Five artists, one year

If I Can't Dance's course at DAI this year is constructed around sessions with recurring tutor Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and sessions with our Commissioned Artists Gerry Bibby, Sara van der Heide, Snejanka Mihaylova and Emily Roysdon.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is an artist based in Berlin who brings elements of theatre, music and dance to a practice that manifests itself in a broad variety of mediums (ceramics, textile, print, painting, live performance). Matthew will join us for four sessions this year, with an intensity towards the end of the year, and a one week working period outside the DAI week. At the end of the year, a collective performative work, developed with Matthew, will be presented publically. Further information on the workshop sessions with Matthew will follow shortly.

The course is also closely interwoven with If I Can't Dance's programme as you are invited to attend the presentation of works of Gerry Bibby, Sara van der Heide, Snejanka Mihaylova and Emily Roysdon in Amsterdam, as well as a series of public conversations with the artists held at our offices in Amsterdam, that take place following their performances. Each of these artists have an interest in working performatively, but approach the notion of performance from their own position, which means that the specific form and content of their work determines what performance means to them. For the workshop, the artists are asked to introduce their work to you, and to take an aspect central to their current working methodology as a guiding principle to explore ideas about performance. Alongside a shared interest in working performatively, all five artists - Matthew, Emily, Sara, Snejanka and Gerry - have adopted a responsiveness to If I Can't Dance's current research field, of 'appropriation and dedication'.

With this research field we express our interest in how acts of appropriation, -or making something one's own-, might be considered as acts of acknowledgement, homage and mutual influence. Each of the artists has an articulated idea of how to configure a relationship with other practices and fields and how to make use of 'source material', for instance through research into authorship and originality, or by adopting strategies of infiltration. The five artists all have experience in exploring collaborative work in their practice.

We're interested to ask them what collaboration means and what aesthetic and ethical questions arise when working collaboratively. In the artists' practices that will be introduced to you, you will recognize collaborations in the form of co-creations, making connections between different fields, but also as consults or dramaturgy. We're interested in how authorship at different moments needs to be shared, or conversely, claimed.

The course is coordinated by If I Can't Dance curators Tanja Baudoin and Vivian Ziherl in turns.

If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution produces art works and thematic programmes. Departing from a spirit of open questioning and long term enquiry with artists, If I Can't Dance is dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art.

http://www.ificantdance.org/

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