Body/Space - Krisztina de Châtel

air

BO ­D­Y/ SPA CE artist in residence Krisztina de Châtel

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Body/ Space Krisztina de Châtel, Artist in Residence at the Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam

2 Introduction Marijke Hoogenboom 5 Krisztina de Châtel 6 The space as antagonist Francine van der Wiel 15 And… GO! Noël van Dooren 20 Colophon

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Body/ Space

Introduction Marijke Hoogenboom Since its inception in 2004, the research group Art Practice and Development has stimulated and produced the Artist in Residence Programme (AIR) at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. The ideal model that is its founding principle is to involve influential and innovative artists with international status in providing directors of studies, ­teachers and students with impulses from contemporary arts practice, and thereby have an enduring effect on the climate and culture of the school.

Thus far, fourteen artists have been hosted by the various faculties: the Academy of Architecture, the Dutch Film and Television Academy, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Theatre School; the AIRs have made a valuable contribution to the interaction between art education and the international ‘state of the art’.

In consultation with the faculties and departments, the research group chose not to impose a blueprint on the AIR programme with regard to content or organisation; the decision was instead made to ensure a rich diversity of styles and approaches, by on each occasion reinterpreting the potential relationship between the artist (or ensemble, or office) and the educational structure. This requires dynamic interaction with the AIRs themselves, and from the outset the

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host’s ­artistic agenda is always an important factor to be taken into account. The artists are invited to reflect on issues pertaining to their artistic practice, while the school has to have a clear idea of just who they are inviting. It is essential that there is a shared curiosity when it comes to research, developments in the arts and ideas about knowledge transfer. Usually, the artist’s approach to conveying information is very different from the education.

The AIRs often question the very purpose of schools, and employ individual artistic methods to explore the boundaries of their expertise.

Through the resulting confrontation of approaches, an open space is created: for the artists, who are provided with an opportunity to test out their positions; and for teachers and students, who can ­re-evaluate their assumed truths within a given context.

Each AIR project presents us with the challenges inherent to the programme. Educational structures do not lend themselves to exclusive retreat. In fact, they emphasise the area of tension between autonomy and involvement, raising crucial questions such as: What is expec­ted of an Artist in Residence? Can we offer (unconditional) space to new artistic ideas? Does the AIR have an interest in schooling and knowledge transfer? Can the Academy contribute to innovation in a given field?

And how can we connect diverse artistic, educational and professional domains? The Academy of Architecture (AvB) chose to have

its AIRs operate in ­accordance with an special educational formula: the Capita Selecta ­series of public lectures and the winter workshop.

These are the only moments in the academic year when all three design disciplines (landscape architecture, architecture and urban planning) collaborate and the school temporarily receives international guest students. The AvB is also wellknown for its desire and willingness to cooperate with its AIR in focusing attention on other arts, thereby bringing its own disciplines in direct contact with practices entirely new to it. This has led not only to its hosting of Krisztina de Châtel, but also, in past years, to the residencies of orbanist Luc Deleu, writer/architect Paul Shepheard and advertising art director Erik Kessels.

This booklet provides insights from a variety of perspectives into the collaboration between Krisztina de Châtel and the AvB: from within, through the comments of Noël van Dooren, head of the landscape architecture department; from an observational distance, through the contribution by dance critic Francine van der Wiel; and especially through the unique documentary made during the process by Bernie van Velzen.

It pleases me greatly that Krisztina de Châtel has concluded her period as AIR with a challenging proposal for a new collaborative project, creating a perspective for making her encounter with the AvB productive for her own artistic development. Together with her we ask ourselves whether a research project

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c­ ombining dance and architecture could result in a choreography.

Can architecture generate conditions that inspire choreographers to arrive at new, even innovative, works? Can architects, landscape architects and urban planners use spatial design to create objects or places with a high degree of ‘danceability’? And, finally, is it possible to train the body to the same degree that the mind can be trained, and use it to experience, explore and manipulate space?

It is my great privilege as professor to be able to offer the opportunity for such exceptional (and, for inno­ vation within education, vital) ­coproductions at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. But without the enthusiastic efforts made by Krisztina and her dance group – dancers and staff alike – and the teaching staff at the AvB, Body/ Space would never have been possible. My sincere thanks to all of them!

