Tanz der Dinge / Things that dance:  

the annual symposium of the German Dance Association (gtf), curated by Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger, invites you to a weekend of events scheduled 5-7 October in Karlsruhe, the city well known for its internationally renowned media museum ZKM.

Featuring three days of exciting research papers and seminars, workshops, performances, films, digital art works and installations, the symposium delves into questions that have recently risen to the forefront: the current wave of new materialisms has brought attention to things that move or are moved, “vibrant matter,” objects, physical phenomena, machinic or animated agents and assemblages, the labor of apparatuses and intra-actions between human and nonhuman forces – passages in the “political ecology of experience” that link new dance philosophies with choreographic, theatrical, sonic and media installation practices.

There is also a growing fascination with hybrid material performance and puppetry crossing over into political theories (e.g. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things), ecological, ethnographic and social science studies, as well as postcolonial and critical race theories (on the materiality of liquid blackness, for example, and historically specific and located sensorial experience and affect).

Reviewing current dance research and publications intensifies the impression of a vibrant neomaterial turn that calls for critical reflection. This symposium – with its rich and provocative mix of actions, addresses vibrant matter and lively materials, reconfigurations of human and inhuman forces, social choreographies and objects of nature, and thus the various agents of an assemblage of dancing things within a vast ecological system – a compost heap or „latent commons“ (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s provocative concept for life in capitalist ruins).

For listings of the distinguished international practitioners -- see program at the gtf website: https://www.gtf-tanzforschung.de/tagungen/symposium-2018/

Location: KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Institut für Sport und Sportwissenschaft, Campus Süd: Gebäude 40.40 Engler-Bunte-Ring 15

76131 Karlsruhe