An Academy 1

sunday 12.06.05 saturday 25.06.05 at the HF.05

... been to school together ‘It was like we’d been to school together,’ is how theatre maker Laura van Dolron felt when she bumped into a couple of her fellow participants. 1) What school was this then, that was not a school? Where was it? And most importantly: why?

The ‘school’ Laura was referring to was An Academy, a radical idea that she took part in – together with a group of other young, professional makers – throughout the two weeks of the Holland Festival 2005 in Amsterdam. The primary impulse behind An Academy was the urgent need to provide an opportunity for local practitioners to engage with the international state of the art and to confront their own artistic discourse with the practice and vision of renowned colleagues.

The basic premise of the initiative, conceived by Mark Timmer at Theater Gasthuis and myself as head of the research group for Art Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, was seductively simple: we proposed to treat the Holland Festival, one of the highpoints of the cultural season in the Netherlands, as if it were an academy, and by doing so take advantage of the wealth of an intense period in time.

Rather than offering a formal structure, we wondered to what extent we, the participants and organisers of An Academy, would be able to involve ourselves in the process of teaching and learning and behave like parasites on the body of our generous host.

1) Laura van Dolron / email to the participants of An Academy / p. 70 2) Rose de Wend Fenton / The festival as learning zone / p. 79

Twelve participants from different artistic and cultural backgrounds, two peer facilitators and one line producer agreed to be largely accountable for the route this journey would take and to explore crucial issues in art-making today. In our home base for the duration of the Festival at its very hub, the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, we had daily conversations inspired by: presentations of our own work; meetings with five guest artists; and the fourteen performances and two lectures we attended – not only at the Holland Festival itself, but also at the parallel DasArts Daily event, a cross-section of the recent, past and current reality of this postgraduate studies programme.

This publication collects evidence from the personal notes of the individual participants, as well as five new articles that reflect on the Holland Festival 2005, the wider context of international festivals, artistic production and the future of education. It is a stimulating record of a somewhat unpredictable encounter. Or, as Rose de Wend Fenton states in her contribution to this book, one that ‘became a catalyst to open up questions and thoughts we did not know we had.’ 2) An Academy was able to build on the artistic exchange that Theater Gasthuis has developed with the Holland Festival over the past years. We are grateful for the enthusiasm with which Festival director Pierre Audi welcomed us, and for the efforts of Festival researcher Annemieke Keurentjes, who supported our plans from the very beginning.

Moreover, An Academy would not have been possible without the group of dedicated participants who were ready to make sense of the opportunity, to wholeheartedly invest their curiosity and to ask honest and hard questions about their practice.

It is to these young professional artists that we owe our gratitude and it is they who have encouraged us not to turn An Academy into a regular event, but to insist upon the inherent uncertainty of the initiative and to maintain it as a series of experimental, non-institutional learning situations that will continue to change location, time and context.

Marijke Hoogenboom / On behalf of the organisers of An Academy ahk/L Art Practice and Development / Theater Gasthuis / Holland Festival

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Contents notebook / p.12 Rose de Wend Fenton / p.78 The festival as learning zone Development of An Academy: how does it nurture my ideas?

Some random thoughts and reflections Igor Dobricic / p.83 Of course, we know what to expect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?

Andrea Bozic / p.83 Audience vs. Audience The Sufi night experience Marijke Hoogenboom / p.86 Who’s afraid of (art) education?

Some indecent proposals Nicola Nord / p.92 SPREAD! An Academy

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// In Your Pocket / programme book / Holland Festival 1–26 June 2005

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// In Your Pocket / programme book / Holland Festival 1–26 June 2005

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// In Your Pocket / programme book / Holland Festival 1–26 June 2005

// final picnic in Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ / photo Hester van Hasselt

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// Hester van Hasselt / from her report for the participants of An Academy

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sunday 12.06.05 Tierno Bokar / Peter Brook > Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal // Peter Brook / Tierno Bokar

// Peter Brook / is the uncontested master of pure theatre. For thirty years now the renowned 80-year-old English director (of theatre, film and opera) has operated from his Paris base with his international company, Bouffes du Nord. In his constant search for a deeper understanding of the ‘the essence of theatre’, he has become particularly fascinated by African theatre and spiritual practices.

