International Festival of Contemporary Theatre
Programme
MASTERCLASSES
01.09.-11.09. Festival Centre | Free
The masterclasses are free and will be held in English. Places are limited, so we encourage you to register on time. For the more information about and how to apply, visit theatre.lv or homonovus.lv.
Creating New International Realities (Together) with Merel Herring (NL)
01.–2.09. / 11.00–16.00
In this two-day event, Dutch artist Merel Heering will propose to work through the lense of ethics. Ask yourself: when looking at your current or intended international practice through the lense of social and environmental justice, what concerns do you have? What would support a greater alignment of your vision, values, and actions? In this masterclass, the artist offers tools for each participant to articulate their biggest current challenges, desires, or concerns around working internationally, and create the conditions for a practice-based exchange. We will unpack each other’s questions, moments of reflection, and case studies, learning with and from each other. By doing so, we will jointly propose ways to move forward in both facing and creating new international realities.
Presented in collaboration with ‘Samovar Circles’.
‘And Then the Doors Opened Again’ Workshop: As spectators, What Do We Crave for Now? / David Weber-Krebs (BE/DE) and Simone Basani (It/BE)
Workshop 01.–4.09.
Practical elements 05.–11.09.
On April 8, 2020, in the middle of the first Covid-19 wave in Europe, artist David Weber-Krebs invited his colleagues around the world to participate in a collective act of imagination. He asked them, via e-mail, to imagine the future of theatre from the specific moment when theatres were closed and it was not clear how, when, or even if they would open again. The answers were compiled in the book ‘and then the doors opened again’ (Onomatopee, 2020). Since then, the book has been used as a tool to generate further speculations and reflections about spectatorship in pandemic times and beyond. David Weber-Krebs and dramaturg Simone Basani have worked in different cities, through walks around a theatre, conversations, and online and offline workshops. In Summer 2021, they had a series of conversations with spectators of different ages, cultures, and professions in Rēzekne and Riga. All these encounters have been documented and their traces collected in the archive of and then the doors opened again.
For Homo Novus 2022, David and Simone unfold this archive with a group of local artists and intellectuals to explore the question: as spectators, what do we crave for now?
Implemented as part of ACT: Art, Climate, Transition project. Supported by EU programme Creative Europe.
Rename and Unbody – Somatic Awareness and Language for Who and What We Are with PEREL (US)
06.–10.09. / 13.00–16.00
How can we find terms for our many “selves” that are closer to our experiences? Through various forms of somatic exploration, we unlock spaces of deepening knowledge about our anatomy to develop new concepts and relationships for what makes up our body. Although some of the exercises offered in this workshop derive from practices such as Skinner Releasing Technique™, Body-Mind Centering® and Authentic Movement, they do not aim to optimize a pre-existing notion of the dancer’s body and its ultimate efficiency. Rather, we aim to develop languages of access, intimate images, and forms of embodiment that support our own meaning. We will consider the lunar cycle, astrological moment, and their connection with somatic practice, as multiple planetary bodies in constant conversation with our own.
Presented in Collaboration with the Choreographers Association. This programme is made possible by funding from the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation (BAFF) and the US Embassy in Latvia.
About artist
Merel Heering (NL) is a freelance dance dramaturge, facilitator and alignment coach. Merel’s practice is rooted in supporting social change and bringing awareness to positioning, artistic responsibility and supporting people and organizations in aligning vision and actions. She facilitates conversations on the friction between personal and professional values and is committed to creating spaces for dialog and exchange between people with different worldviews. Merel works with a great variety of independent choreographers, dance companies, festivals, theatres and production houses across Europe, for over ten years already.
David Weber-Krebs (BE/DE) is an artist and a researcher based in Brussels. He studied at the University of Fribourg (CH) and the Amsterdam School of the Arts (NL). David explores various contexts as a basis for an experimental process, which questions the traditional relationship between the work of art and its public. Recent works for theatre are the performances ‘Tonight, Lights out!’ (2013), ‘Balthazar’ (2015), ‘The Guardians of Sleep’ (2017), ‘The Actual Event’ (2020) and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (2021). Recent works in the field of the visual arts are the installations ‘Immersion’ (2014) and ‘The Earthly Paradise’ (2017). David is the curator of the series of performative conferences ‘On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors’ (with Jeroen Peeters) in which they address this question: how are the arts (its questions, forms, research and discourses) challenged by climate change? He is the initiator and editor of the book ‘and then the doors opened again’ (Onomatopee) in which 75 authors imagine their first theatre visit after the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. He is affiliated as a doctoral artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.
Simone Basani (IT/BE) is a curator, dramaturg and art producer. His research focuses on participatory strategies and remembrance processes. The main outputs of this research are curatorial site-specific formats where he invites artists and other peers to react on specific questions and collective onstructions of physical sites for critical thinking. Simone collaborates on an ongoing basis with curator Alice Ciresola and artists David Weber-Krebs and Heike Langsdorf.
Perel (US) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is centered on disability and queerness as they relate to care, consent, sexuality, and personal and historic trauma. Utilizing choreography to examine power exchange between the artist and audience, “Perel is a master at timing, of tension, relief, and intimacy while creating a space of learning and unlearning.” (Victoria DeJaco, Spike Magazine). Their work includes performance, installation, criticism and curatorial projects. They often use collaboration as a platform for the exchange of disciplines, working methods and discourses with other choreographers, composers and visual artists. Perel asks, “How do we move across space and time with respect to our collected histories?” Their work has been shown for more than a decade at numerous galleries, theaters and performance spaces in the U.S. and abroad.