Open Call: For local dance/movement artists in Trondheim

One part of folded possibilities is a project called Walk & Talk. In it, local dance/movement artists will get an opportunity to work in pairs with an artist at risk currently living in Trondheim, in close collaboration and dialogue with Maryam. The aim of the Walk & Talk is to develop a critical study of citizenship and the conditions of co-existence/living with risk; risk of displacements caused by socio-political-natural-cultural climates and constantly shifting borders of loss and resilience, in the local and global spheres.

Due to the limits of material resources, folded possibilities can only afford to host three local movement/dance artists for this project. They will be paired with one artist at risk and have regular meetings with Maryam during the creative process. The final sharing of the collaborations will take place on the 25th March during the Multiplié dansefestival.

The project is supported by Kulturrådet. 

Timeline

One online meeting October/November with Maryam and the participating artists
Collective meeting late November. Pairing up artists.
Meeting with pairs online (late january)
Collective meeting in february online
Work sessions in March with Maryam
Performance/Final sharings on the 25th March 2023.

Each pair also gets up to six hours of rehearsal time at DansiT studio in Svartlamoen. Those times will be booked separately throughout January – March.

The dance artists will be contracted as independent and receive a fee by invoicing. Please note that other costs such as expenses for travel and housing are not covered.

For more questions about the project, please email asgerdur@dansit.no 

How to apply

Selections will be based on expression of interest. To apply, please write a letter of max 2000 words, remarking:

1. The significance of this opportunity in your career as an artist, locally and globally.
2. How do you see your artistic practice relevant to the concept of risk, socially, ecologically, politically, …, etc.?
3. How do you usually take care artistically and kinaesthetically? politically and poetically?
4. In your choreographic imagination what segregates the location of safety from risk, in space and time?

In addition, please send your CV (one page max) with a short biography and video material if you see it relevant to the project.

Please state if you have any restrictions regarding rehearsal period or the performance date.

Please send your material to asgerdur@dansit.no latest 20th October. 

NB: Please name your email interest in participating in walk & talk in the subject line. 

About Maryam Baghemi Nesami

Maryam Baghemi Nesami is a dance writer and artistic researcher from Iran, based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her  background as a dance person was established in Iran, where ‘dance’ is illegal for women, and therefore, the practice of dancing is a political act. Dealing with censorship and prohibitions in a theocratic society, to live both as a woman and as a dancer have provided Maryam with capacity to negotiate, being strategic, being inclusive, and contingent on micro-politics. Her artistic PhD (University of Auckland, 2021) has built a body of scholarly that looks at dance within the context of exile, migration, reparative strategies, strategies of resistance, practice of freedom, dance of minority and marginalized groups. folded possibilities is one of her  post-PhD choreopolitical  negotiations proposing a migratory and nomadic mode of presence that is potential to sustain balance when grounds are uneven.

Curator’s notes

Embodying an exilic positionality and witnessing the global displacements and confusions (caused by climate change, war, COVID, etc.), as an artist-academic, I see this urgent and exigent to re-visit the concept of risk/risking in an artful, embodied, expanded, and trans-disciplinary term.  folded possibilities is a curated extension to the Multiplié dance festival, proposing an alternative framework for curation and spatialisation of a platform for artists at risk.

 This project of art activism develops a critical study of citizenship and the conditions of co-existence/living with risk; risk of displacements caused by socio-political-natural-cultural climates and constantly shifting borders of loss and resilience, in the local and global spheres.

Dance as an embodied practice is potential to contain moments of pain and joy, suppression and emancipation, as well as a topos to reflect the moments of contradictions between politics and independent agencies. As an Iranian movement artist I have dealt with censorships and prohibitions of feminine/heterogeneous embodiments in a choreophobic society (where dance is illegal and the dancer is a criminal). I have contextualized my artistic practice and research within such a choreophobia. Then, I navigate the topos of risk within the binary language of realization in arts (as well as academia) that fixates and immobilizes the subject in the either/or sides of the segregated spheres, and bans the transitions through/across the borders (geotemporal, gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, …). folded possibilities is one of my post-doctoral choreopolitical (Lepecki, 2013) practices, aiming to propose a migratory and nomadic mode of presence that is potential to sustain balance when grounds are uneven.

As a nomad, I work through the method of wandering/walking, as a slow process. Walking requires constant negotiations with gravit(ies); it also necessitates constant falling and rising. However, modes of walking, as well as falling and rising are context-specific. It depends on the gravitational forces that are operating simultaneously. I introduce Walk & Talk encouraging the significance of walking as an ethical way of arriving in a new ground/land, and an oblique way of residing with risks. This transitory mode of residency calls for artists from different disciplines to connect, relate and sit with each other, con-fuse different modalities and spatiotemporalities, in order to create a non-linear language of risk/hope.

Acknowledging the oblique-ness and slow-ness I think through Sara Ahmed (2006) and the potentials of being around the concept of risk. aRound Table (co-authored by me and Susanna Hast in 2021), allows spiraling, distancing and approximating simultaneously. This alternative mode of orientation (which also summons dis-orientaion) is a critique to the subjectivity of the directed-ness and toward-ness. This alternative platform and its spiraling mode of presence aim to be inclusive to those who are subject to the severe spatio-temporal segregations, and conditioned to displacements (of any type: COVID-related, geopolitical, economical, gender, class, racial, ethnic and beyond); those who have faced problems of border-crossing.