Emphatic Vocabularies of Collective Molecular Bodies

Workshops and Performances by knowbotiq with Lamin Fofana and Alesandra Seutin

November 10, 2018
4 pm Workshop

November 11, 2018
4 pm Workshop
8 pm Performance

at Archive Kabinett
Müllerstrasse 133, Hinterhof, 13349 Berlin

Please register for each of the workshops until November 7 at school@district-berlin.com.

manYdancing the digital ornament aims to reflect on what it means to form a collective body today, to activate and affect body knowledge through a repertoire of dance-like movement. The workshop and a performative public extension ask how we could deal today with the excessive demands of confrontation with technologization/digitization, anonymization, and the resulting disorientation. And whether undisciplined collective dance could play a role in this.

To make this more tangible, we draw references to the “epileptically dancing white European bodies” that in the 1920s had to deal with the nihilism and insanity in the aftermath of the First World War. We establish links to the experiences of colonialism’s construction of the Other and look at the phenomenon of the “hysterically shaking masses” (dance rage and dance addiction), which we interpret as a reaction to the manifestations of industrialization and automation in the world of wage labour. Post-slavery dance forms that conquered the variety and music halls of Berlin and Paris as urban, animal or epileptic dances promoted queer lines of subjectivity informed by blackness, femininity and class consciousness. manYdancing the digital ornament aims to combine these metropolitan body practices of the early 20th century with the crisis-like experiences of a present in which algorithmic governmentalities and biotechnologies fragment the bodies, molecularize them and translate them into data sets.

We believe that a lot of knowledge is stored in body movements and dance, which can be used to engage with the current hybrid and posthuman body concepts (body optimizations). Despite that the integrity of the individual body is emphasized strongly in Eurocentric culture, the situations in which it has to adapt, transform, dissolve or to accept algorithmic and molecular access determined by others are increasing. Individual borders become more and more obsolete and dividualized. Symbiosis with algorithms, bots, affects, drugs, hormons in urban mass event events or political demonstrations emerge.

The workshop contents are the same Saturday and Sunday and each for a group of maximum 20 participants. Participation is free. Food will be provided based on donation. Please register for each of the workshops until November 7 at school@district-berlin.com.

After a short conversation about body knowledge and collective bodies, the performer Alesandra Seutin will improvise on undisciplined movement repertoires together with the workshop participants. Lamin Fofana has developed specific sound material for this purpose.The workshops do not require any experience or previous knowledge. Please bring comfortable clothing.

The performance on Sunday is open to a public.

knowbotiq are interested in how social and political conditions as well as historical knowledge and theories can be activated with the means of art. The focus is often on the (working, the political and the gendered) body with its ability to (re)act, camouflage, to dissolve, but also to (re-)assemble. We outline various situational scenarios that position these bodies in the context of quotidian, technological and scientific developments.

Alesandra Seutin’s repertoire of work is focused on the exploration of subjects, which influence our society, and with this captures her audience into a journey of compelling and outspoken dance theatre. She founded Vocab Dance Company with the vision of fusing African traditional dance with contemporary dance and urban dance forms to distinctly create Afro-eclectic dance theatre from a feminine perspective.

Lamin Fofana is an electronic producer and artist. His instrumental electronic music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. He is from Sierra Leone, lived in Guinea, United States, and currently located in Berlin.

manYdancing the digital ornament is the third iteration of a collaborative and performative space that appears under different titles across the months of October and November 2018 at School Without Center / District and Archive Kabinett. Dada is Black, duh! * Mad Vibrations * manYdancing the digital ornament * Choreographic Unrest is funded by Hauptstadtulturfonds.