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// Carolien Hermans / notes

monday 13.06.05 first meeting > Muziekgebouw aan‘t IJ introduction by stories meeting Peter Brook > Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal

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// Quote from Arnon Grunberg’s Vermeer Lecture ‘De techniek van het lijden’ (The technology of suffering), Kaneelbloesem 6 / NRC Handelsblad / 20.05.2005 / contributed by Olivier Provily

// Nicole Beutler / notes

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tuesday 14.06.05 introduction by stories discussing Peter Brook lecture Ong Keng Sen opening DasArts Daily > Brakke Grond little red (room) / Nicola Nord > Brakke Grond Les Larmes du Ciel / Joachim Schlömer > Stadsschouwburg

// Hester van Hasselt / notebook

// Ong Keng Sen / is the artistic director of the Singaporean theatre company Theatreworks and a key figure in the pan-Asian creative dialogue.

Demonstrating his intense commitment to intercultural exchange, he also serves as a curator and was a mentor at DasArts’ Block 20: ‘The Continuum: Ancient technologies, borders and transcendence (featuring EXOTICA!)’.

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19 // Carolien Hermans / notes

// Opening Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ by Queen Beatrix / photo Paul van Riel / Hollandse Hoogte / NRC Handelsblad / June 24, 2005

wednesday 15.06.05 discussing Les Larmes du Ciel Chips & Dips / DasArts Daily > Frascati Hamlet > Frascati

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21 // Hester van Hasselt / excerpt from the article ‘Parasites / An Academy at the Holland Festival 2005’/ Volume 5, 2006

// Igor Dobricic / ‘Of course, we know what to expect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?’ / >> p.83

thursday 16.06.05 Tatyana / work presentation meeting Ong Keng Sen Nathan / work presentation Bach Cantatas / Peter Sellars > Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ

// Carolien Hermans / notes and notebook

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// Nicole Beutler / notebook

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What is the use of art?

// Nicole Beutler / notebook

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Being a parasite

// Bach Cantata BWV 82 / ‘Ich habe genug’

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friday 17.06.05 Laura / work presentation Olivier / work presentation lecture Marijke Hoogenboom / DasArts // Marijke Hoogenboom / ‘Who’s afraid of (art) education? Some indecent proposals’ / >> p.86 Daily > Frascati Sufi Night > Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ // Andrea Bozic / ‘Audience vs. Audience’ / >> p.83

// Carolien Hermans / notes

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// Nicole Beutler / drawing from notebook, in response to Olivier Provily’s performance ‘The Washing Room’

// Message by Marijke Hoogenboom’s daughter Anna at age six, presented as part of her lecture ‘Who’s afraid of (art) education?

Some indecent proposals’

saturday 18.06.05 discussing Sufi Night meeting Peter Sellars

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// Peter Sellars / American theatre and opera director, known for his radical updatings of the classics. In the autumn of 2006, at the end of the Mozart Year, he will present the New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna where he has invited international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to ‘pick up where Mozart left off’ and create new works inspired by the luminous music of his final year: The Magic Flute, La Clemenza di Tito and the Requiem.

// The plum blossom / honoured by Chinese painters and poets for centuries, is the central metaphor for the mission of Peter Sellars’ festival: ‘This first flower, that already appears in February – fearlessly, selflessly, tenaciously, surrounded by ice and snow – announces that winter will not last forever. The image Longing for Spring is known from Prague to Beijing; it symbolises the hope for political thaw. Against all evidence to the contrary, someone must carry the certainty of the miracle of spring in their heart, and place its promise of rebirth and renewal right up against the cold hard facts of the world.’ / Peter Sellars / www.newcrownedhope.org

// Carolien Hermans / notes

// Regina Krahl in collaboration with Nurdun Erbahar / Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul / edited by John Ayers

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// Hester van Hasselt / report for the participants of An Academy

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// Andrea Bozic / notebook

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sunday 19.06.05 day off

// Andrea Bozic / notebook

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monday 20.06.05 Nanine / work presentation Nicola / work presentation Rage d’Amour / De Nederlandse Opera > Stadsschouwburg

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// Collection of questions and issues from the conversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

What is your practice?

How do you relate to the artistic practice of others?

What are your doubts?

What haunts you?

Where do you need to go?

How will your thinking evolve throughout an intense dialogue with peers at this year’s Holland Festival?