They are my motivation to ensure that in the future, the Amsterdam School of the Arts’ Artist in Resi­den­ ce programme will confirm its position even more emphatically as the place where inventiveness, flexibility and the compelling force of the ­artistic impulse are brought to the fore.

Marijke Hoogenboom became Professor of Art Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts in 2003. She was previously involved in the founding of DasArts, a workspace for the various theatre disciplines. Hoogenboom is a member of the Grants Committee of the Prince Bernard Cultural Fund, and shares responsibility for international policy at the Dutch Council for Culture. She is an in-demand speaker, moderator and consultant in the fields of the arts and art education, in the Netherlands and abroad. In September 2008 she received the Marie-Kleine Gartman Pen for artists and theatre commentators from the Dutch Stage Association.

Krisztina de Châtel Over the last thirty years Hungarianborn choreographer Krisztina de Châtel has made fifty choreographies and two dance films. Her work is an interplay of dance, music and visual art. An additional characteristic of her choreographies, especially her most recent ones, is that they are often performed beyond the confines of the theatre; the space and artworks used for the choreography are intrinsic to it.

One of De Châtel’s chief aims is to have people experience a singular space in a new way. Examples from recent years include performances in the mediaeval Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the St. Bavo Church (or Great Church) in Haarlem and in the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen.

She was Artist in Residence at the Academy of Architecture (AvB) in Amsterdam for the 2007–2008 ­academic year, and the following year she lectured at the AvB and the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy, also in Amsterdam.

In Krisztina de Châtel’s performances, two worlds always collide.

Fragile human frames confront the forces of nature: wind, earth and water. And conflicts rage within the body itself, it seems, as passion and control battle it out for ascendancy. Even De Châtel’s choice of ­mentors, Kurt Jooss and Koert Stuyf,

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s­ uggests an early focus on contrast – whether conscious or unconscious; she ­developed her own style on the foundations of Jooss’ expressionism and Van Stuyf’s postmodernism.

Awards for specific work by Châtel include the Sonja Gaskell prize and the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Boards’ Choreography prize. In October 2000 De Châtel was awarded the Dutch Dance Days award for her entire oeuvre and in 2001 she was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion for her services to dance in the Netherlands.

In 2002 Krisztina de Châtel ­received the critics’ award from the Dutch Critics Circle. Pulse (2007) was ­nominated for a VSCD Swan award in the Best Dance Production ­category (2006–2007).

Autumn 2008 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Krisztina de Châtel Dance Group, and this was celebrated with the jubilee production Giubileo and an accompanying retrospective exhibition. After this, from 1 January 2009 onwards Krisztina de Châtel will work together with Itzik Galili as their new company Amsterdam Dance Group.

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The space as antagonist Francine van der Wiel

‘A piece of bravery’, is how land­ scape architect Noël van Dooren described the decision of the Amsterdam Academy of Archi­tec­ ture to invite Krisztina de Châtel’s to become its Artist in Residence.

A courageous act? Was Châtel not in fact a n obvious choice? Among the spatial artists that choreogra­ phers (and architects) are, she is, after all, a thoroughbred ‘builder’, whose compositions so often seem to resist the fleeting nature of dance, a nature that distinguishes this art form so fundamentally from architecture.

On a windy day in January, next to the railway embankment between Amsterdam’s Central Station and Sloterdijk station, a rollcall is being held. While some dawdlers are still traipsing in, the names of students from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Vaduz and Carmel are being called off.

One name is followed by someone nonchalantly shouting out, ‘No, he won’t be coming. He never comes.’ The look on the face of the choreo­grapher – notoriously intolerant of clutter, disorder and lack of discip­line – is priceless. This is the place – where a pathway meanders between the railway embankment and the straight ditch that borders an allotment complex – where the students participating in the winter workshop are to examine the lay 6

of the land; describing dimensions and proportions, and emphasising particular characteristics and peculiarities. Their tools will be neither pencil and paper, nor computer and camera: they will instead use their bodies. Their uncomprehending eyes are cast towards the horizon, where the lines of the embankment, overhead wires and ditch flow into one another. After a short while, the participants start to move. It is the start of a journey of discovery. Although the students may need a little time to get used to their assignment, for those more familiar with Krisztina de Châtel’s body of work, this is ‘merely’ a new variation on a theme already well-established in her oeuvre: the relationship between the body and its environment, whether natural or designed, finite or infinite. In the thirty years spanned by her career as a choreographer, this has resulted in fascinating works.

