The Live Art Workshop project is a series of collaborative professional exchange workshops that harnesses the international network of Pro Helvetia around the development of new work in the live arts field and new circuits for the presentation of that work. The workshop series is built on the existing work and approaches of organisations and platforms active in this field in each region where the international network of Pro Helvetia is present and active.

The Live Art Workshop developed out of discussions between the Johannesburg and New Delhi offices of Pro Helvetia and Jay Pather of the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. The first edition of the project was convened in Cape Town in March/April 2019 and included specialist practitioners and programming partners from the southern African region, Switzerland and the regions of the liaison offices.

The second edition of the Live Art Workshop will now take place in Switzerland in the context of the platform PARTOUT by PANCH – Performance Art Network CH from 2 – 11 October 2020. It is organised by Arsenic Lausanne and Kaserne Basel and supported by the following partners from the international network of Pro Helvetia liaison offices: Institute for Creative Arts (Cape Town, South Africa), Khoj (New Delhi, India), Explode! (Sao Paulo, Brazil), NAVE (Santiago, Chile), platforms led by Zhao Chuan (Shanghai, China), Noor Abuarafeh and Mohamed Abdelkarim (Cairo, Egypt).

The Live Art Workshop brings together cultural practitioners and artists in the field of performance art to exchange and develop on a professional level. The different cultural contexts of the participating partners, hosts and artists forms a central point in the joint discussion.

Within the context of COVID-19 travel restrictions, this year’s edition of Live Art Workshop includes the specially formulated Acts of Transmission framework which pairs artists from Cairo, Colombo, Delhi, Shanghai and São Paulo who cannot attend in person with European artist collaborators. These Acts of Transmission are collaborations that manifest themselves in two different places and contexts in parallel. The European collaborators are physically present at PARTOUT and mediate the joint project. The Acts of Transmission are understood as an extension of one context into another and vice versa. It is about the specific encounters, their translation and an awareness of the in-between as well as of the two different bodies and realities.

PARTICIPANTS FROM SOUTH AFRICA

Pro Helvetia Johannesburg is supporting the participation of Jay Pather and Kopano Maroga, both of whom took part in the initial Live Art Workshop.

Jay Pather directed the first edition of the Live Art Workshop. He is a choreographer, multimedia artist, curator and professor. He teaches at the University of Cape Town, is director of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (Cape Town, ZA) and artistic director of the Siwela Sonke dance theatre (Durban, ZA). Jay’s work has travelled widely and goes beyond the boundaries of disciplines, regions and cultures. Since 1984 he has been working with visual artists, architects and town planners and presents his intercultural performances in the public spaces of various cities.

Kopano Maroga’s interests lie at the intersection of art, social justice and healing knowledge systems. Their current research is in the potential of disidentification and biomythography as tools for destabilizing rigid identity theory. They very much believe in the power of love as weapon of mass construction. Kopano is a master of arts student in live art, interdisciplinary and public art through the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. They are a performance artist, writer, cultural worker and co-founding director of the independent dance, movement and embodied politics organization ANY BODY ZINE. During the Live Art Workshop Kopano will lead a workshop based on the research and development behind their work Jesus Thesis. The workshop is titled Biomythography and critical fabulation as performance practice and seeks to translate the literary techniques of biomythography (coined by Audre Lorde) and critical fabulation (coined by Saidiya Hartman) into techniques for developing performative strategies.

FULL LIST OF LIVE ART WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS

Jay Pather (Cape Town) & Pooja Sood (New Delhi) Talk

Kopano Maroga (Ghent/Cape Town) Workshop & Performance

Vicky Shahjahan (Colombo) & Sorour Darabi (Paris) Acts of Transmission / Workshop & Performance

Indranjan Banerjee (New Delhi) & Ralph Tharayil (Berlin/Basel) Writing as Acts of Transmission

João Simões (São Paulo) & Ivy Monteiro (Zurich) Acts of Transmission / Workshop & Performance

Maria Jose Cifuentes (Santiago) & Domingo del Sante (Berlin) Acts of Transmission / Workshop

Zhao Chuan (Shanghai) & Nathalie Stirnimann & Stefan Stojanovic (Zurich) Acts of Transmission / Workshop & Performance

Keng Chen (Hangzhou/Shanghai) & Dino Radoncic (St. Gallen) Acts of Transmission / Performance

Noor Abuarafeh (Cairo) & Samuel Georgy (Frankfurt) Acts of Transmission / Performance

ABOUT THE SWISS PARTNERS

Kaserne Basel

 is the largest centre in north-west Switzerland, blending the artistic avant-garde with modern pop cultures in its programming. Kaserne Basel is a reliable partner of the local, national and international theatre and dance scene and organizes various festivals in the performing arts. As a co-producer it supports the continual development of independent theatre and dance companies, promotes young talent and produces exceptional formats within urban spaces.

Arsenic Lausanne

is a platform for artistic creation located in Lausanne in French-speaking Switzerland. Arsenic presents to the public a targeted programme of contemporary Swiss and international projects in dance, theatre and performance. Since its creation, the centre has accompanied several generations of artists who are regularly featured on European stages.

PANCH

considers networking within and beyond national borders as a prerequisite for shared thinking, developing visions and collective action. «Partout» follows a three year project of research trips within Europe, with the aim of PANCH to build bridges between Swiss and European performance art scenes. With «Partout», PANCH invites performance artists to share and present performances and to engage, to experiment and exchange on a professional level. PANCH is concerned with the exchange, visualization, deepening and cultivation of the networking approaches of recent years.