Projects

UPCOMING

22 Oct 2023
Histoires croisées
Remodelling Memories of/in Nijinsk’s Dancing
I am not in a Room
Installation / Performance / Lecture Performance
Brick 15, Wien (Austria)

Present

May 2023
Tanz & Archiv Nr. 10
Tanz schreiben: Artefakte, Hypertexte –
und Nijinsky

Im Zentrum des Hefts von Tanz & Archiv stehen die vielgestaltigen Spuren, die Waslaw Nijinsky im kollektiven Tanzgedächtnis hinterlassen hat – Spuren, denen die Autor*innen dieses Hefts in der Tanzhistoriographie des 20. Jahrhunderts nachgehen. Spuren des ‚Mythos Nijinsky‘ sedimentieren sich aber auch in konkreten Materialien, nämlich in einem Koffer mit Notizen, Skizzen, Fotografien, Kostümen und Memorabilia, den Romola Nijinsky 1950 der Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra in Paris zur (vorübergehenden) Verwahrung anvertraute – „un trésor de souvenirs“ in den Worten der Tanzkritikerin und -forscherin Françoise Reiss. ‚La valise de Nijinsky‘ bildet eine der Quellen für die sogenannten Nijinsky-Scrapbooks, die seit 2021 in den Derra de Moroda Dance Archives der Universität Salzburg aufbewahrt werden. Dabei handelt es sich um ein umfangreiches, vielgestaltiges, unterschiedliche Textsorten und Materialitäten verbindendes Konvolut aus Fotokopien von Dokumenten, die von Nijinsky selbst stammen oder auf ihn – und insbesondere seine Auseinandersetzung mit Tanzschrift – bezogen sind: tanznotationale Skizzen (‚Notation-Notebooks‘), das aus Romolas Koffer stammende sogenannte ‚Valise-Notebook‘, Teilübersetzungen der Notebooks ins Französische und Englische, Notizen und Skizzen …
Die Publikation ist im Buchhandel und hier erhältlich.

Past

Filmstill: Constantin Georgescu

25 – 28 Oct 2022
Rosenberg Dance/Research Festival
In cooperation with Institute of Dance Arts (IDA)
Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Oberösterreich, Linz (Austria)
Koordination: Rose Breuss & Damián Cortés Alberti

Public Rehearsal + Workshop: Nijinsky’s Suitcase
with: Rainer Krenstetter, Claudia Jeschke & Constantin Georgescu

The dancer Vaslav Nijinsky left behind written material of notable quantity and
quality that fuse his vision for dance and choreography, his professionalism in
shaping his creative powers and transferring them via writing and drawing.
The so far unpublished material is related to a suitcase filled with auratic
Nijinsky materials, La Valise de Nijinsky, which his widow Romola had
deposited in the Paris Bibliothèque de l’Opéra after Nijinsky’s death in 1950.Like every suitcase Nijinsky‘s Valise operates as a container for items
considered valuable as well as a receptacle that references journeys,
encounters, familiarities, and alienations. The Valise, thus, becomes a ‘time
media archive’, in which ‘present times’ correlate with ‘absent times’.
The collaboration of researchers (Rainer Krenstetter, dancer, Constantin
Georgescu, media artist, and Claudia Jeschke, historian) will especially focus
on Nijinsky’s transcriptions presented in and around the Valise by reading,
performing, and digitizing Nijinsky‘s notation materials as multivalent scores
that merge layers of historicities, then-actualities, innovations, optionalities.

Lecture: Le Bal de Paris – and the wired dancer
with: Andreas Backoefer

In virtual reality (VR), by means of computer-linked sensory-activation equipment the individual is ‘plugged’ into an artificial environment where the physical sensations of an alternative verisimilar world are induced; what reality can’t be, virtual reality promises to be. The new production Le Bal de Paris by the Spanish choreographer Blanca Li goes way beyond anything experienced yet in VR dance. Once the participants get past the complicated tech setup, wearing a backpack, headset, wrist and ankle sensors, it’s like stepping into an enormous ballroom with hundreds of choreographed guests. The audience has the opportunity to participate and dance, interacting with live dancers. Slavoj Žižek, in his book Hegel in a wired brain, asks the question “What will happen when the human mind can actually wire itself to a machine?” Le Bal de Paris’ immersive VR experience explores the situation when dancers are ‘wired’ together.



Photo: Constantin Georgescu

31 March – 01 April 2022
Atelier: Shifting and Morphing. Skills of Artistic Displays: Dance, Choreography …
In cooperation with Institute of Dance Arts (IDA)
Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Oberösterreich, Linz (Austria)
Konzept + Realisierung: Rose Breuss, Claudia Jeschke, Andreas Backoefer

The Cambridge Dictionary paraphrases the verb ‘to morph’ with “to gradually change, or change someone or something, from one thing to another”. Highlighting the metaphoric quality of the transitory as well as transient connotation of the term, the object-based ‘morphing’ brings about – as does the time-based ‘shifting’ – untried strategies and fresh artistic procedures that are operationalized as well as contextualized in the multiple (and distinct) media transformations of e.g. doing dancing and/or video art.
Thus, the laboratory format of the artistic-academic Atelier intends to understand morphing and shifting as dynamic converters of knowledge production in body/movement-related arts by embracing experiments with and strategies of agency, experience and visualization in movement research, scoring, historiography, praxeology… The Atelier asks about the peculiarity of non-discursive practices of thought in (dance) arts, their aesthetic obstinacy and their own validity.