Team 2020

The Saturday Meetings

A big THANK YOU to all artists of the A.PART-Festival 2020! It has been an exciting and challenging time, and our blog has become much more than a makeshift solution, thanks to your commitment, curiosity, and creativity. Our weekly Saturday meetings have been an anchor through the past six weeks, and it will feel quite strange not to see you anymore in this virtual community space. The A.PART festival has come to an end – but the blog lives on, as do your artistic processes.
We are looking forward to keep seeing and reading you here, and hopefully, we’ll celebrate this experience sometime soon in the 3D world.

Till soon,
The A.PART Team
Julek, Diethild & Gabi

Text #2 zum A.PART-Festival von Johanna Ackva

Johanna Ackva, Studioschreiberin des ada Studio, hat sich mit den Künstlerinnen Silja Tuovinen, Lauren Fitzgerald, Simone Gisela Weber & Julia Keren Turbahn unterhalten.

Hier geht’s zum Interview.

PODCATS #1

With Podcats, we attempt to contextualize the A.PART-Festival 2020. Now, finally, you can listen to us while doing your dishes!!

For our first edition, we invited Alex Hennig for a conversation. Together we wander through questions around the blog, the event of theatre, and habits of watching in times of Corona.

We also play games.

Enjoy!

PS: Because we are all native German speakers, it would be bizarre to have a conversation in English. I want to encourage all our colleagues and friends that feel insecure with the german language to give it a try. We are available for questions about translation. 🙂

Click down here:

PODCATS was edited and mastered by Lea Niemann.

Text #1 zum A.PART-Festival von Johanna Ackva

Here is the first of a series of reflections by studioschreiberin Johanna Ackva. She took a look at the blog and gathered her impressions in this beautiful text. Take a look:

Text #1

Of Gestures and Other Utterances

Dear A.PART 2020 artists!

Check out this beautiful work by my friend and colleague Sophie Arstall, that she made in collaboration with the filmmaker Inbar Jeffrey.

The solo is an evolving work that is still in process and the film captures the work at a particular moment. I’m sharing it with you because I feel it’s related to some of your projects on a conceptual level, but also regarding the question of how to translate the sensuous aspect of dancing into the screen, which concerns almost all of you at the moment. I recommend you to endure the full 16 minutes (Yes, it’s long, and therefore it’s also a good example of how we can dare to challenge the 20-seconds-attention-span of our online-audience). .. Just meditate into it!

Sophie says:

This solo exploration around notions of resilience focuses in particular on the hands in relationship to one’s self, as channels or portals into an intimate psychophysical world in which vulnerability, strength, fragility and femininity are addressed and questioned. Exploring these qualities, the hands shape and mould the sculptural clay of the body from the outside in and inside out, creating a pliable, receptive and at times destructive self. A physical language manifests: hands, mouth, periphery, zooming in, slowing, fists, gut, torsion, wind, unwind, rewind, pulling, hanging, rope, toil, anchors, elasticity, these images and gestures carefully crafted as the work unfolds.

The work is perhaps particularly resonant now as our relationship of hands to the self, face, body takes on new consequences as these gestures and behaviours become risky and we mourn a loss of tactility and expression towards ourselves and others.

CREDITS:

Choreography and Performance: Sophie Arstall

Filmmaker: Inbar Jeffery

Music: No copy infringement of music intended.

For Voice: Sarah Davachi

23:17: Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm

Shrinking and Expanding Space

Since mid-March 2020, the space in which I physically move around has shrunk to an area of about 6 square kilometers. It stretches from Hasenheide in the North, along Hermannstraße to the East, down to the end of Oderstraße in the South, crossing Tempelhofer Feld towards Columbiadamm and up to into Lilienthalstraße in the North-West.

For a month now, I’ve been roaming and exploring this territory. And surprisingly – or maybe not surprisingly – even though I’ve lived here for eight years, I’m discovering it now anew. I walk along paths I’ve never walked before. I sit on spots I’ve never sat on before. I look at things I’ve never looked at before. Every now and then, I circle my territory by running around its outline, in competition with myself and with time.

This morning, while roaming and exploring my flat, I looked at the spaces between the grooves of the radiator in my kitchen, and I discovered that they were dirty. Sticky dust has accumulated there over the past years because the vacuum cleaner doesn’t fit into the narrow gaps.

Anyway, now it’s clean.

The sky in the window above the radiator looks clean, too.

Surprisingly – or maybe not surprisingly – since the territory which I occupy as a moving body has shrunk, my inner space has expanded. I’m roaming and exploring myself, and I’m discovering movements of body, thought, and emotion that I’ve never looked at before. I wonder if my inner space is actually endless. I mean, actually endless. This is where I experience the boundaries of my imagination. I’ve also experienced my inner space as being narrow, at times. Many times.