By participating in the winter workshop, students experienced a practical initiation into some of the ways De Châtel has shaped her relationship with (dance) space over that period.

Measuring the space Traditionally, the most obvious space for a choreographer is either the studio or the stage. Both are clearly delimited by vertical and horizontal surfaces. The floor is, of course, indispensable: it is the foundation, the springboard and the safety net for each movement. De Châtel, autodidact in modern dance techniques and familiar with ‘earthy’ folk dances from her Hungarian youth,

always emphasises the connection between the body and the ground, the earth. In the 1970s she did this with the precision of a surveyor: she had her dancers (predominantly female in this period) explore and crisscross the performance area in carefully laid out lines and patterns, their feet rarely breaking free from the ground. The main ingredients of Lines (1979) and Light (1980) – both featuring light designs by Jan van Munster – were direction, rhythm, line and light. These works can be safely considered the foundation of De Châtel’s oeuvre. The construction site was surveyed, leveled and prepared for the building of a movement construction.

These first works also clearly feature several elements that were to define her choreographic style. One of De Châtel’s fundamental inspirations was the movement analysis by dance theorist Rudolf von Laban.

Laban saw movement not only as

the physical translation of emotions and moods, but also (from a more objective viewpoint) as a succession of changes in the spatial positioning of a part of the body. As a student at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany – the cradle of European expressionist dance, or Ausdruckstanz – De Châtel became acquainted with his ideas about the theatrical significance of various movements, most particularly oppositions such as perpendicular and diagonal, hard and soft, organic and geometric, and central and ­peripheral.

One can also detect her affinity with the principles of Bauhaus.

The art of dance, which also occupied Bauhaus artists, was viewed by this movement as a phenomenon primarily characterised by shifts in time and space. One of the most renowned Bauhaus dances was the Raumtanz, or space dance, which consisted mainly of completing a

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­ redetermined route through the p space, with varying investment of energy.

At the winter workshop in the Machine building of the converted gas factory the Westergasfabriek, students of architecture could experience for themselves this very concrete approach. The great space itself most resembles a studio or stage space: a floor, four walls and ceiling. In dialogue with the delegation from the Krisztina de Châtel Dance Group, the students conceived a short choreography which amounted to a physical exploration of the empty space. The floor, the foundation for all movement, was emphatically ‘named’ as an element in the space by means of rhythmic combinations of steps. Likewise, the material and functional qualities of the walls were emphasised using the human frame: they are hard boundaries to the movement space that offer protection as well 8

as s ­ upport and push-off points.

At varying speeds, the participants surveyed the space and subsequently dynamically filled them in the straight lines, diagonals and simple geometric shapes such as semicircles – typical of Bauhaus.

Stacking bricks From the outset, De Châtel has sought to collaborate with visual artists. It may be something of an overstatement, but one could say that she sought sabotage.

Particularly the fame she garnered in the 1980s was a result of her willingness to be creatively stimulated by visual artists, who forced her to find solutions for the spatial information they presented her with.

The most well-known choreography from this period is undoubtedly Föld (Earth, 1985), for which Conrad van de Ven (De Châtel’s creative antagonist on several occasions) designed a circu­lar earthen wall that the dancers proceded to demolish piece

by piece and literally raze to the ground in an exhausting, repetitious, cyclic dance.

The repetitive character of much of De Châtel’s early choreography shares much with works emanating from the minimal art movement in the United Statesin the 1970s. The most important representative of minimal dance within this movement was Lucinda Childs. Her choreographies are intoxicating constructions employing hopping steps that constantly change direction, spinning a fine network of geometric shapes in the space. Although several of De Châtel’s pieces also feature repetition and basic geometric shapes, there is an important difference between the choreographies of the American and the Dutch-Hungarian: while Child’s minimal dances achieve an intoxicating effect with their light, springy energy flow, De Châtel’s repetitive work is ­evidently not intended to daze

the viewer. The innumerably repeated rigid, tight rhythms and forceful movements are rarely fluid, peripheral and light, as Child’s are. They are always bound, centred and ‘heavy’, as if De Châtel seeks to carve them into the space, or into the viewer’s memory, at least. They are building bricks, patiently connected and stacked up, with which she slowly but surely realises a spatial concept that seems to resist the ephemeral nature of dance.

