Material Goods

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 revolved 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? ‘Material Goods’, a conference held at Kampnagel in February 2023, raised these and other questions both from a scholarly and an artistic perspective.

The programme included performances, academic lectures, and public discussions, including a keynote address by Aleida Assmann and further contributions from Johannes Odenthal, 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 days of the conference was 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, drew on sketches of never-realised art projects.