WORKSHOP - Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change

 

Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change

Through a series of individual and group tasks of reading, writing, discussing, questioning, designing and testing, this workshop will involve students in a critical process that aims to reflect on the relation between curatorial practices and social change. In this frame, we will approach the design of any curatorial project as an artificial construction site for the creation of alternative social imaginaries, i.e. as a concrete alternative proposal about the way we imagine and practice our social coexistence. The act of curating will, thus, be worked as a practice that moves away from established norms and social habits; as the crafting of social encounters towards more imaginative, unknown directions, away from capitalist demands that strive for the ‘groundbreaking’, the ‘new’, the ‘successful’, the controllable, popular, profitable and effective product.
Key terms in our exploration will be the notions of ‘social imaginary’ (as discussed by C. Castoriades and other scholars), ‘dramaturgy as working on actions’ (as discussed in The Practice of Dramaturgy – Working on Actions in Performance, a book co-authored by the workshop’s facilitator), ‘commoning’ (as a concrete practice within the discourse on ‘commons’), as well as the relation between art, crafts and materiality. Students will be asked to read texts in advance related to all these issues, which will be further discussed and tackled in the workshop.
In the same frame, students will also be asked to design and, at least partly, test different curatorial frames and exchange models that could act as artificial social imaginaries, through which they will attempt to detect the processes and working principles involved in such acts.

 

 Workshop with Danae Theodoridou  

Topic Tags:  emotionality social imagination Hannah Arendt withdrawal

Question game:

- How can curation work as a process of communing?
- What exactly is a process of communing?
- Why do we need to define something in order to do it?
- How can we do something without defining it?
- Who is defining what we’re doing?
- Who has the correct answers?
- How can we produce our own answers?
- What if we start thinking about honesty?
- How to provide a hierarchy of multiple perspectives?
- How to work with multiple perspectives?
- How to shift one perspective to another?
- How can I listen to perspective to someone else without forgetting my perspective?
- How can I have more than one perspectives?

- How do I approach working with others as not a frame an agreement?
- How do I stand on my ground?
- What is the power of giving in?
- What happens when I don’t give in, but don’t agree?
- How much time is needed in order to decide whether I agree or I give in?
- Why is it important to make fast decisions?
- How do I feel like I have time?
- What sort of pace do I use the most?
- What is the difference between the actual time given and the experience of having time? Or How is it possible to have half an hour and feel like that you have time, and have half an hour and feel like you don’t have time?
- What if procrastination is not procrastination?
- What are the gradients of not doing?
- How can laziness be productive?
- Can we name laziness as nesting something?
- What if nastiness was nasty nest? What happens when we change a nest to a nest?

 

·         Institutions as traps?

·         Frustration of art in relation to its political force

·         Art: only an attempt?

·         Community withdrawal: need for community?

·         Immediate community: returning to the materiality of the event

·         Relation to others and common decision-making processes

·         Emotionality: crying, helplessness, caving inside, withdrawal

·         In order to return to emotionality and forces of community that capitalism has alienated us from: we have to spend the time of crying

·         Curation as a process of commoning

·         "The guts to give in" - bravery and giving in

·         Giving in as political action

·         When is something not an action? 

·         Hannah Arendt's definition of action

 

 

Documents:

3 principles for Dramaturgy DT.pdf

Performing Arts and Social Imagination_DT.pdf

 

Danae Theodoridou is a performance maker and researcher based in Brussels. She studied literature and linguistics in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and acting in the National Theatre of Northern Greece. She completed her PhD on dramaturgy of contemporary theatre and dance at the Roehampton University in London. The past years, her artistic work focuses on the notion of social imaginaries and the way art can contribute to the emergence of social and political alternatives. At the same time, Danae teaches in various university departments and art conservatoires of theatre and dance in Europe, curates practice-led research projects and presents and publishes her research work internationally. She was co-creator of Dramaturgy at Work (2013-2016) and co-author of The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017).

 For more information visit www.danaetheodoridou.com