About
The annual WHAT festival is a platform for invited artist curators to ask questions of dance, and through dance. This year, the festival re-imagines itself through a public residency and guest lectures.
Four public talks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday will look at the thinking body through different lenses: language, writing, philosophy, geography, education and performance.
Together, the talks develop a body of thought about how attention operates, how we direct ourselves and our thinking to ways of being full-blooded human.
The four guest speakers of the what_now festival: Derek McCormack, Caroline Bergvall, Joris Vlieghe and Laura Cull.
Writing Gestures
At its root, the gesture of writing is a gesture of tracing. The writer starts to exist in this moment of tracing. As such the trace of writing is a performative act which can be connected to the temporality of a physical body. It can be seen as a gestural choreography. But where the gestures disappear into their moment of performance, writing itself really only starts to exist once the act of tracing has been concluded, and the writer has disappeared. It is in this paradox, in this balancing between absence and presence, life and death, writing and written that I have located a lot of my practice as a writer and performer.
In this performative talk, I will actualise and expand on some of the material and philosophical questions that tie gestures of inscription to the development of a text, and in what ways performing a text can in turn inscribe the material shadows of physicality back into writing.
About Caroline...
Caroline Bergvall is a writer and artist of French-Norwegian origins, based in London. She works across lan¬guages, artforms and media. She is a strong exponent of writing methods adapted to contemporary audiovisual and contextual concerns and multilingual identities. Her language-based pieces and micro structures frequently revisit literary models as well as tackle historical and political events. Projects alternate between performances, sited installations, textual and graphic work, and audio pieces. Current performance: Drift (for live voice, percussion and electronic text).
Price:
£6/£4 each
£10/£7 for any two talks
£18/£12 for all four talks
Booking is highly recommended , please call 020 7091 9650 to purchase your tickets.
Venue:
Siobhan Davies Studios
85 St George's Road
SE1 6ER
Other talks at what_now 2014:
Derek McCormack: Thinking and moving with atmospheric things | Friday 11 April | 7pm
Joris Vlieghe: BEING-ENTIRELY-FLESH | Saturday 12 April | 7:30pm
Laura Cull: A(n Interrupted) Lecture on Attention in 9 Parts | Sunday 13 April | 3pm
For more information about the residency and the guest speakers please visit http://www.independentdance.co.uk/programmepage/activities/what-festival/