What is the twilight zone between a visible performance and an audible one?

How does invisibility sharpen the senses?

How much can the audible shape one’s imagination?

What is the position of the audience in the contemporary performance field?

How does the audience get involved in the world of the performance?

Where is the borderline between interaction and entertainment and what spaces does it open?

What strategies of watching do different makers employ?

What is happening to the form of live art and performance at present?

What spaces open up in the gaps in interdisciplinary work?

Who needs to be present in a live performance? A performer or a spectator?

Anyone at all?

What is the state of the vital and complex relationship between art and ‘otherness’?

What are the possibilities and limitations of the dramaturgical contribution to the production of non- or meta-verbal theatre?

What am I looking for?

In what way are festivals ‘learning zones’?

What is their role, how do they provoke, make people (audiences, artists, producers, policy makers) break out of established patterns?

What are the ideas that resonate and are taken up and forward into the next generation of artists and their work?

And why is it these ideas?

Does the rhetoric of festivals match up to their reality? Or is it simply rhetoric devised by marketers and producers to stimulate the appetites of the often well-fed arts consumer? Or does it fill the social agendas of politicians and civic leaders?

How does it all fit in with our world today?

Where is the space for intimacy?

What is the relationship between movement and language?

How does the body have its own semiotic and how do narrative structures emerge from language?

What is theatre, what is it that we want from the experience of togetherness in place and time?

How will this theatre (dance, music) speak to me and to others?

Is it possible to create autonomously organised structures for learning?

Is it possible to share the responsibility for a mutual dialogue?

What makes us human?

What happens if you lose a utopia?

What are the difficulties when dealing in an artistic way with so-called ‘political material’ in theatre and performance?

How can I determine the structures of thinking in my own work?

In what way am I thinking right now, and how does it relate to my environment?

How does language influence our thoughts?

If every truth is subjective: what is the relationship between the language of words as used in science and philosophy and the visual/expressive/musical languages of art?

Should art illustrate, stimulate or entertain? // Collection of questions from conversations and notes / Hester van Hasselt

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What is the role of Internet/television/public space/democracy in the contemporary political environment and how do artists make sense of them?

What is the present position of art?

How can differences be reconciled? By transcending them with tolerant action?

Can you see theatre as a place of meditation?

What is the impact of presenting international work in a local context?

What impact can a festival have on the making of a work?

What is the responsibility of an artist in society?

What is the role of art in Dutch society?

What is theatre for you?

If theatre did not exist, what would you be missing?

How relevant is it?

What happens once a show has been presented?

What are the repercussions of a project?

When the play finishes what begins?

How do I become a successful artist?

What do you gain/lose by working in a bigger institution?

Do I choose for collaboration or independence?

If this piece had been directed by somebody else, would we have viewed it differently?

Who thought this performance was boring?

Why? What can we do to affect the world?

What can we do with an evolving Europe?

What is the use of the work we make?

How do you link conversations?

What comes up?

As a musician, how do you relate to such a performance?

What do you hear when you listen to the music?

Why do we want to feel emotions?

What is tragedy?

How can we begin to feel again?

Why, and for whom, did he create this?

What was the urgency?

Why do you expect theatre people in the audience?

Who finances artists and for what purpose?

Where do you position yourself?

Who is your audience?

Can you relate this to your work?

What is beautiful?

How can space be used?

How do you reach local knowledge?

What do you think of the position of artists in Holland?

Why is art needed?

Why do you make theatre?

What is the use of this?

What is East? What is West?

South-Asian art. How big is this?

What is the potential for change through popular theatre, commercial theatre, musicals?

Why do I have to think so hard? Can’t I just enjoy it?

How is Asian and African theatre presented in Europe?

What is freedom, what is a free society?

How do we avoid colonising each other in interdisciplinary work? // Collection of questions from conversations and notes / Hester van Hasselt

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// Collection of questions and issues from the conversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

Trance: psychiatric/physical/spiritual hygiene. Would they call it that in Senegal?

How can trance be translated from everyday/ritual life to stage life?

How do you engage the public?

What can you ask from actors?

Why do you make theatre?

What would the perfect audience member for your work be like?

What is important for you to express on stage?

Why is it pleasant to lose sense of time and space?

Could you analyse this performance as baroque theatre?

Spielberg: what does an exploding eye look like?

