Topical Dance

When we talk about dance performances, we can tend to talk about them as the vehicle of a message or a theme. ‘Aboutness’ can point us away from the dance and towards a subject or a political issue ‘out there’ in the world beyond the theatre. But aboutness can also be a feeling, a flavour, a vague supposition that inheres in the dance itself. How does dance create a feeling of topicality? What norms, forms, and genres does it lean on to do so? And where do we arrive if we work on honing just that—the form and feeling of a topical dance—without settling on one particular topic or message?

At workspacebrussels, Sebastian will be in the studio with Erin Hill and Maria Kefirova, thinking about transforming the improvised dance practices they’ve developed so far into something resembling a performance. Without resolving the conceptual tensions they have nourished, they are going to work on getting more explicit about the constellation of concerns which animate Topical Dance using not only the body, but also projections, sound, voice, and text.