2019, Oran Leong and Aoife Kavanagh
Post-dance is a new and rather empty terminology. Initially a 2015 conference of the same name it took place at MDT in Stockholm. Created by Danjel Andersson, André Lepecki and Gabriel Smeets, it gathered artists, scholars, thinkers, producers, activists and those who care deeply for dance. Together they considered this new vocabulary as a container for contemporary dance practice/thought which may otherwise suffer from an attempt at capturing it in historically loaded language. Post-dance has no agenda to advance or project the future of movement. Rather, it gives licence to connect things that seem farfetched, make what was once evident, foreign again; consider and cross-pollinate work that does not easily slot into commercial or institutional contexts.
Post-dance is an “open-source concept.” “It is not a leader. It is a container. It needs to be filled.” While performance art practice is overrun with multi-/inter-/post- disciplinary artists, dance may have become a term so vague and unstable that it can envelop any-body. The Dublin context, however, does not often consider the cross section of these paralleling practices. Both approach similar concerns of embodiment, meaning and touch through varying methods, methods that are appropriately and productively transferable. This contribution to Post-dance aims to connect often disparate creative performing communities. It proposes a space to borrow and test each other’s methodologies in order to labour for new answers to worn out questions like; what is dance? What is performance? It also has the potential to prompt answers to questions we have not yet asked.
This performance/ lecture hopes to introduce the container of Post-dance to the Irish context through subverting expectations of what we consider to be dance, live-art, musical composition and, perhaps, audience. Post-dance is a container that serves the needs of every national community differently. This is Dublin’s contribution, hopefully one of many.
Performed by Oran Leong
Original sound design was created and produced by Aoife Kavanagh
Curated and commisioned by Sara Muthi
Lecture by Amanda Øiestad Nilsen
Photography and videography by Kristian Mantalvanos
This project was kindly funded and supported by Fingal County Council, the Project Arts Centre and Draíocht
Sara Muthi 