In 2008, Anne Collod proposed a reinterpretation of Anna Halprin’s major work, Parades & Changes (1965), which toured internationally and received a Bessie Award in New York in 2009. This was followed by a new version of the work in 2011 and a recreation of Halprin’s urban performance Blank Placard Dance (1967) in 2016.
For her teaching at the Freie Universität, Anne Collod will share her experiences and practices of reinterpretations of choreographic works with a specific focus on Anna Halprin on the occasion of her centenary. Together with the students she will question her processes of recreation and will explore new ways of recreating choreography. Combining theoretical approaches and performative practices, the seminar will be structured around three axes:
Investigate
How can we conduct research on a choreographic work based on the traces, the archives, and the documents it left? Why should we be concerned with dances coming from other times and other places? How can we propose a living relationship with dance history and activate both contemporaneity and anachronism, familiarity and strangeness in the works of the past? Can we abandon the phantasm of authenticity and conservation linked to archives that privilege enigma and mutation and transform archives to an-archives that ultimately support creation? The students will be invited to explore their own dance memories as subjective movement material. Developing processes of collecting, choosing, assembling, articulating and disarticulating documents, they will collectively create a documentation center for the notion of archive and an-archive linked to Anna Halprin’s works.
A Feldenkrais practice will accompany this process. Feldenkrais method will be approached like a score of sensitive investigation, allowing to learn to perceive and differentiate micro-information, to clarify the organization of the supports and the posture, and to open new possibilities of movement.
Interpret
The second axis will focus on the work of interpretation and will involve the reading and the performance of Anna Halprin’s scores, and scores of other natures. The students will be invited to interpret three scores from Parades & Changes based on daily gestures, with the constraint of being as faithful to the score as possible. This will provide the opportunity to question and explore notions of faithfulness and difference, transposition and translation, letter and spirit, rules and freedom, and processuality in general.
Anne Collod will link the practice of Anna Halprin’s scores to esthetical and political issues, to guided improvisation, and to reflections on individual and collective creation processes, tasks and daily gestures, sensation and emotion as tools of perception and work.
In this week, the Feldenkrais practice will focus on amplifying the awareness of the organization of the daily gesture.
Reinterpret, speculate
This week will open a new axis and focus on reinterpretation: choreographic work will be considered as a field of possibilities inviting to develop a multiplicity of potentialities from its elements. The students will be invited to work in groups to reinterpret one of Anna Halprin’s food scores from the 1960s with which she questioned the choreographic dimensions of daily gestures and the ritual aspect of daily activity. The students will speculate on possible transformation of the score regarding current topics. In dialogue or in tension with the original score, they will create their own version of it, interrogating the social, esthetical, and political issues implied in the action of preparing food and eating together. They will use scoring processes, create and materialize the score through different media, and finally perform it.
Share
At the end of the workshop, a performance of selected elements of the processes of investigation, documentation, interpretation, and speculation will provide a situation of recreation and sharing.
close20 Class schedule
Regular appointments