THIRD Annual Forum 2022

DAS Research and THIRD are very pleased to announce a new edition of the THIRD Annual Forum. From Wednesday 26th October until Saturday 29th October, artists researchers of the cohort 3 of THIRD composed by Catalina Insignares, Nikita Maheshwary, Igor Koruga, Cecilia Vallejos, Andrea Božić, Áron Birtalan, and Amanda Piña will present their ongoing projects in individual sessions. Join a collective reading experience, a performance, conversations. Dwell in the negative space of artistic works, enter practical knowledge, walk into installations and films. Join a low-key role playing experience / fictional workshop, a performative show-and-tell research presentation. Be part of THIRD for a few days!

Location: DAS Graduate School 26-29 October 2022, program distributed from 10:30 to 21:30.

 

Photos by Thomas Lenden with performances by THIRD fellows Igor Koruga and Andrea Božić in collaboration with Julia Wllms and Billy Mullaney.

Wednesday 26th October 10:00 - 13.30hrs and 17:00 - 20:30hrs

Please sign up for the morning session or the afternoon/evening session. Each session can accompany a maximum of 13 participants.

The Unquiet Veil is a low-key role-playing experience / fictional workshop where players are guided through playful and mystical activities in which they develop their own practice of 'everyday death magick', make a pact with an imaginary entity, and create a spellbook that they take with themselves after the event.
The experience brings together pretend-play magick, electronic music, office protocols and playful more-than-human imagination. It also features a synthesizer that casts spells, a band of singing undertakers and lots of metaphysical bureaucracy.
The experience is a part of Áron Birtalan's PhD research project 'Your Bones Hold the Shape of What's to Come' at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Guiding Undertakers: Gabriel Widing, Catalina Insignares and Áron Birtalan Scenography: Maren Wolf Lighting: Gabriel Widing Music: Áron Birtalan Production Assistant: Maren Wolf developed by Secret Fiction with support from Stockholm University of the Arts
Find more information on the website

Thursday 27th October 10:30 - 13.00hrs 

This is a landing and study session for The Unquiet Veil. We will be guided through activities of reflection and conversation in ways that gently challenge our traces, sensations and memories from the day before. The session is meant to provide a space to explore the aesthetics and erotics of the Unquiet Veils afterlife as a relationship-making artwork.

On Thursday 27th October, we will collectively celebrate the THIRD Talks: conversations initiated by THIRD researchers with artists, activists, theorists on their praxis. We will celebrate through more practices of conversing: Catalina Insignares invites Léa Rivière for a talk, Amanda Piña and Cecilia Vallejos invite Prof. Rolando Vázquez and Prof. Mario Blaser.

Climatic Dances is the name of the fifth volume of the Endangered Human Movements* , a long-term research carried out by choreographer Amanda Piña on the current loss of planetary cultural and biological diversity. 

* Endangered Human Movements is the title of a long-term project, started in the year 2014, focusing on human movement practices which have been cultivated for centuries all over the world. Inside this frame a series of performances, workshops, installations, publications and a comprehensive online archive are developed which reconstruct, re-contextualise and re signify human movement practices in danger of disappearing, aiming at unleashing their future potential

Friday 28th October 11.00 - 12.30hrs

A talk about different art projects embedded in specific contexts in Latin America, Europe, Australia and Indonesia, which present specific uses of artistic skills to respond to social issues. What does it mean for an artist to work with (in) a community? What are the preconditions to take into account when working across or even outside disciplines?

Ongoing video installation
With intro by Cecilia Valejos Friday 28th October 14.00hrs
"Amsterdam, april 2020

In the first months of lockdown, the public space became a strange place where the fear of a financial crisis loomed. Parallels between other historical moments were inevitable, the comparison between crises seemed a possibility to see beyond. Amsterdam 2021,  juxtaposes images from the city with brief accounts from another place, Argentina, during the crippling financial crisis of 2001 and what it meant for some people to build a perspective beyond insecurity and lack of work."

Cecilia Vallejos is an artist, dramaturge and researcher with a background in Theater Studies and Cultural Analysis. Since 2020 she is professor at the Department of Visual Arts of University of Kassel, Germany.