The best location to expand space is the cemetery Lilienthalstraße in the North-West corner of my territory. It was built between 1938 and 1941. Initially, it was meant to bury and honor the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, but then it became the grave for thousands of people that died in the bombings in 1945. So many bodies. So many lives. Again, the boundaries of my imagination. I wonder if I’m supposed to feel that this is a sad place. I don’t feel that. At this moment in time, it is a peaceful place. It’s where the noises of the city, like construction sites roaring, sirenes howling, cars growling, children screaming, church bells ringing, dogs barking, people chatting, music playing, train doors beeping, mute into a distant murmur. It’s where I hear a woodpecker pecking, crows crowing, a squirrel rummaging in the bush, birds singing, wind passing through the trees. It’s where I hear sounds. It’s where I have space. Sometimes, I walk along the long rows of gravestones, and I read all the names. Reaching out into these past lives makes me feel I’m expanding in time. I mean, actually expanding.

I wonder what kind of space is the internet. Is it a space that we inhabit or a space that inhabits us? The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan thought of technology as a means to extend human body parts. In the 1960s, he predicted that humankind would eventually invent a technology to connect us all globally, and that would thus function as our collective nervous system. Damn, Marshall!! Not even Jesus or Mohamed topped that prophecy.

If the internet is a tool that extends our internal individual nervous systems into an external collective one, I wonder if we have already learned how to use that tool. I mean, if you don’t know how to use a hammer, that’s bad, right? But in fact, we also don’t know how to ‘use’ our internal nervous system the way we know how to use our hands. It just operates on its own agenda, sending and receiving and uploading and archiving and erasing data. It’s a highly complex system and highly sensitive as well. Nervous, indeed.

I wonder what kind of space we have created with this blog—one for sharing and communicating, for sure. But I cannot quite grasp yet what this is, how it works, what it means.

As a dance artist, I know well that the blog cannot replace dancing and performing in front of a three-dimensional, physically present audience. We are experts of sensation, experts of listening into our bodies and the ones present, experts in understanding the space, experts in making something happen with the information we receive at the moment.

As a curator of this festival, I’ve reacted to a given situation – ‘no public events allowed’ – with a merely practical decision: A decision that enables us to carry forward with what we’ve started, a decision that justifies paying fees, a decision that keeps us all occupied.

And now, as a human being thrown into this experiment, I feel the decision is more extensive than I was aware of at first. I feel that I actually feel the people involved. I feel care, responsibility, and love. I feel a space for reflection opening, both individual and collective. I feel timid; I feel proud.

Communication across distance: Trisha Brown’s ‘Roof Piece’ (home version)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/dance/trisha-brown-roof-piece.html

 

This article in The New York Times explains how Trisha Brown’s ‘Roof Piece’, originally created and performed in 1971 on the roofs of SoHo, is transferred in 2020 into the digital space.

teaming up on saturdays

finding touch

Today, it is warm outside. Sun could touch skin, for a moment, a few minutes, half an hour. Each time someone jogs past me, I hold my breath, I noticed this today. And I start to wonder how many more invisible and silent patterns have already settled in bodies moving in urban space. Some close friends spend time in the countryside now, staying in the house of a befriended family, and they tell me that not much has changed in their daily life. Solely grocery shopping becomes an adventure for a single body, instead of collective excursion and responsibility. And return to home remains a vague date.

After spending a few hours in Zoom-Meetings with many people, most of them I never met in person, I end up in a conversation where redefinition of virtual space is attempted. While I feel my friends, that I love to touch, moving further and further away, as my physical recollection of what they feel like, what they smell like, what the sheer presence of their bodies is, moves into an undefined space where memory and imagination mingle, I discover empathy on a physical level while commenting on the designs of a variety of platforms that enable live-conversation in times of Covid-19. For instance, D. mentions that on Facebook messenger call without video, one can see an aureole around one’s profile picture that radiates with the changing volume of one’s voice. I then imagine D. getting closer to the microphone, moving away from it, breathing, moving the jaw, and tongues to form words. Suddenly I feel spacially close to D. We probably look for connection and sensibility wherever we can at the moment. This thought is (also) amusing to me. Or maybe I reveal here that I haven’t arrived in the 21st century yet. Where to find sensibility right now? Where to find an equivalent of touch? At least for the time being and as a strategy to not lose one’s mind. A shift in perspective. A shit loads of perspectives. Sitting perspective. What are the triggers that remind me to feel the body while sitting in front of the screen? Truman Capote wrote lying down.

While formulating this text, I listen to Laurens waves again and again. Drauf hängen geblieben, sozusagen. It is soothing and it moves me. I start to think into Alica’s proposal more in detail after reading her first post. No, I imagine walking through the image she posted. Entering it, walking in it, pausing, returning, as if it were a building or big scale sculpture. I watch Maria amid piles and piles of paper sitting on the floor, writing by night, in my head. I want to drink tea after reading Lina’s post. I wonder how one keeps things whole if one wishes to do so. And so on and so on.
I discover feeling into the processes of our A.PART artists. Welch Überraschung! Welch Glück! Welch Entdeckung! Welch Fragen über Fragen allerdings, die ich mir noch unformuliert und leise stelle, weil ich sie selbst noch nicht verstehe.

j