What can dance do to limit environmental catastrophe? Everything. During our Half 6 conversation with Romain Bigé and Antonija Livingstone, we will take this bold idea seriously.

Beware, we won’t be commenting dance pieces that are about ecology, and we won’t be discussing how to lower the carbon foot-print of dance industry. Instead we will try and find out how dance practices can help us redefine the very idea of what is « human » and its relation to other earthlings. We’ll consider dance as a precious space of experimentation in which we can try and disturb anthropocentric ideas of personal and collective agency.

We’ll procede by asking a couple of simple and at the same time difficult questions: Who is moving? Am I moving, or am I being moved? Through different answers to these questions, we’ll try and embrace a multi-focal and multi-agent perspective of ourselves and of the world. In other words, through dance we will try and reach a shift in thought that makes the survival of our world imaginable.

This HALf6 edition is part of the second part of the Artist in Residence programme Training the Future: Context, Difference and Awareness in Dance Education that runs from 2 to 6 September 2019. Students and teachers of the Expanded Contemporary Dance, Modern Theatre Dance and Urban Contemporary (JMD) study programmes take part in this event organised by Angela Linssen, Bojana Bauer and Gerleen Balstra and co-curated by Bauer and Linssen.

Romain Bigé, PhD, digs, writes about, curates, and improvises dance and philosophy. Lives and teaches nomadically in and out of Paris, Europe.Fell in dance in North America with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, Matthieu Gaudeau, and many others. And investigates the soma-topolitical potentials of dance for mobilizing sensitivities to other critters.

Antonija Livingstone ( CA/DE)
Operates at the intersection of performance & plastic arts practice. Graced by a self-directed non- institutional education with choreography and performance studies, her outlook is informed by her family of geologists living in nomadic gold mining camps in the Yu-kon. Kinship with the elements. Exploration. Affection for the makeshift.
Formerly, as a dancer choreographer working most extensively with Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods as well as in a variety of projects with Benoit Lachambre: Recently, as an Associate Artist at Mé-nagerie de Verre, Paris and Darling Foundry Montreal 2018; curating, coaching, creating new sculptural works.

Her body of work includes a decade devoted to creating, producing and touring a series of co-authored feminist performance installations including :
Culture Administration & Trembling with Jennifer Lacey, Stephen Thompson, Dominique Petrin, Supernatural with Simone Aughterlony and Hahn Rowe, les études ( hérésies 1-7) with Nadia Lauro and CHAUD collection 20 with Mich Cota. She coaches performance practice and facilitates workshops at École Supérieur Nationale de Pay-sage, Versailles, EXERCE CCN Montpellier, MDV, Paris, DOCH, SE Impulstanz,AT Movement Research, NYC, PACAP Forum Danca PT, HZT Berlin, Lovein and other hives.