Working in the organised space At the winter workshop, De Châtel did not emphasise the characteristic element of repetition. But she did have students work with some ­objects from her more repetitive or minimal pieces. One group of students, for example, worked in the Krisztina de Châtel Dance Group’s studio with the two-metre high ­plexiglas cylinder from Paletta (1992, designed by Peter Vermeulen), the wheeled walls from Rooms

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(2002, designed by Mike van de Lagemaat) and the ‘glass boxes’ from the performance about Egon Schiele in the Van Gogh Museum (2005). The cylinder and the glass boxes were circled and surrounded; knocked and climbed upon; crawled in and out of; while the mobile walls were used to create ‘areas’ that were subsequently burst open; and walls were erected and collapsed.

A direct relationship with these 10

objects seemed inevitable and, almost as a matter of course, this led to physical responses, serving to confirm one of De Châtel’s artistic convictions, namely that spatial limitations force one to find solutions.

Less ‘obtrusive’, but equally tantalizing, was the area of land which had undergone an extreme redisign by Rotterdam-based landscape architectecture bureau West 8. In this no man’s land connecting station

effects an organised space can have on movement and choreo­graphy – and thus on the body. De Châtel experienced similar insights while working on choreographies ­involving the performance area being influen­ ced by the presence of ­spatial objects or obstacles (including the aforemen­ tioned earthen wall, plexiglas cylin­ der and ‘contracting space’) and on location projects such as those in various Dutch museums and ­churches.

Human and space – a drama The solutions arrived at by the ­students and their leader at Sloter­ dijk may well have been a little on the frivolous side when compared to De Châtel’s austerity, but cogent ­connections can nonetheless be made between them and the choreo­ grapher’s oeuvre. It is striking, for example, that in this environment a role is played by the distinction between group and individual.

and business premises a movement composition was created in which the spatial elements in this artificial landscape were both emphasised and processed logically. There were many such elements for such a small area: a monumental staircase, a studded walkway, a double row of flyover columns, and a strip of greenery, with castings of tree trunks. And so this winter workshop location project provided insights into the

There she encountered staircases and linking chambers that forced her to make choices; how did she want to relate to the specific spaces, placing her con­struction, the choreography, into it in an appropriate way? It is no great stretch of the imagination to com­pare this with the manner in which many architects seek to organically adapt a design to make it suitable for an existing organised space, and simu­ ltaneously add a new element to it.

One of the students ran a few times past a block of fellow students (solid-looking, but pliant as reeds), before ultimately resolving to bore through the group. This ‘impact’ caused the group to burst apart. This individual against group, against power and mass, just like body against space, is a determinant motif in De Châtel’s work – a motif made explicit by dynamic means.

Elements of play, conflict and ritual

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can be discerned in the game of ‘musical chairs’ that took place on the small field with tree trunks.

Spatially, the f­ ragments on the steps and between the columns were the most arresting. At a steady pace, the shape of the monumental double flight of steps (its basic form similar to, among others, the central staircase at the Palais Garnier in Paris) was sketched out by following, or not following, its lines: by ascending

and descending it or by accentuating the horizontal aspect of the steps by moving sideways along them, either individually or in a cluster, in an orderly or unstruc­tured fashion, quickly or slowly. It is precisely these spatial, temporal and compositional contrasts that repeatedly feature in De Châtel’s work. Between the two pillars, a game of hide-and-seek is played out, seemingly naturally drawing one’s attention to depth 12

and distance, to the verticality of this section of Carrasco Square, and to human insignificance.

This last quality was placed even more firmly in the foreground in the choreography made for the small plot near the railway embankment.

