LACE #3, open call!
Invitation:
With this OPEN CALL we are inviting professional artists, researchers, and educators, i.e., practitioners working with dance, the performing arts, or an adjacent body-based practice to contribute to LACE #3: Materialising Touch symposium.
Theme:
Last year we wanted to create a hospitable environment for artistic research and art-based knowledge-making and -sharing. Our goal was to engage with the practice of making spaces hospitable at least as much as it was to engage with the poetics and the theory of hospitality. In the end, our successes and failures left us with a deep sense of appreciation for the labour of hospitality, the labour of making spaces hospitable to the kind of tenderness and the kind of vibrancy that emerges from contact, and relationship.
With LACE #3: Materialising Touch we want to continue exploring along the tangent set by the question, “What does it actually take to create a space for the community to not just recognise a value (like hospitality), but actually embody it (integration)!? And what does it take to include or integrate the space for integration within the structures we operate in? As artists, academics, or activists. Therefore claiming spaces for integration as essential for experiencing, studying, and working in the context of professional dance and performing arts?”
We have decided to focus this year’s OPEN CALL on the notion of integration, which we define as any material practice that evidences the effort (action) and the time it takes (duration) to make whole (anew) by putting things together, by putting things in touch. The general questions guiding the curation of this year’s symposium have been articulated here. Below, you will find some ways that we’ve thought about the labour of integration, what it is made of, how it could be defined or thought of. If any of the ways we thought of speak to you, if they remind you of your practice, please respond to our call. If another way of thinking integration comes to mind that aligns with the ones we show below, and your practice exemplifies it, please respond to our call!
Examples:
Reading the questions below, does your practice come to mind? Can you share the example of your practice with us? Can you engage us in its reflective effort, its action, or duration? Thus introducing us to its experiential, discursive methodology?
integration as an essential activity
- What would it mean to treat integration as an essential activity?
- Does your practice include integration as one of its essential components?
integration as a collective activity
- What would it mean to treat integration as a collective activity?
- Does your practice evidence the potential of integration to be engaged as a collective activity? Does it, perhaps, require taking action at a communal level?
- How do you create the conditions for taking relational action requiring a communal effort?
- How do you coordinate a shared effort that yields a relational action? How does your practice create the conditions for such coordination?
integration as a creative activity
- What would it mean to treat integration as an essentially creative activity?
- Does your practice evidence creative characteristics of integration? How does it do that, by way of transformation, or renewal, or regeneration? Does another example come to mind?
- Does your practice, perhaps, evidence a resistance to standard measures of time?
- How does working with non-standardised measures of time embody larger values described by the notion of integration, like renewal, restoration, creative reflection?
integration as a touch-based activity
- And if we commit to thinking integration as an activity that includes touch and touching, how does thinking integration as an essentially creative activity helps us understand touching as essentially creative? What would it mean to treat touching as an essentially creative activity?
- How does your practice exemplify the treatment of touch as a creative activity?
conditions
Contributors will be given up to 90 minutes to present their practice in a format we call the ‘deep dive’.
We are being deliberately uninstructive regarding the form your contribution ought to be presented in. The reason for that is very simple. Encouraged by our experience working with artists, activists, and academics who specialise in making-knowledge by making-art, we’re assuming that the form of your contribution will be articulated specifically in relation to the knowledge you’re documenting through your practice. Our questions are,
- How does your practice operate?;
- What conditions does it require?; and
- In what format do you imagine sharing your practice and your observations with the symposium participants?;
- What kind of point would you like to make? To what embodied conclusion do you hope to bring the temporary community to? And why?
Your response may take place in written language. You may send us a pdf document with your responses and reflections to the questions above at maximum length of 3 pages, excluding images. In case writing is not your preferred medium of expression, we welcome video material. Maximum duration of video material is set to 6 minutes via link.
For your application we also need the following information (in English): personal data, a CV, a portrait photo and optionally links to videos/online platforms of past works.
Please submit your proposal via www.education.impulstanz.com.
This OPEN CALL closes on February 9, 2025.
We will respond to all applicants by the end of February, 2025.
Those invited to contribute will be offered a travel allowance (up to EUR 300,-), accommodation, and a contracted fee of EUR 500,-. An official letter of invitation will be sent to those contributors who accept our invitation, which you can use to secure any additional funds.
If questions remain, please write to symposium@impulstanz.com.
Thank you for your contributions!
pavleheidler for Team Lace