|
DECISION
MAKING IN A COMPLEX SITUATION: THE PRIX JARDIN D'EUROPE AT THE WORKING TITLE
FESTIVAL 2009 IN BRUSSELS
By Pieter T'Jonck
The
following text is an attempt to assess what happened during the Working Title
Festival in Brussels in December 2009. This festival was also the platform for
the yearly convention of the European Jardin d'Europe dance network, during
which the Jardin d'Europe prize was awarded. Being present in the festival as
well as a member of a workshop on dance criticism, a member of the jury and a
journalist, this proved to be a probing experience.
Working title and Jardin d'Europe
About every
six months, Workspace Brussels, a young organization that wants to help
emerging artists in live art, mainly dance, to develop their work, holds a
festival that shows the results of what the resident of the workspace are
brooding upon. For this, the festival usually shows a large amount of "works in
progress", though the degree in which works are "unfinished" can vary
enormously.
The edition
of December 2009 however was a different matter. Ultima Vez, the company of the
Brussels choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, asked Workspace Brussels to act as a
platform for the annual meeting of the
Jardin d'Europe network they are member of. This network obtained funding from
the EU for setting up a wide variety of programs to promote the development of
"young" choreography in Europe. The network is obviously inspired by the
successful model of the Viennese Dance Web, the twin organization of the more
well known ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, and project leader for the project
that got EU funding. Dance Web gives young and promising dancers and
choreographers from all over Europe and Turkey the opportunity to meet, take
part in workshops and present work during an intensive month of workshops and
shows in the Austrian capital. Imagine what it would be to enhance this model
on a European scale and you have the blueprint for Jardin d'Europe.
For the
Working Title Festival however, this link to Jardin d'Europe meant a huge shift
in scale as well as scope. Suddenly, not only work from the artists of
Workspace was shown, but also that of other artists belonging to the Jardin
d'Europe network. This meant that the festival had to present no less than 24
productions, all of them very recent, many of them still unfinished, in only 10
days' time. As a result, the last days of the festival were crammed with
performances. The disadvantage is obvious. Many shows were held at unusual
hours, and it was rather difficult to see all of them. Because of this, even
though a lot of spectators turned up for the shows - in this sense the festival
can be considered a real success - they were mainly part of a professional
audience. But as those pieces have been shown in Brussels, the odds are against
the possibility that this work will get a second chance with a more "regular"
audience in Brussels.
The
extension of the festival with works proposed by members of Jardin d'Europe
also made the festival almost confusing.
The variety of the work that was presented was enormous. However, nothing was
to be done about that: once you decide to show work from all over Europe and
even from the USA, from very different organizations, you fatally end up with a
rather messy portrait of contemporary dance. But, of course, one can look at
this messiness in a positive way too: it shows that the art form is still very
much alive and in evolution.
Prix Jardin d'Europe
An
important factor in the Jardin d'Europe network is the annual prize, the Prix
Jardin d' Europe, for the best emerging choreographer . This prize, worth
10.000 euro's, is to be awarded at the
end of an existing festival in the hometown of one of the member organizations.
Evidently, the prize was awarded for the first time in Vienna in 2008 during
ImPulsTanz, more specifically during [8:tension], the festival in the festival
dedicated to young artists. This year, Working Title in Brussels was the
platform for awarding the prize. Unlike in Vienna, where the selection of
[8:tension] consisted of finished works, Working Title showed a lot of "works
in progress", and anyhow presented a lot more works then the 10 to 14 that
ordinarily would have to compete for the prize. Because of this, it was decided
upon that two prizes would be awarded, the first being the "real" Prix Jardin
d'Europe, the second one a residency with one of the network members for the
most promising work in progress.
This prize
is remarkable for another reason however. Jardin d' Europe is not only providing
a context for choreographers, but is also promoting the critical context of new
work. During the annual festival, a thorough workshop - Critical Endeavour -
for emerging young critics is organized to that end. Initially, this group of
young critics, led by a recognized dance critic, was supposed to act as the
jury that awards the Jardin d' Europe prize. In itself, this is a tempting
idea, because for the lack of "established" opinions on the work at hand in the
competition, it triggers participants of the workshop to develop arguments for
or against any choreography at hand from scratch. Being a guest teacher of the
first workshop of this kind in Vienna in 2008, led by Franz Anton Cramer, I
discovered however that this burden to award a prize gradually blurred the
initial goal of the workshop to provide young critics with the right tools to
watch and assess new work. The participants lost themselves in an endless
discussion about what is "most relevant", what are the "right criteria" and so
on. The problem evidently was that they were invested with a power that they
were not ready to endorse, but as such deprived them of the calm that is needed
to think in a disinterested, yet sympathetic way about what there is at hand.
Luckily, Ultima Vez decided against this model and asked an independent jury to
award the prize.
This jury
consisted of four members: Christa Spatt, curator of [8:tension], Ulla Sickle,
choreographer, Charlotte Vandevyver, academic as well as former Parts student
and myself. As such, I found myself in a peculiar position, because I was also
mentoring the criticism workshop, together with the outstanding Dutch art
critic Anna Tilroe. In this position, I discovered that it was a good decision
to go for a jury outside the members of the workshop, because even if the
participants of Critical Endeavour had no say in the prize, discussions about
"good" and "bad" performances were sometimes not only very heated, but also
very rewarding, precisely because there were no consequences to the discussions.