Here, as at the double row of columns at Carrasco Square, one can speak of being drawn towards a vanishing point. Distance and depth

were demonstrated at ­varying tempos by the students, as were the variances in height. The lateral stone bulwarks functioned not only as markers in the landscape, but also as bases for movements and as shelters. The dimensions of the landscape were captured in straight lines, but the winding course of the path was also walked. The group mostly moved as one body or in small subgroups. The image of the group bravely attempting to get to grips with its surroundings evokes comparisons with other location projects, especially De Châtel’s film Stalen Neuzen (Steel Toecaps, 1996, directed by Erik van Zuylen) which was her first outdoor project. One of the locations in which she places her dancers in this film is a desolate Hungarian landscape bearing clear signs of human intervention. The dancers create their own space in this emptiness, as if they are expressing a need underscore their insignificant existence in this vast

volume, to gain their right to exist.

The choreography comes across, as is often the case, as a battle, as a struggle for life that is at once ­abstract and gripping; although there is neither enemy nor immediate threat in view. It is a drama played out between humans and space. In other words, this is the drama of ­human existence.

De Châtel the master builder It is doubtful that the students participating in the winter workshop attached such significances to their activities. Considering the commitment and enthusiasm on show, what can be safely assumed is that they experienced a variety of spaces in an entirely new way. And if they were to further investigate De Châtel’s oeuvre they might well detect the correspondences between her work and various aspects of the building process. This analogy could probably be applied to other

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artists (including other dance artists) but what sets De Châtel apart is that to her it is more than mere metaphor. Like no other, De Châtel has surveyed spaces, recorded them in plans, ­leveled floors and erected her constructions with solid building blocks. And when the ‘house’ has been made habitable, she gets to grips with the external space. But no matter how focused she may be on the spatiality of her dance architecture, ultimately it is all about people.

About the small, powerful, vulnerable, courageous human being, the human relating to the collective (which can be both ‘home’ and opponent), and about the relationship between people and their environment. Because space, like the group, has an explicitly dramatic function: it is both partner and adversary, and in De Châtel’s work it can often be considered a full member of the ­dramatis personae.

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Francine van der Wiel studied Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Under the guidance of Luuk Utrecht MA, she specialised in dance studies at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht. In 1990 she graduated from her studies with distinction. Her d ­ issertation ‘Leve de Arabieren!’ (Hurrah for the Arabs!) ­examined the introduction of postmodern dance into the Netherlands. As a member of the editorial staff at the daily NRC Handelsblad she writes reviews, interviews and background articles about dance, something she previously did for many years for Het Parool. She has also been part of v ­ arious juries and advisory organs over the years, including the Amsterdam Arts Council, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (Sonia Gaskell Award and the Choro­ graphy Assignments Commission) and the Philip Morris Art Awards.

And… GO! Noel van Dooren The Artist in Residence programme gives the Academy of Architecture the opportunity each year to ­invite a famous person from a different discipline. The work and method are intended to lead to a stimu­ lating confrontation with the courses offered by the Academy: edifying for the Academy and for the artist. As Artist in Residence in the ­academic year 2006-2007, the ­choreographer Krisztina de Châtel (with her dance company) presen­ted six lectures in the Capita Selecta programme under the title Body/Space and coordinated the winter workshop.

There is an evident point of con­tact between the choreographies of De Châtel and the work of ­architects.

The title Body/Space is an attempt

to sum up that point of contact in a one-liner, but in fact it is too simplis­ tic. De Châtel’s choreographies are a search for the core of ­relations ­be­tween people (the body) and space.

She intensifies those ­relations: the lonely person in immeasurable space; the person in an extremely narrow space; ritual movements in the ­(urban) landscape like a funeral procession; mass meetings in which orderly alter­ nates with ­disorderly movement.

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In general, architects describe the relations ­between people and space as a condition of their work, but they do so in a much more pragmatic form.

De Châtel’s ­approach forces architecture to confine itself to the simplicity of I and the building, of we and the landscape.

How can a meeting of that kind be organised in the course? Only taking part in a real choreography would

Krisztina chose the locations on the basis of spatial characteristics that had immediate choreographical potential within her approach.

Four ­dancers, who are thoroughly acquainted with Krisztina’s idiom, worked with groups of 30 students.