Sellars: why would somebody explode someone’s eye?

How can people be reintegrated into their reality?

What do you give back/sacrifice?

What does it mean that leaders of an older generation step aside?

What are the ceremonies for those who died in mass graves?

What makes it possible to move forward, for the living and the dead?

How do you deal with power and hierarchy in theatre?

Who needs it?

What is it to touch infinity?

Do you see yourself as a magician?

What is possible evidence of our conversations?

What does my heart have to do to make my body dance?

Why should highly trained dancers go out in the dark?

Why are lights used mysteriously in theatre?

How should large pieces be staged?

Do I need to stretch my foot?

What am I doing here?

Who am I? What am I expressing?

Why dance?

How do you find your own distinctive voice?

How do you get rid of what is embedded in your system?

How do I unlock my creativity?

How do I get to work? What is the trigger?

What do I express and why?

Do you think it is important to know in words?

Why do I go to Zierikzee?

Isn’t that exactly what your mission is?

Who are those people?

Did it never challenge the way you work?

Can you make a performance that could be done anywhere, for anybody?

Why only now?

Why is the TAT (Theater am Turm) closing now – now that the house is constantly full?

How come theatre people only open up to people to create allies once something is close to dying?

What kind of language do you use?

How do you engage with reality?

Do you bring real life into theatre?

Is it better to meet the public outside/inside the theatre?

Did you make a play that we can all understand in some way?

How do you see your performers on stage?

Who are they?

Is everybody speaking?

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// Collection of questions and issues from the conversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

// Collection of questions from conversations and notes / Hester van Hasselt

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How do you work now?

What about the context?

What happens to your work when you move to Holland?

Who makes choices? ‘Somebody has got to be unfair in the end.’ (Quote Tim Etchells) How do you reconcile that?

What is fair/unfair?

Who are we? From which position can we speak about the refugees?

Into what is your work embedded?

Why did you come to Amsterdam?

What if there is no artistic contextualisation of your work in Holland?

From the perspective of a producer: where is your work presented?

If 20% of the audience leaves, should we change the work?

What kind of climate is this?

Why is this sort of theatre made?

Why is it loved so much?

Where should it be presented?

Where are the limits of my freedom?

What is art if you use it as an instrument?

How can all the reflections on art/theatre be materialised?

What happens to theatre when there are no performers left on stage?

How much is it about me? What am I telling you? How much is it about you?

Is there a difference between the reactions of theatre friends and those of normal audience members?

Who is your audience?

You are many people through interaction with different people. What is realised of your potential?

How can we think of theatre in the perspective of push (TV) and pull (Internet) media?

What does technology produce on a human level, beyond creating possibilities?

What can you do to remain true to your own art?

What does it to you?

How do you look at things?

What is this meeting going to change in your work?

Is there a way to learn from people with experience, to learn a lot and to leave out some things?

Do you allow yourself to be affected?

Do you need to be very humble in order to create?

Honesty? Purity? Authenticity? Acting?

Imagination rather than image?

What can make a festival necessary?

Where is the platform for the next generation?

How many people can do this?

Why is there no relationship with the theatre school?

Why are you doing this academy at the Holland Festival?

How do you go about finding unknown groups?

Why do you give your pieces English titles?

If you see yourself, how would you present yourself in movement and monologue?

Do you want to dance with me?

Where does it take you now?

What evidence might all of us collect from these two weeks?

// Collection of questions from conversations and notes / Hester van Hasselt

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// Collection of questions and issues from the conversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

What does the Holland festival get from us?

And what does it take from us?

Is there communication between host and guest?What could such a group mean to the Holland Festival?

What kind of relationship does the Holland Festival create with the audience?

What if An Academy was open to an audience?

What can we give back from within An Academy to the public arena of the festival?

Does An Academy have anything to offer to the festival?

What do I think of these performances?

Who am I? Who are these people?

Who is inside/outside the community?

What is An Academy?

What could it be?

What is the context?

What is the place of theatre in the arts today?

What is the difference between culture and agriculture?

What does Great Britain look like from a boat?

How do we use the international in London?

Why must art always go around with a begging bowl?

What if theatre was not there?

Where do you begin those conversations with the new Laurie Andersons?

How should one speak?

How can one be dignified?

What is the most important question right now?