And, we had a great group of participants. They were truly with the cause of
dance and did their utmost best to get as good a grip as possible on the
stunning variety of work at hand. Probably they would not have felt as free to
vent their meanings if they would have had to take the final decisions. (On the
other hand, they were almost baffled by the decision the jury took to give a
special mention to Sara Manente and certainly, not all of them could appreciate
that the jury gave the actual prize to Claire Croizé...).
What about the festival then?
A festival
like this is always something of a frustrating experience, because too many
proposals follow too quickly to be well digested, especially if one is supposed
to make a judgment on them. One thing that struck me however, was the neat
division there was between works that followed a safe line of operation and
those who didn't. I think every more or less clever person who followed the
dance field in recent years, can fairly easily make a performance that answers
to the expectancies we all have about a critical, coherent, "interesting"
performance. However, if you are
confronted on a very short notice with an overload of too many "interesting"
performances, you quickly discover that in reality some of them don't succeed
in raising even the slightest interest. They respond to a certain "idée reçue"
of what a dance piece must look like, but don't go beyond this kind of
simulacrum of what is "interesting art". What is for instance the use of doing
three times the same dance, but in different costumes and with different music,
if you end up with nothing more than a demonstration of the fact that the way a
dance is "dressed up" defines the way we experience it? This experiment of
Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld has been demonstrated many times in the past. If you
want to do it again, you have to find a new approach, a new reason to pick up
this matter. You can't just stop at the demonstration as such. More problems
can arise when artists such as Ben Benaouisse or Marty Schnapf believe that it
is enough for them to have a deeply felt question or to be deeply emphatic to
raise the interest of the spectator. Actually, that could perhaps make
interesting human interest literature or TV, but it is hard to see what the
point can be as a theatrical proposal.
On the less
safe side, there were some really interesting proposals. But also some misfits.
Just a few examples. Marc Iglesias for instance confronted the public in
"Original Untitled (to her ladyship)" with a series of images of encounters
between a man and a woman, and also between a rooster and a hen, that were
certainly enigmatic, but alas to a point one could hardly figure out why we had
to stand all these "niceties". Anne-Lin Akselsen and Adrián Minkowicz proposed
in "Dry Act #1-Corpse Aroma" a reflection on the heating of the earth that
hardly went beyond a few good workshop ideas. They never fused into a gripping
representation of the way we react to a problem that is so huge that we have a
hard time to come to terms with it personally. The interesting thing about
these works is that you can understand that the makers don't go for easy
questions or solutions, but even then, they don't succeed in getting a grip on
the matters they try to assess.
This was not the case for a "long
list" we drew up as a jury. Looking back upon our conclusions, it is evident
for me that we reached for the works that one would call "singular" and that
used and thought dance as a true means of expression, leaving aside the well
known "tricks of the trade". Amongst the works in progress we were struck by
the quality of the work of Varinia Canto Vila, Florin Flueras and Lilia
Mestre. In "During beginning ending", Varinia Canto Vila is outstanding in her
effort to communicate in a very truthful way fleeting states of being. (Actually,
it was a work that was most heavily discussed in the critical endeavour
workshop, because all participants were struggling hard to explain why these
movements who are almost next to nothing moved them so much). Florin Flueras "Brave
search for the ultimate reality" was proposed as a finished work, but we felt
that it might be further developed. That is why we proposed to give the
performer a residency to work further on the proposal he makes here. Flueras radically
doubts and yet affirms the transformative possibility of art using the
artifices of the art itself. Funnily, he touches upon pseudo-religious
convictions we use to forge some meaning out of the turbulent environment we
experience daily. Lilia Mestre, finally, is exploring in "Live-in-room" a radically different medium to
make a choreography out of sound and space. Thanks to the generosity of
Workspace Brussels and the spontaneous gesture of Szene Salzburg it was
possible to award a residency to all three of them.
Of the "finished works" we hesitated
for a very long time who to give a special mention. We certainly appreciated
the work of Kajsa Sandström ("I need a witness to perform") and Adva Zakai
("How to spell a piece") very much, but finally decided against them because,
however clever they put their case, they shied away a tiny bit from the
question what was the urgency of their work. Three of the finished works stood
out precisely for that reason of urgency. Eleanor Bauer, who pretended to show
a work in progress, actually gave the public in "(Big girls do big things)" a
fascinating view on the friction between the desire to embody a social role and
the loss of authenticity that comes along with it. Sara Manente on the other
hand, in "Lawaai means Hawaai" demonstrated in a defiant way how loss of
meaning is always imminent. Ultimately, the jury decided to award the prize to "The
Farewell" by Claire Croizé because she succeeds to integrate in her dance as
well the immediate emotional response to the music of Mahler as the more
reflexive, intellectual attitude to try and understand what this music is
really about. The importance of the work is certainly also due to the study of
the way dance, lighting (another proof of the great craftsmanship of Jan
Maertens) and music (advice by Alain Franco) can interfere with and influence
each other . What convinced us ultimately was that the performance has the
potential to reach a large public without watering down the choreographer's
artistic integrity.
(28.12.2009)
|