Krisztina has such a crystallised dance idiom that just selecting the location took time. Afterwards it was possibly to work immediately on the basis of the existing ­vocabulary.

genuinely confront the students with Krisztina’s view of body and space. In itself that is a rupture with architecture teaching as that essen­ tially takes place in the Academy and elsewhere. It is usually about actively creating, while in a choreo­ graphy those involved make a ­passive contribution to a creation.

The idea of a choreography was leading to in a two-day happening on four locations in Amsterdam.

Even without Krisztina her experienced dancers can get down to work right away, not so much with isolated dance steps, but rather the reverse: the dancers work with internalised patterns to investigate (the) space. The role of the choreo­ grapher in its most simplified form is that of freezing and arranging successful moments. The students were subjected to the same procedure. For some of them that led to an

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unexpected conflict with a designer’s approach because work started immediately. There is no plan; the plan arises in practice by converting a familiar pattern of behaviour into action.

These internalised patterns of behaviour yielded an interesting confrontation. If you convert it into the language of architecture, urban design or landscape architecture, it would mean that you can start sketching a new design situation just like that on the basis of a fami­ liar vocabulary, and that that will automatically touch the specificities of the specific situation. This calls for nothing more than the alertness to literally or metaphorically stop the process when this happens, and to record it as a useful discovery.

Some designers will say that this is exactly how they work. All the same, I have never seen that taken to such extremes as in the case of Krisztina. The underlying technique for representing an idea – in dance, the technical control of body and motion and in design, the capacity to sketch – calls for continuous, spe­ cialised training: one or more hours of practice every day. It is a stimu­ lating idea that we designers should practice a ­couple of hours of drawing skills every day! Freezing the process where a ­situation-specific discovery is made calls for a sensi­ ti­vity that can only be acquired through good intuition and/or years of practice.

That was one of the reasons why the Capita Selecta lecture by Herman Hertzberger was so exciting. It was no random choice: Hertzberger has a

lot in common with De Châtel.

The fascinating thing about the ­lecture was how Hertzberger ­analysed his own work, with which ­the audience was familiar, from this new perspective. He almost danced on stage, but apart from that he de­monstrated the same acuteness, shaped over the years, in going straight to the heart of the matter ­regarding space in general and a plan in particular.

Hertzberger illustrated this primarily on the basis of all kinds of forms of staircases and ramps. That is a characteristic aspect of his work, and also an architectural repertoire with a large choreographical potential.

If architecture students take part in a choreography, should they ­regard themselves as amateur ­dancers?

That was a question that we asked ourselves, and so did many of the students who looked forward to or dreaded the prospect of ­being allowed to or having to dance.

Krisztina did not beat about the bush: amateurs must not try to be dancers. The students are material for the choreographer. The choreo­ grapher puts a simple question to the group (walk among yourselves, as you choose and without behaving any differently from usual, from wall to wall). The choreographer watches what happens and notes the ­moment when the walking leads to an interesting picture that is related to the space. The proviso ‘without behaving any differently from usual’ is important. Krisztina indignantly intervened when one of the choreo­ graphies started to become too much like dance.

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The title of this essay sums up an essential experience of the project: a form of action that, like music, theatre and sport, starts at a welldefined moment. The choreographer asks people to perform an action and simply calls out: And… go! These words embody a self-assuming authority to initiate the action that spatial designers do not possess.

Architecture students and professionals usually begin in an explora­ tory way. The design develops afterwards in a mixed form of oral exchange (discussion, think-tank – what are we going to do?) and the collecting of material.

No matter how clear the starting point may have been, the final result was not predetermined. There was no plan. As the project progressed, we regularly asked one another: What next?

Maximal success was achieved when the project developed ‘in the moment’. A spontaneous choreo­ graphy arose in the Machinehal on Saturday afternoon. Krisztina needed to make a design intervention because the spectators took up so much space that only a traditional stage would be left. However, Krisztina’s work prefers to abandon the conventional setting of stage and audience. She therefore put the audience in the middle of the room so that the walls would be free, and asked everyone to keep moving. This combined the practical advantage that everyone could see the dancers ‘exploring the wall’ with a new idea: the public became a part of the choreography. At the end of the 18

workshop the opportunity arose to use the Gashouder (former gas tank in Culture Park ­Wester-gasfabriek) for a short while. For Krisztina a brief glance inside that impressive space was sufficient to create an instant choreo-graphy with 150 participants.

