origin story

The story of the LACE Symposium begins in the summer of 2013 with the first IDOCDE Symposium. IDOCDE’s original mission was to create the IDOCDE website. The IDOCDE website was going to function as an extra-institutional space for dance professionals—particularly dance educators—to store their research and their documentation and engage in content-specific peer-to-peer exchange in an attempt to develop a discourse around the practice of dance documentation. Imagine the best characteristics of LinkedIn, Facebook, and the Research Catalogue all wrapped up into a single platform eagerly populated by independent dance researchers, artists and educators alike. That was the goal.

Kerstin Kussmaul, IDOCDE’s founder, often talked about her motivation to make the IDOCDE website in terms of accessibility. Her examples included critical reflections on the amount of time institutionalised peer-review takes, on the ways biassed institutionalised peer-review can stand in the way of knowledge-making and -sharing, and on the potential negative consequence of unchecked institutional bias for knowledge-creation overall. To counter some of the negative effects of said restrictions, Kussmaul and her team developed a website that functioned independently; that allowed artists-researchers to publish their findings first, before exposing them to peer-review; and crucially, that put peer-review in the hands of the community as a whole.

Members of the IDOCDE community frequently reported that being permitted to publish their research first allowed them to explore a wider range of methods, both when it came to documenting their processes and situating their knowledge- and art-making practice within critical discourse. Many speculated that, as a result, this model allowed them to discuss their work with a wider community of people than is common within the academic context, which–in turn–allowed them to find a wider application of their knowledge than they had previously thought.

The symposium was initially established as a dissemination event, i.e., to satisfy the expectations set by IDOCDE’s primary funder, Erasmus+. Over the years, the event revealed itself to be not only a dissemination event, where experts reported on the advancements they’d made in their respective fields the year prior, but a site of experimentation, where experts engaged their peers in practice-based exchange. It was the users of the IDOCDE website that informed and encouraged the continued experimental and practice-based formatting of the symposium, an effort that eventually led to the emergence of the IDOCDE community.

After a decade of organising IDOCDE symposia and successfully implementing three Erasmus+ projects, Team IDOCDE organised their final symposium. To organise this symposium, they turned to Plato whose own Symposium reflects the ancient Greek tradition of gathering after a meal in a conversation accompanied by dancing, singing, reciting, and playing and listening to music. The last IDOCDE Symposium—The Rest of Art, a Manifesto—invited no speakers, organised no panels. Instead, everyone attending the Symposium joined the circle hosted at the beginning and the end of the day, in which the community slurped on freshly cut pieces of watermelon. After this symposium, which was taken to be a celebration of the decade the team spent working on the IDOCDE Symposium, Team IDOCDE and the IDOCDE project dissolved.

With the original Team’s blessing, two remaining members–Deirdre Morris and pavleheidler–coordinated with an old IDOCDE collaborator–now a new member of Team LACE–Sylvia Scheidl to make a new symposium. Like a phoenix rising out of its own ashes, so did the LACE symposium emerge in place of the IDOCDE symposium, complete with its new mission. Namely, to continue bringing together practitioners working at the intersection of art, academia, and activism to examine the challenge of place, the restriction of its specificity, and explore strategies for successful interpersonal cross-cultural contact-making in the age of gentrification, polarisation, and segregation.

Since 2023, LACE symposium continues to hold the space for radical approaches to making-knowledge by making-art.