SE.S.TA Blog

The first edition of the Dance Reading Club series When The Dancers Know The Answers took place in the living room of Studio ALTA on Thursday 21st of May 2020 and it hosted two hours long discussion which started with the question When the dance fails as a gesture? Observing how the piece Assemblage by Martina Hajdyla Lacová found its audience in the park due to the pandemic restrictions, sandwiched later with the video excerpts of performances mentioned in the discussed text Writing Laughter / Violent Desire by Jenn Joy brought the discussion back to the core of what is the artistic gesture and why it requires gaps, stumbling and failures. 

Extraordinary project Gallery without borders hosted a research of eleven dance makers from Czech republic and USA who were together with american choreographer Sue Schroeder exploring the role of the the artistic artefact and its kinesthetic potential in the Gallery - white cube space. Various mouvement  researches were applied and reflected the display and curatorial ideas of current exhibition  Art of Long Century: 1796–1918 in National Gallery Prague.  The outcome of this long term quarantine research was presented life in the National Gallery Prague and streamed on 14th of July 2020. Here you can folow more on why these eleven mouvement artists decided to attend this particular project.

How do we care for each other in these times of pandemic isolations? When the borders and social distancing are locking us in our own bodies forced to be detached in the small bordered units prohibiting us to meet the other. Hapticality is denied by the only contact we have through screens. We need to touch, to feel the other and through the other. In their book Undercommons  Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Or as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes : "In this intimate and intense example of affected writing—writing which is always already other, with an other—Harney and Moten dare us to fall." Rereading Undercommons in isolation is to recall the hapticallity within the other.