How to see everything

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (8)

Everyone knows it’s impossible to see everything. Some things feature only once. Some always feature at the same time at different places. And if you go to see everything, you’ll be so over-exposed you won’t have anything sensible to say at the end of the day. Yes, we know all that. And still we tried.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (3)

Dance in the pocket hall

What a day. Where to begin? Let’s start at the end. We were packed together in the smaller hall of the Arts Printing house, appropriately called the ‘pocket hall’. People were sitting on the floor to see the dance. Well that’s nothing odd in informal settings, and I like the touch of underground or living-room performance it gives to our EU-logo-laden festival. (Anthony Dean tells me they also do it in the State Opera here in Vilnius, it’s part of the local folklore that people will use every aisle or step to sit on and “fully booked” is a malleable expression.) If the festival wasn’t free we’d be selling out.

“What’s going on?”: An interview with Jason Beechey

Under the working title What’s going on?, we’re starting a cycle of interviews on new developments and initiatives in Higher Arts Education. This is number one. Jason Beechey, Rector of Palucca Schule Dresden, talks about the international D.A.N.C.E. programme.

Like a puppet on string

Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy, 1-4 July, Sofia

I’ve just learned to pretend I’m a puppet. Carla Delfos likes to tell that her great formative experience was when she was six and an artist told her to imagine she was a tree. In the workshop I was just in, May Früh explained to a Bulgarian student what a ‘pendulum’ is and for half a second she was a clock – and she didn’t try to act like one.

Texting, dancing, interacting, expanding the image

Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy, Sofia, 1-4 July

There’s nothing like Loyke Lomine’s body language. When I came to his presentation on sms learning I was just out of a workshop on Qiang dance. The Qiang are an ethnical minority in China whose dances, Zhang Ping tells us, bear the character of a mountain people’s body language. The Qiang cultural heritage suffered badly from last year’s earthquake, and Zhang and his wife are very active preserving it. Here, while we see it on video, his wife reproduces Qiang dance on stage. We should get a professional dancer to reproduce Loykie’s presentation too I guess.

ITs Festival goes international

June is graduation month, and all around Europe art schools are putting on their graduation shows and festivals. Last night we attended the opening of the 20th International Theatre School festival, ITs for intimates, which features over 70 unique productions by fresh graduates in theatre, dance, music and film. Advertising itself as the largest European festival of its kind, and as standing at the cradle of the future of theatre, it is now featuring work from Frankfurt, Berlin, Dresden, Bern, London, and Perth, as well as from most leading performing art schools in Holland and Flanders. “In the coming years we are going to put a lot of effort into expading our international branch”, says Theu Boermans, artistic director.

NEU/NOW

We are inviting all members of ELIA and partner networks to nominate their graduating and freshly graduated student talent for the NEU/NOW Festival, an event that will first take place in virtual space and then live in Vilnius, Cultural Capital of Europe.
NEU/NOW is intended to become a yearly recurrent event that presents the best of the new generation emerging now from art schools around Europe, in all disciplines. Schools can nominate up to two students in each of the five discipline categories.

Deadline for nominations: 10 June

www.neunow.eu