WE LIVE HERE is a yearly summer academy at the end of the cultural season proposing time for experimentation, research and reflection beyond the scope of individual projects or production agendas. For the 9th time we invite professionals active in different fields of the performing arts and beyond to join a temporary community, to work and think together. WE LIVE HERE offers two Laboratory programmes with workshops, lectures, expeditions, How-Do-You-Work sessions and visits to Julidans.
The summer academy takes on a slightly different shape each year. This year’s edition presents two Labs. Nicole Beutler invited performance duo Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot to host the Ancestor Project Lab. This year’s guest curator Keren Levi asked Switzerland based choreographer Simone Aughterlony to come over and share her practice in the Remaining Stranger Lab.
Ancestor Project Lab
In The Ancestor Project Lab, Suzan Boogaerdt en Bianca van der Schoot work in close collaboration with video artist Roderik Biersteker. You will develop a contemporary ritual to honour the ancestors. From the idea that history is not what actually happened but how you choose to remember it, you will create a room for transformation, a space in which the virtual world and our technological extensions are part of a new Ancestral Altar. The research will look into a way how we can turn our wounds, or the wounds of the world, into sources of power by shedding the stories of our past. We will develop a ritual in which we can dump our historical baggage, the narrative we inherited over the course of thousands of years and many lifetimes – the story that drew us to our current family. If we can break these “ancestral curses” we can move on and we can create the new narratives the world needs nowadays. In the workshop the saga of our parents will be the inspiration to look into a possible future, into the evolution of our human body and our collective mind.
Remaining Stranger Lab
The Remaining Stranger Lab proposes an inclusive and accumulative approach to devising viable strategies for affective relations with others that hold difference rather than assimilate the other. How do we sense and foster the dimension of strange in each other, in the fundamental experience of not being at home in the world? Drawing on ideas and often contradictions steeped in the local, the figure of the chameleon and the guest/host relation we will experiment with temporary associations, exchanges and intimacies that are not rationed by normative aspects of building and unifying. Here, consensus might mean something closer to embracing the ungovernable – inviting many subjectivities, desires and activities to play out in their own particular ecology of relations.
8 - 12 juli