'Material Goods' at KampnagelThe Materiality of Dance

31 January 2023

Photo: Evgen Rom

What role do written artefacts play for an ephemeral art like dance? At a CSMC conference at Kampnagel, lectures, audience discussions, and performances revolve around the relationship between the ephemeral and the permanent in the performance arts.

Unlike a painting on canvas or a novel on the pages of a book, dance cannot be captured. In dance, the artwork disappears the moment the performance ends. Still, choreographers and other actors produce material goods before, during and after a performance, which take the form of notes, sketches, and recordings. How do these materials relate to dance itself? Are they part of the artwork or something entirely different? And what does this mean for the possibility of archiving dance? From 2-4 February, the conference ‘Material Goods’ at Kampnagel will raise these and other questions both from a scientific and an artistic perspective.

‘Despite the availability of analogue and digital image media such as photography, video, and smartphones, written artefacts play an essential role especially during the production of choreographies’, says Gabriele Klein, who curated the event and organised it together with Franz Anton Cramer. ‘In Hamburg, there is a striking example of this: John Neumeier ensured from the very beginning that his works were notated and thoroughly documented. At the conference, we want to take up the issues of how dance can be archived and what the relationship is between a performance and the materialities that refer to it.’

The programme includes performances, academic lectures, and public discussions. It starts on Thursday afternoon with a keynote address by Aleida Assmann, who has been awarded the ‘Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels’ and an Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, among others. She will then engage in a panel discussion with Johannes Odenthal, founder of the magazine tanz. On Friday and Saturday, the programme included lectures by Sybille Krämer, Annet Decker, Cristina Baldacci, Timmy De Laet, Hari Krishnan, Bojana Cvejic, and Bojana Kunst, as well as a lecture performance by the artist Penelakeke Brown, and a panel discussion with the visual artists Axel Malik and the choreographer Ursina Tossi.

The end of all three days of the conference is marked by performances that directly address the role of written artefacts in dance. The choreographer Sasha Waltz developed her piece ‘In C’ from experimental forms of rehearsing during the pandemic; and ‘Rewriting’ and ‘Science Fiction’, a two-part evening by choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion, draws on sketches of never-realised art projects.

More information on the conference is available on the event page.

The full programme can be downloaded here.

Attending the lectures and talks is free of charge. To participate, please register via e-mail at franz.cramer"AT"uni-hamburg.de. Tickets for the evening events can be purchased directly from Kampnagel.