Friday 28th October 16.00 - 17.45hrs
Performance 35 min

Choreography, video, text: Igor Koruga
Dramaturgy: Ana Dubljević
Costume: Maja Mirković

The session will focus on the performance „closeness of touch“ as one of the artistic materials (texts, video works, podcasts, performances) from the three year long artistic research on the practices and discourses of care, immunity, depression, vulnerability - as ways of resistance to today's pervasive capitalist realism. The research was based on applying kinetic and choreographic principles of gathering and interaction, seeking for alternative socio-political co-existences, coming from the domains of: physical gathering from rave clubbing dance and political protests; digital gathering and interaction; and gathering under somatically-affective movements of slowness (standing, resting, breathing, spiraling, bodily fluids), set within the feminist dramaturgical structures.

Igor Koruga is a freelance artist working within choreography and dance as an author, performer, pedagoge, dance dramaturge, stage movement choreographer and researcher in archiving performing art practices in the Balkans. 

Friday 28th October 18.00 - 20.30hrs

This artistic practice led research investigates the co-constitutive relationship between attention and space: how – through altering their logic - a new ‘imaginal’ space might appear in their overlap. It works towards developing a cosmology of attention and modes of spectatorship – an experience of an expanded range and quality of perception and attention - practiced through artistic work as an interface (membrane) with the world.

Working through ‘differentiated attention’, ‘weaving spaces’ and ‘mapping dreams’, the research explores the overlaps of spatiotemporal logic in dreams, gameplay and cosmology in site-responsive collaborations with architectural structures and their given systems and their spectatorship apparatus. It seeks to blur the edges between the stage and the world to consider the co-constructedness of the theatre and the world as imaginal spaces.

The performative show-and-tell research presentation will include excerpts from the performance How To Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) and from the colour and light installations The Light Archive and the Looking-Glass House in collaboration with Julia Willms and Billy Mullaney and a response to the research by Konstantina Georgelou, Joe Kelleher and Billy Mullaney.

Andrea Božić is choreographer, artist and curator whose art and research explore the co-constitutive relationship between attention, space and spectatorship under the umbrella name Spectra - Space Is an Organism. She artistic co-director (together with Julia Willms) of in-disciplinary art platform TILT, and tutor and researcher at DAS Theatre and DAS Research.

Konstantina Georgelou is a performing arts theorist and dramaturg. Her research spans over the areas of dramaturgy, choreography and artistic research, inquiring ways to move, attend and act collectively. Konstantina is an assistant professor at Utrecht University and a tutor at DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam. She co-authored The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017).

Joe Kelleher was Professor of Theatre and Performance for many years at University of Roehampton London. He is co-editor of the book series Thinking Through Theatre for Bloomsbury / Methuen. My own books include The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (Routledge, 2015), Theatre & Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio with Claudia and Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi and Nicholas Ridout (Routledge 2007). He is currently working with artist Edit Kaldor on a book Theatres of Powerlessness, due for publication in 2023. In the 1990s he made performances with Theatre PUR, and more recently with Eirini Kartsaki.

Billy Mullaney (USA/NL) is an Amsterdam-based artist working in theatre, choreography, and performance art. His research focuses on representational practices in and of various sites of performance, the modes of spectatorship they conventionally engender, and how interventions in the former affect the latter. By rigorously embodying such interventions, Billy's work often foregrounds the physiological impact of movement and thought on the body, indexing the stakes of adhering too closely (or too successfully) to logics such as the attention economy or post-fordist production. This research has led him to experiment with forms ranging from quantum physics lectures and children's television shows to promotional trailers and tarot readings. Billy is a recent graduate of DAS Theatre and associate artist at TILT. He is a lecturer, mathematics instructor and an actor.

Julia Willms (DE/NL) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht (NL) and Media Art at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna (AT). Her work deals with the nature of perception, the very act of viewing itself and the changing position of the spectator within a given environment. Together with choreographer Andrea Božić she is artistic co-director of the in-disciplinary platform TILT within which they collaborate on long term research into the co-constitutive relationship between attention, space and spectatorship under the umbrella name Spectra - Space Is an Organism.

