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Culture Acción Tipo de actividad Dance Paises participantes IT,UK,ES,SI,NL
Fechas de inicio y fin Estado del proyecto finalized Subvención
Coordinador COMITATO PROVINCIALE ARCIGAY DI BOLOGNA IL CASSERO ASSOCIAZIONE IT
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Performing Gender – Dance makes differences was a 2-year capacity building programme, addressed to a new generation of European dance artists and professionals. The objective of the project was to provide them with a set of knowledge, skills and tools, useful to develop a new form of narrative for LGBTI identities in Europe, whose citizens live today in dramatically diverse contexts of social recognition when it comes to differences in gender and sexual orientations . Artists and cultural professionals were asked to take charge of a challenge, creating cultural products able to trigger a debate and intercultural dialogue across national cultures. The best art form to investigate the theme is dance: in this sector we created new practices to facilitate the process, testing new training models, nurturing specific professional figures and connecting different players in the capacity building chain. To do so, our project involved 5 dance makers, 5 dance dramaturgs and 50 dancers in an experiment of interaction and collaboration. In a first step, the dance makers faced together a traveling training programme, both theoretical and physical: lectures, meetings and exchanges allowed them to dive into the issues of the project. With the help of the dramaturgs, they built a “sketchbook” of performances and elaborated a training project themselves. The second step was a one-week workshop for 10 young dancers led by each dance maker, in the context of one of the partner festivals. Each workshop ended in a final sharing, that was attended by a general audience and by an international group of potential producers. The project ened in a closing event, during which we retraced the stages of the model and turned them into tools and recommendations addressed to a wide audience of European professionals. The project was produced by Gender Bender Festival (Bologna, Italy) together with the following partners: Center for Contemporary Scene (Bassano del Grappa, Italy), City of Women (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Stichting Theaterfestival Boulevard (‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands), Paso a 2 (Madrid, Spain), Yorkshire Dance (Leeds, UK). With this project we strengthened the European professional field of dance, intended as an art form, helping it to take full responsibility for this challenge, increasing its capacity to interpret and represent a constantly changing European context. We moved from a consideration, shared by the partners in different European contexts, that the competencies and skills of the dance professionals today, in reationship with LGBTI issues, are growing, but they have to be challenged and tested by new practices and models. Regarding gender roles and identities, the formation for dancers and choreographers is often still ruled by strong conventions and dominant mindsets. In general, there’s the need for specific professional figures trained to bridge and to facilitate the relation between new dance productions and topical subjects for European societies, also to connect with new audiences and to build a dialogue among generations. A new training model must also be able to connect in a same system, with a same objective, different phases and different players in the capacity building chain. The training of dancers usually starts at early age with a major attention on physical and body issues, whereas the work on themes and conceptual frameworks is not tackled until they start to work with a dance maker, in the first years of their professional career. The dancers learn via doing, their conceptual thinking grows and deepens via embodied knowledge. Also dance makers learn by doing, in the process of dialoguing with artistic directors and institutions, through their choice of programming and producing, and confronting with audiences. It is an intertwined chain of experiences, which builds a model that is not formalized and that we explored in this project. |