ANGELA GUERREIRO:
The Live Legacy Project
The Live Legacy Project, by Angela Guerreiro and Karen Schaffman, investigated the numerous links between contemporary dance in Germany and the Judson Dance Theater movement in New York. The results were fed into a six-day symposium, a gathering of choreographers, dancers, students, teachers and experts.
The project made it possible to experience a piece of dance history in workshops, lectures, films, installations and performances, narrated in the words of those who made a considerable contribution to the development of the American avant-garde concept of embodiment from the 1960s onwards and brought it to Germany in various ways including via institutions in the Netherlands. Guests invited to the symposium included Trude Cone, Pauline de Groot, Dieter Heitkamp, Eva Karczag, Martin Nachbar, Lisa Nelson, Mary O'Donnell, Ka Rustler, Nancy Stark Smith and Gabriele Wittmann.
The additional documents available here give an insight into individual symposium workshops, and there is an opportunity to watch the film recordings of the performances by Martin Nachbar and Lisa Nelson as well as a trailer of Dieter Heitkamp’s installation Going into Contact.
In his solo, Martin Nachbar looked for links with US American dance and the old masters of Judson Church. The result was a playful homage to actual and fictitious legacies in times of crisis.
MARTIN NACHBAR
Born in 1971, Martin studied at the SNDO, Amsterdam, in New York and at PARTS, Brussels. He was one of the first graduates of the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh). Since 2001, he has choreographed more than 20 pieces, some of which have been very successful. He has written about his work on numerous occasions and taught various topics at dance schools, including at SNDO, HZT, SEAD, PARTS, MA Performance Studies and LABAN. He has been working closely with the Belgian dramaturge Jeroen Peeters for several years, including on the pieces Repeater and Animal Dances, and in the Backtracking workshop format.
A communication format at its core, the instruments in the GO score allow their players to set the image, time and spaceand thereby create their own meaning. Feelings reveal form as it emerges and sets dancing in motion. The instruments make the spaces between randomness andunavoidability visible, an improvisation jigsaw puzzle for both the audience and performers. Lisa Nelson and Scott Smith have been working together since the early 1990s, researching the improvisation territory covered by Tuning Scores, initially with the Image Lab group in the USA. 2001 The created the duo format GO in 2001 and have since presented it at festivals in Great Britain, Germany, the USA, Italy, Portugal, France and Poland.
A communication format at its core, the instruments in the GO score allowed musicians to set the image, time and space, and thereby create their own meaning. Feelings revealed form as it emerged and set dancing in motion. The instruments made the spaces between randomness and unavoidability visible – an improvisation jigsaw puzzle for both audience and performers. Lisa Nelson and Scott Smith have been working together since the early 1990s, researching the improvisation territory covered by Tuning Scores, initially with the Image Lab group in the USA. The created the duo format GO in 2001 and have since presented it at festivals in Great Britain, Germany, the USA, Italy, Portugal, France and Poland.
LISA NELSON
Lisa Nelson is a dance creator, improvisation artist and video artist, and works as a cross-disciplinary artist. Since the early 1970s, she has been attempting to research the role of feelings in both the performance and observation of movement. She dances, teaches and creates dance in different locations and on many continents, and maintains long-term partnerships with various artists, including Steve Paxton, Daniel Lepkoff, the video artist Cathy Weis and Image Lab, a multi-faceted research/performance ensemble. She won the New York Dance and Performance Award (‘Bessie’) in 1987 and an Alpert Award in the Arts in 2002. She has been co-editor of Contact Quarterly, an international dance journal, for 30 years. She also runs VIDEODA, a project for videos about improvisation dance. Lisa Nelson lives in the mountains in Vermont (US).
SCOTT SMITH
Scott Smith is a composer and sound designer with a dance and performance background. He does theatre, works with several bands and teaches, and collaborates with a wide range of artists. He is based in England, works internationally, and composes for dance, theatre and video.
The Live Legacy Project: Workshops
Tuning Scores by Lisa Nelson
Click here for information about the workshop!
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Workshop with Trude Cone and Ka Rustler
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Workshop with Dieter Heitkamp
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Workshop with Gabriele Wittmann
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GOING INTO CONTACT
An installation by Dieter Heitkamp
The focus of Going Into Contact – a permeable spiral installation was on contact improvisation (CI), which has now been developing for more than 40 years, the link with other forms of movement, and the specific working methods associated with CI. Going into Contact attempted to create a living archive and investigate the question of how archive material can be used for new dance creations, unusual presentation formats and new transmission methods. The installation also illustrated the research process for The Live Legacy Project. A specific aspect of this project was the collective approach to developing new forms of creativity from body knowledge, and access to it. One aspect of Going into Contact was the daily performances by CI practitioners using scores. The performers related to the space, objects, themselves, other dancers and the public, as well as to concepts, methods and working practices. They discovered traces and connections between people, incidents, items, points in time, and places.
Concept – Dieter Heitkamp
Curator team – Dieter Heitkamp, Angela Guerreiro
Performers – David Bauer, Finn Lakeberg, Max Schumacher, Orla Mc Carthy, Gal Fefferman, Madeline Ferricks-Rosevear, Nadja Simchen and Laurin Thomas
A co-operation of the Global Contact Improvisation Archive (contactencyclopedia D / contact quarterly (USA)) and FLASK (Frankfurt Living Archive for Social Kinesthetics)withthe Live Legacy Project/Tanzfonds Erbe, tanzhausnrw, the Berlin Academy of Arts, Tanzlabor_21/Tanzbasis Frankfurt Rhein-Main, the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and Tanzfabrik Berlin.
2014
2016
2019
- 23 – 27 April 2019 | Fabrik der Künste, Hamburg – screening film documentation within the frame of the symposiums Valises et Passages – Temporärer Raum für Wechselwirkung der Künste
- 28 April 2019 | Metropolis Kino, Hamburg – screening film documentation