Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung
Wir schaffen Begegnung!
The annual symposia are at the core of the Society's activities.
Interdisciplinary in nature, the symposia facilitate exchange as they bring together people from different areas of dance research (dance studies, dance practice, dance therapy, dance educationpedagogy) who present their latest research findings. The symposia offer different presentation formats and constantly develop new ones in which participants are invited to join the discussions.
Additional social events complete the symposias' programs and create space for encounters. Since the symposia are often conceptualized and organized in collaboration with other associations and institutions, they initiate and support the creation of productive local networks focusing on dance.
Symposium 2021
Tanzen / Teilen
Sharing / Dancing
In cooperation with Tanznacht Berlin 2021 – Uferstudios Berlin
The annual gtf-symposium aims to examine processes of sharing. We consider sharing (“teilen”) as a form of movement with two opposing directions, it refers to processes of separation and to forms of connection. We share our dancing by moving together, by moving for one another. We participate by experiencing another person’s dance with all our senses, by allowing their movements to touch us. However, with regard to dance, sharing can also mean experiencing differences and realizing that we may remain fundamentally separated. With these tensions in mind the symposium Tanzen / Teilen. Sharing / Dancing aims to create opportunities to discuss current social and political developments.
Processes of sharing / separation take place in social, geo-political and global movements and along fault-lines, as the construction, the fall, and the aftermath of the Berlin wall illustrates. Also, current debates re-evaluate Germany’s role during times of colonialism revealing the long-term effects of the various imperial practices of segregation. “Sharing the world” does not always happen in a communal spirit that respects the rights and wishes of all participants equally. Approaches like the “decolonization of knowledge” are prompting us to recognize problematic power structures in society and in the arts in particular and to confront them through specific artistic and theoretical practices (e.g. anti-discrimination clause). How can especially the art of dance reveal the potential of sharing and of interweaving physical, theoretical, political and social realms? How can dance and dancing help to develop new forms of dialogues between different perspectives, contexts and periods? Those involved and invested in the field of dance are experts of sharing and participation, of communicating and differentiating. Through their activities of dancing, speaking and writing – in training and education, in therapy, in their artistic practice, in their archival work or in their research – they create and re-create the divisions and classifications of dance, keeping the relation of techniques, methods, styles and their respective theories and practices dynamic and alive.
Sharing the space with the dance festival Tanznacht Berlin 2021, this year’s edition of the annual gtf-conference invites various experts to the Uferstudios Berlin. We will take time to discuss the borders of and differences created through our bodies, its movement capacities and potentials. We will dare to agree and disagree, to have controversies and hopefully meaningful exchanges on what we share (or not). We welcome lectures, various impulses, more experimental formats, lecture demonstrations, collaborative presentation formats that try out various forms of sharing knowledge in and about dance, asking how we can experience and make comprehensible Tanzen / Teilen. Sharing / Dancing as a physical, material and/or political act.
Literature
Gabriele Brandstetter, „Dis/Balances. Dance and Theory“, in: Dance [And] Theory, eds. Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein, Bielefeld, 2013, pp. 197–210.
Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World, London, 2008.
Grada Kilomba, „Who can speak? Decolonizing Knowledge“, in: The Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies (eds.): Utopia of Alliances, Conditions of Impossibilities and the Vocabulary of Decoloniality, Vienna 2013, pp. 27–31.
Cynthia Joan Novack, Sharing the dance, Wisconsin 1990.