What does it mean to create a monument today?

How can a living monument be created?

What do we want?

Who is West? Who is East?

What is exoticism?

What is an export product?

Where does authenticity lie?

What is ‘in’ in the West?

What can you put on stage?

What do we gain from the distinction between good and bad?

Where was the mess, the roughness, in the Festival?

Where is the body in this?

Is that transformation?

What is left of the theatre when the performers have left?

How do you create an education for artistic contextualisation?

How do you set up the discussion on theatricality/reality within performance?

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// Collection of questions and issues from the conversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

// Collection of questions from conversations and notes / Hester van Hasselt

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// Theater am Turm – TAT – in Frankfurt am Main / was for many years one of the most important venues for the production and presentation of innovative international work. It was finally closed down in 2004 with the performance programme for urbanities by andcompany&Co. (Nicola Nord) // Carolien Hermans / notes

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tuesday 21.06.05 Basten / work presentation Andrea / work presentation discussing Peter Sellars discussing Rage d’Amour Elementarteilchen / Johan Simons > Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ

// Carolien Hermans / notes

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// Nicole Beutler / notebook

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wednesday 22.06.05 meeting Pierre Audi Nicole / work presentation discussing Elementarteilchen

// Carolien Hermans / notes

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// Pierre Audi / born in Beirut, is the artistic director of both the Holland Festival (since 2005) and the Netherlands Opera (since 1988).

As early as 1979 he launched the Almeida Theatre, an innovative and international performing arts centre in Islington, London, and as a director of theatre and opera he has built up an extraordinary repertoire of contemporary and classical works.

// Hester van Hasselt / excerpt from the article ‘Parasites, An Academy at the Holland Festival 2005’ / Volume 5, 2006

// Quote Pierre Audi / turn page >>

// Four Holland Festival directors: Pierre Audi / Ad ‘s Gravesande / Ivo van Hove and Frans de Ruiter / photo Corbino

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// Roland de Beer and Hein Janssen / ‘Over de Grens’ (Over the border) / Volkskrant / June 23, 2005

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// All that Dutch / Over internationaal cultuurbeleid (On international cultural policy) / NAI Publishers, 2005

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thursday 23.06.05 Before... Existential Makeover / Laura van Dolron discussing Pierre Audi Caroline / work presentation Hester / work presentation evaluation An Academy Paradise / MAU/Lemi Ponifasio > Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal

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// Kasper Jansen and Wilfried Takken / ‘De Wederopstanding’ (The Resurrection) / NRC Handelsblad / June 24, 2005

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// Rose de Wend Fenton / friday 24.06.05 ‘The festival as learning zone’ / >> p.78 Rose / work presentation meeting Lemi Ponifasio > Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal The End of the Moon / Laurie Anderson > Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ Devendra Banhart & Band > BIMhuis

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63 // Carolien Hermans / notes

// From the LIFT Enquiry brochure

// Photo from the programme booklet of Paradise, company MAU/Lemi Ponifasio // Lemi Ponifasio / was born in the village of Lano, Samoa. He is one of New Zealand’s leading theatre artists and a pioneer in the evolution of Pacific contemporary dance and theatre. He is founder and artistic director of MAU, which he established in 1995, naming it after the Samoan independence movement Mau. While known for his radical approach to contemporary theatre, Ponifasio’s work is firmly rooted in the values of the Pacific.

// Hester van Hasselt / from her report for the participants of An Academy

The third space 64

// photo Tatyana van Walsum

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// Hester van Hasselt / notebook

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saturday 25.06.05 discussing Lemi Ponifasio ‘Top 5’ of An Academy in response to the ‘Top 5’ of HF director Pierre Audi final picnic Josta / work presentation Igor / work presentation The Veil of the Temple / Sir John Tavener > De Oude Kerk

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// Hester van Hasselt / from her report for the participants of An Academy

‘the nocturnal self’ 68

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// Carolien Hermans / notes

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// Laura van Dolron / email to the participants of An Academy

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// Rose de Wend Fenton and Peter Sellars at the Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ / video still by Andrea Bozic

// Reproduced by kind permission of Peter Sellars and the Gulbenkian Foundation, publishers of The Turning World: Stories from the London International Festival of Theatre by Rose de Wend Fenton and Lucy Neal (draft preface) / London 2005

