Dance First Think Later

Featured artists
Alice Anderson, Marco Berrettini and Yan Li and performers, Lara Dâmaso, Manon de Boer and Latifa Laâbissi, Agnès Geoffray, Zuzana Kakalikova, Isabel Lewis & coll. and The Field, Adam Linder, Shahryar Nashat, Ceylan Öztrük, Samuel Pajand and Cosima Grand, Emilie Pitoiset, Davide-Christelle Sanvee, Ulla von Brandenburg

Curator: Olivier Kaeser

Organisation and production: Arta Sperto / Production partner: Pavillon ADC / Host partner: Cinémas du Grütli

Dance First Think Later is a hybrid event, between an exhibition and a performance festival. It explores an artistic terrain at the edge of dance, performance and visual arts—fields that feed off each other but operate through very different mechanisms of production and presentation. At the heart of the project is dance, i.e. the gestures and movement of the human body, their meanings and interpretations in different cultures, and how they are considered through various prisms, cultural, sensual, political, social, ritual, technological, gender-related, etc.

Multi- and transdisciplinarity are not an end in themselves, but an open field for perceiving and questioning the contemporary world. Movement and gesture have specific meanings in different cultures and areas of society: politics, diplomacy, sports, the army, communication, social struggles, street demonstrations, rituals… Everywhere, gestures deliver messages and are scrutinised in the media and on social networks; they bring people together or divide them. Moreover, expressions such as “diplomatic ballet,” “political faux pas,” “political posture,” “pas de deux,” “awkward gait,” “crowd movement,” “body language,” “revolutionary gesture,” “inappropriate gesture,” “misunderstood gesture” testify to the fact that words that are notably linked to the vocabulary of choreography are also used in many other fields.

Moreover, I think that the COVID-19 period was very “choreographic,” in the sense that we have never been so concerned about the way we move: we unlearned gestures that were natural and learned new ones; we questioned ourselves about compulsory or forbidden gestures and movements. In this way, we have caught up, without really being aware of it, with the questions and reflections that choreographers develop on the meaning and scope of a given gesture and movement, whether individual or collective. The impact of these reflections and of certain changes in behaviour will probably last for a long time.

The title Dance First Think Later was inspired by a passage from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. As is often the case with this master of the absurd, a sentence turns out to be more complex than it initially appears. This title aims to challenge and capture attention.

Programme
September 15–October 9: exhibition with Alice Anderson, Lara Dâmaso, Agnès Geoffray, Samuel Pajand, Emilie Pitoiset, and Ulla von Brandenburg

September 15–16: Marco Berrettini and Yan Li and performers, S’entraîner les dents, 2020

September 16–18: Davide-Christelle Sanvee, À notre place, creation, 2022

September 20–21: Samuel Pajand & Cosima Grand, Pleased to meet you, creation, 2022

September 22–23: Ceylan Öztrük, Orientalien, 2020

September 29–30: Zuzana Kakalikova, Am I in the picture?, 2021

October 1–2: Isabel Lewis & coll. and The Field, Scalable Skeletal Escalator (stage version), 2022; dance: The Field, Rafał Pierzyński, music: Labour, visual arts: Mathew Lutz-Kinoy, Dirk Bell

October 6–9: Adam Linder, Shelf Life: Barre Forever & Some Brain, 2022

October 6: Shahryar Nashat, Parade, 2014 and Manon de Boer and Latifa Laâbissi, Persona, 2022. Film screening followed by a discussion with the artists

Arta Sperto
Arta Sperto curates, produces, organises, and publishes multi- and transdisciplinary artistic projects. The organisation, which does not have a fixed location, designs its projects in collaboration with cultural partners and venues, or in the public space.