Her works in video installations (often site responsive), performances, digital collages and paintings which have been presented in musea, theatres and festivals internationally (De Appel/Amsterdam, Reina Sofia Madrid, Centre Pompidou Metz, BNKR/Munich, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Frascati, SPRING, EMAF, Netaudio London a.o.).

Session 1: Saturday 29th October 11.00 - 12.30hrs
Session 2: Saturday 29th October 14.00 - 15.30hrs

Me&You: In a Dialogue is a collective reading performance in which the audience members are invited to read (aloud!) a stack of letters addressed by 'me' to 'you'. The letters, written in no particular chronological order, meditate on themes of guilt, care, borders, motherhood and the shifting identity of a dancing girl to unfold accounts of inequalities between religions, cultures and genders. While the first session is dedicated to collective reading; in the second session, together with dramaturg/curator Lara Staal, audience members are invited to join the conversation.

Nikita Maheshwary (NL/IND) is a choreographer. Her art inquiries lie at the nexus of gender, culture, and identity and through her performances, writings, exhibits and curation work, she is deeply invested in telling stories of plurality, female agency, forms of marginalisation and class divide.

Saturday 29th October 16.00-17.00hrs

In conversation with the work of medieval female theologians Hadewijch van Antwerp and Marguerite Porete, this talk and guided experience explores how mysticism acts as an interface to form intimate relationships with the unknown and unknowable. My hope is to undo assumptions and expectations about the aesthetics and erotics of mystical relationships - going from an objectifiable 'is' to a cloud of 'could be' that unfolds within the relational and situated. Further illuminations include the anguishes and joys of trying to leap into the abyss of Another - only to plunge sideways, ending up in the abyss of one's human condition again, and again. 

Our activity cards for the event are Undoing, Devotion, Contamination, Union, Annihilation and Symbiosis. This event features amplified music and touches upon death, grief, erotics and the supernatural in a poetic manner.

Saturday 29th October 18.00 - 20.30hrs

During the session we will dwell in the negative space of two of the works developed during my years of research around the relationships we have with the dead: the one-to-one practice landscapes of the dead  and the performance to know the vultures so well. Tamara Antonijevic and Carolina Mendonça will join me, as they constantly have during the past years, to share texts and practices that sustain these works by its sides and that will now be at the center of our collective time of study.

Catalina Insignares is a  colombian choreographer based in Brussels. She’s interested in how to use the sensorial and fictional means of the body and of touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. She always works through collaboration, her main partners in art are Myriam Lefowitz and Carolina Mendonça.

Carolina Mendonça is interested in contamination of knowledge and in being vulnerable to different logics. Graduated in Performing Arts at ECA-USP and with Master’s in Choreography and Performance at Giessen University in Germany. She develops a practical theoretical research that she shares in the workshop Impossible Practices dealing with telepathy, levitation, deep listening among other practices. Carolina build’s her work always in collaboration with other artists such as Catalina Insignares, Marcelo Evelin, Dudu Quintanilha, Carolina Bianchi among others.

Tamara Antonijević (1989) writes and works as a dramaturg and artistic collaborator in performance, theater and dance pieces. She studied Dramaturgy at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia and holds MA from Institute of Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, Germany. The role of the text in the collaborative process is in the focus of her interest and research. She worked in many national and international institutions in Germany and Serbia, as well as in the independent cultural institutions. As of this year, she’s a Phd candidate at the Applied Arts University Vienna. She is co-hosting and co-organizing the performative practices master’s program Live Art Forms at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, where she also teaches dramaturgy. 

About THIRD

DAS Graduate School initiated the 3rd cycle research group THIRD in 2016. It is a unique facilitating model designed as a two­-year trajectory for small­-scale learning cohorts of seven fellows each year. THIRD prepares theatre and dance artists for 3rd cycle research opportunities through the processes of refining their individual artistic research proposals, sharpening their national and/or international aspirations, and defining their affiliation as well as funding possibilities. The cohort environment generates collective experiment and reflection on the potential of artistic research. 

Delen