Session June 17, 2015

ACTION UNITES, WORDS DIVIDE (ON PRAXIS, AN UNSTATED THEORY) is a yearlong course conceived by artist Jon Mikel Euba at the invitation of and curated by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. The course is coordinated by If I Can't Dance curators Tanja Baudoin and Susan Gibb.

For each new workshop session of the course, Jon Mikel Euba will write a new text. The June session starts with a lecture he has written that will be live translated from Spanish to English while the students engage in ‘active listening’ by simultaneously translating the text into other media. This month, this will involve the students keeping count of how many ideas, and how many images, are contained in each point of the text, and then making a further division between ideas and images that appeal to their perception. Afterwards each student will verbally analyse with the group how each image and idea they identified could be instrumentalized in their practice.

For the rest of the June session, the group will participate in an exercise that involves them live translating into their mother tongues paragraphs from an earlier lecture by Jon Mikel Euba that will be recorded on video.

Session May 20, 2015

For each new workshop session of the course, Jon Mikel Euba will write a new text. The May session will start with the continuation of a lecture he wrote while the group was roaming in Marfa, Texas. The lecture will be live translated from Spanish to English while the students engage in 'active listening’ by simultaneously translating the text into other media.

For the rest of the May session, the group will participate in an exercise that begins with a specific experience with a set of images: each student will be asked to reflect upon how the surface was formed by putting endless questions to the images. Their questions will then be compiled, edited and recorded. This process aims to lead the group back through what made the forms possible, and forward, as a tool for generating new creative solutions.

Session April 22, 2015

For each new workshop session of the course, Jon Mikel Euba will write a new text.

The April session will start with a lecture he wrote while the group was roaming in Marfa, Texas. The lecture will be live translated from Spanish to English while the students engage in 'active listening’ by simultaneously translating the text into other media.

For the rest of the April session, Itziar Okariz rejoins the group as the guest tutor. After getting to know the students in February – where she introduced them to her performance practice by presenting fragments of her work and the group’s participation in a vocal exercise – she will work with vocal and body exercises to address the difference between oral and written language.

Session February 25, 2015

Itziar Okariz is the guest tutor of the February session of ACTION UNITES alongside Jon Mikel Euba. In this session Itziar Okariz will perform fragments of some of her more recent performances: Zoom OUT; Dream Diary and VW Chapter 2. Both are works in which little technology is required, that take place in a space between text and voice that continually pollute each other; a physical process that has to do with the production of sound.

If time allows, she will also show some other works, and make a vocal exercise with the group for which she will ask each of the participants to bring a written dream they had today to the day of the session.

At the end of the day, the group will meet with curator Theo Tegelaers and Simone Kleinhout from TAAK, and If I Can't Dance's Frédérique Bergholtz, to discuss the forthcoming trip to Marfa, Texas.

Session January 21, 2015

For each new workshop session of the course, Jon Mikel Euba will write a new text. The January session starts with a lecture he has written that will be live translated from Spanish to English while the students engage in 'active listening’ by simultaneously translating the text into other media. This month we'll also look at an exercise the students did, working with the material they produced from a previous lecture.

Session December 10, 2014

The December session starts with a lecture Jon Mikel Euba has written that will be live translated from Spanish to English while the students engage in 'active listening' by simultaneously translating the text into other media. The session furthermore includes screenings of videos by Jon Mikel Euba to continue the work from last month related with the concepts of objective view, subjective view and objectified vision.