November 8–December 4, 2018
Since its inception in 2005, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution has been producing artworks and research projects that explore the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. We do this by supporting artists and researchers to create new work over a two-year period, and present the resulting projects in the Netherlands at the conclusion of this time.
Now at the close of our seventh edition, this presentation will take place as a month-long programme of live performances, screenings and discursive events at various venues in Amsterdam. Complementing the presentations is a thematic inquiry into the notion of “Social Movement,” which has been explored concurrently through a series of reading groups, and is here extended by a keynote lecture, radio broadcasts, and a library of reading.
Programme
Lecture
November 8, 2018
University of Amsterdam
Scholar of performance and social practice, Shannon Jackson delivers a keynote that pursues the question: what does it mean to join the embodied practice of choreography with the systemic consciousness of the social?
Performance
November 22–28, 2018
University of Amsterdam Library
Myriam Lefkowitz inhabits the library with collaborators Lendl Barcelos, Alkis Hadjandreou, Annick Kleizen, and Zoe Scoglio to offer a number of immersive tactile experiences—one-on-one performances in which beholders are guided through choreographed “attention devices,” a collective experience immersed in darkness, and a book club that explores bodily dimensions of understanding—to co-construct perceptive processes outside of the usual contexts of representation.
Reading with audience discussion
November 29, 2018
University of Amsterdam
Art historian Rhea Anastas presents her research on artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s audience-orientated performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76).
Performance
November 30, 2018
Bijlmer Parktheatre
A gathering of three performances and video poems with keyon gaskin and friends. Titled NASHA, the event centres and values black sociality and resists creating something “new” by stipulation, giving context through experience.
Screening and lecture
December 1-2, 2018
Veem House for Performance
Writer and curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez explores the legacy of the actress, filmmaker, and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig through a screening of Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso Go Boating) (1976) and Sois belle et tais-toi (Shut Up and Be Beautiful) (1981), a talk about the larger exhibition of Seryig’s work with art historian Giovanna Zapperi, and a presentation of research into Seyrig’s unrealized black and white silent feature film, Calamity, on the letters allegedly written by American frontierswoman Calamity Jane to her daughter.
Screening
December 4, 2018
ZID Theatre
Mounira Al Solh hosts an avant-premiere of her new experimental documentary Who would spray that? (2018) made with four Syrian and Lebanese women—Rogine, Waad, Hanin, and Zeina—with whom Al Solh spent 24 hours in the various cities to which they relocated.
Across the month
If I Can’t Dance’s office at Westerdok 606-608 will be open daily as an informal gathering point and will play host to a library of reading related to the projects, live radio broadcasts that further explore “Social Movement” through the lens of “embodiment,” “care” and “gathering,” and a screening of Charlotte Prodger’s video Passing as a Great Grey Owl (2017). The screening of this video acts as a footnote to the development of Prodger’s major new work commission, produced by If I Can’t Dance in collaboration with Scotland + Venice, and which furthers her interest in “queer wildernesses.”
Further information and tickets are available on our new website, designed by Will Holder with Arthur Haegeman.
The programme of If I Can’t Dance is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), Ammodo, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. Mounira Al Solh’s film is co-commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.
