Responsive Bodies. The Ethics of Temporal Community in Contemporary Dance

By relating positions of philosophical literature to the connection of dancing and dance reception, the workshop investigates the ethical dimension of temporal communities in dance. Based on but also going beyond the co-presence of dancing and kinaesthetically responding bodies, temporal communities in dance address an extended audience: They transcend the present moment of dancing into the past of ethical reflection and into the future of responsible action.

How can we relate philosophical connections of ethics and performativity (Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Werner Hamacher, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc.) to the materiality of moving bodies? What role do vulnerability, resilience and non-identity play in terms of the temporal community of philosophers, dancers and spectators? How can we understand contemporaneity beyond shared time and presence so that contemporary dance can acknowledge the fragility and incompleteness of the past and unlock the potentiality of the future? And how is this understanding of contemporaneity linked to ethical responsiveness in dance and dance reception?

Programme

Thursday, 3 June 2021

15:00 | Alexander H. Schwan (Freie Universität Berlin): Welcome and Introduction 

Panel 1: Re-Definitions: Choreography and Dancing

Moderator: Mariama Diagne (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien)

15:15 | Lucia Ruprecht (Emmanuel College, Cambridge): An Ethics of Inconsistency

15:45 | Raf Geenens (KU Leuven): Community and Choreography: A Reflection on Dance’s Constitutive Outside

Discussion

Panel 2: Articulations

Moderator: Monika Raic (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

17:00 | Aili Bresnahan (University of Dayton/University of Roehampton): Enactive Communal Expression in Dance: Limits on Spectator Access

17:30 | Sandra Noeth (HZT Berlin): On Corporeal Grounds: Bodily Integrity and its Artistic Articulations

Discussion

Panel 3: (Non-)Relationalities

Moderator: Lindsey Drury (EXC 2020)

18:45 | Mlondi Zondi (Wesleyan University): Cleansing Violence: Notes on (Non-)Relationality and Absolution

19:15 | Stefan Hölscher (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Questioning Man in Joana Tischkau’s ,Colonastics‘

Discussion

Friday, 4 June 2021

Panel 4: Transpositions

Moderator: Kirsten Maar (Freie Universität Berlin)

15:00 | Timmy De Laet (University of Antwerp): The Choreographic Attitude: Documentary Dance and the Ethics of Witnessing

15:30 | Gerko Egert (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen/HBK Braunschweig): Transsituational Techniques

Discussion

Panel 5: Co-Existence

Moderator: Nina Tolksdorf (EXC 2020)

16:45 | Fiona Bannon (University of Leeds): Arenas of Exchange: Dance, Ethics and Communities of Practice

17:15 | Leonie Otto (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): The Experience of Co-Existence

Discussion

Panel 6: Intersubjectivity 

Moderator: Alexander H. Schwan (Freie Universität Berlin)

18:30 | Einav Katan-Schmid (Berlin): Touching Gestures of Relational Care. Three Case Studies from Israel of Choreographing Intersubjective Considerations through Touch

19:00 | Ilya Vidrin (Northeastern University): Normative Issues in Dancing Together

Discussion

Virtual Apéro