That is an ­action for which direction is essential, as only then can the choreo­ graphy be seen from a distan­ce.

It had been decided beforehand that the different parts of the workshop (studios) would present a final result. That turned out not to be such a productive idea. Most of the studios carried out intense and surprising research during the workshop. For example, in a number of groups an appeal was made to the dancers of Krisztina. That resulted in wonderful moments, as in the group of Paul Roncken. The question facing them was how to tap the energy of the mass of people moving about in the city. A dancer was asked to reproduce proposed energetic movements à la minute. Dance thereby changed from being an aim in itself to show the public something to a research tool. In another studio an object was constructed; ­during the construction the idea arose that the object could be a stimulus to dance – a hypothesis that could be immediately put to the test by a dancer. A third studio used white and black slats in an almost blacked out hall with a single bright lamp to achieve ‘perspectival trompe-l’oeil’. The dancer present was given a sort of advisory role to clarify the result. These are examples which illustrate that the research was authentic and followed

alternative paths, as one would hope for in connection with an Artist in Residence. The ­presentation of the results, however, had a remarkable effect: the workshop seemed to have returned to normal design categories. Suddenly there was that familiar atmosphere of gazes concentrated on monitors and the violence of megabytes. The connection with the dramatic quality of a dance presentation with a clear beginning and end was lost.

The open character of the project meant that by the end of the workshop a question was raised: is this also the end of the project?

As I write this essay, at the end of 2007, the project has at any rate had two tangible results. First, ­spatial exploration through dance has become a permanent ingredient of the regular Form Study on Friday mornings. Second, Krisztina has thought of elaborating a performance to be presented in 2009. That production should be a joint project of the Academy of Architecture and the dancecompany. Students would develop the sketches for the production in collaboration with the dancers. Two experiences from the workshop will be deployed: ­students intervene and make objects that continually change the space in which the ­dancers dance – and the dancers react to those interventions à la minute. The second experience is the audience: it is literally in the performance, not on the outside, and will thus also have to react to the changing space. Although this was not thought up in advance,

Krisztina has perhaps thereby made the purest use of the post of Artist in Residence: the application of new experiences in a new work.

Noël van Dooren Noël van Dooren has been head of the Landscape Architecture department at the Academy of Architecture since 2003. He is established in Utrecht as an independent landscape architect. Following graduation from Wageningen University he worked at landscape architects H+N+S for five years. While there, he developed a preference for projects involving wind, water and traffic – high points being a 20km river embankment and a long-term involvement in the surrounds for the river Emscher in the German Ruhr area. Noël van Dooren is also a member of the editorial staff of Blauwe Kamer (Blue Room) magazine, where he established a framework for serious criticism and appreciation of landscape architecture. In 1997 he started up his independent landscape architecture bureau. Besides his own studies and designs he publishes articles in professional periodicals and ­co-authored a book on landscape architecture with Alle Hosper. Depending on the assignment, his ­one-man bureau collaborates with others, including One Architecture, Tauw and La4Sale.

Let’s suppose the ­Academy is a place for artists.....

The Amsterdam School of the Arts’ Artist in Residence programme stimulates innovation and facilitates encounters with contemporary art ­practice. It provides host faculties with the opportunity to benefit from the experience of respected artists, breathing new life into the educational and artistic structures of the Academy. The focus is on current interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary developments, and on interaction with the inter­ national ‘state of the art’.

The research group provides active support to faculties and individual departments in the realisation of their Artist in Residence programmes.

Combining our energies, embryonic ideas mature into substantive plans, a tailored organisation and ultimately a fully fledged coproduction. The format of the programme is flexible, and it is accessible faculty-wide.

Colophon Publisher: Research group Art Practice and Development Editing: Communication AHK Translation: Steve Green, Helen Reid (essay And… Go!) Stills: dvd Body/Space Graphic Design: Thonik Design dvd: Typography and other Serious Matters Print: Hub. Tonnaer BV © Research group Art Practice and Development, Amsterdam School of the Arts, 2008 P.O. Box 15079, NL – 1001 MB Amsterdam www.air.ahk.nl 20