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Participants Nicole Beutler / choreographer, theatre maker, performer, co-founder of LISA, graduated at the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam Andrea Bozic / choreographer, performer, graduated at the School for New Dance Development and Dance Unlimited, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam Igor Dobricic / theatre and dance dramaturge, arts programmer at the European Cultural Foundation, graduated at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade / Amsterdam

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Laura van Dolron / theatre maker, writer, performer, graduated at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Maastricht / Amsterdam Nathan Fuhr / conductor, performer, trance-researcher, graduated at the Conservatory of Amsterdam / USA>Berlin Carolien Hermans / choreographer, performer, dance-researcher, graduated at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg and Dance Unlimited, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam Nanine Linning / choreographer, dancer, former house choreographer of Scapino Ballet, graduated at the Rotterdam Dance Academy / Amsterdam Nicola Nord / theatre maker, performer, student at DasArts, co-founder andcompany&Co., graduated at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt / Germany>Amsterdam

Olivier Provily / theatre director, director at Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven, graduated at the directing department of the Theater School, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam Basten Stokhuyzen / musician, sound artist, student Image and Sound Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague / The Hague Tatyana van Walsum / scenographer, graduated at the Wimbledon School of Art and at the Motley Theatre Design Course in London / Amsterdam peer facilitators Rose de Wend Fenton / founder and former co-director of LIFT ( The London International Festival of Theatre) / London Marijke Hoogenboom / professor Art Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam report Hester van Hasselt / performer and co-founder of LISA, graduated at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Brussels / Amsterdam line producer Josta Obbink / production manager Theater Gasthuis / Amsterdam

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Rose de Wend Fenton / The festival as learning zone Development of An Academy: how does it nurture my ideas?

Some random thoughts and reflections I had just arrived from London and was cycling through a heavy summer downpour from the Muziekgebouw to the Westergasfabriek on the way to Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar, soaked to the skin, past the road works under the bridge doing my best to keep up with Marijke Hoogenboom.

The last time I had cycled on the same pathway was in the summer of 1980 for the Theatre of Nations’ Festival of Fools, held on the derelict docklands – before the developers moved in. There I had participated in a gathering crammed with provocative performances, encounters, debate, feasting, protest and fun. A ‘learning zone’ that had profoundly influenced the spirit in which Lucy Neal and myself set up LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre, the following year.

What was I doing here twenty-five years later? And on a bicycle I could hardly control? I was not used to the back-pedal brakes and kept forgetting how to stop. And when I did manage to stop I usually lost my balance and fell off. Pretty terrifying.

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A few months earlier I had received an intriguing email from a dear friend and colleague Ritsaert ten Cate, telling me about a project led by Marijke Hoogenboom in which a group of young professional artists had been invited to engage with the Holland Festival as if it was an academy. ‘She needs a specialist for peer discussions.’ He thought I might be interested.

I had two reactions. Firstly, I am no specialist. I always feel I invent things as I go along, make up rules, break rules and generally improvise my way though situations. Secondly, it was only three weeks after I had stepped out of running LIFT and was full to overflowing with festivals. Did I really want to get involved with another – just yet.

Nonetheless, I was intrigued, so I agreed to speak to Marijke Hoogenboom. The phrase ‘treat the festival as if it were an academy’ kept resonating in my mind.

Lucy Neal and I, together with the LIFT team, had spent the last years dismantling the biennial festival format of LIFT, creating in its place a five-year Enquiry, a year-round staging of what we grandly declared would be ‘an exuberant and public exploration of theatre in these times worldwide.’ The Enquiry posed a series of questions about theatre as a space for public dialogue. What is theatre? Where does theatre take place? Who is making it? How and why? Over the years we would gather evidence in order to answer to these questions.

In a correspondence about the Enquiry, the writer and theatre maker Rustom Bharucha wrote, ‘I am fascinated by the evidence of theatre. “When the play ends, what remains?” has been the standard response. But perhaps we need to ask: “When the play ends, what begins?”’

The last few years had been a turbulent yet productive time for us. We were looking back, casting forward, going off the map; operating in a space a colleague had dubbed ‘institutionalised uncertainty’. The notion of learning in this experimental zone, and coming to an understanding of what develops as a result – in the artist, the audience or indeed the producer or organiser – was something of a preoccupation. So An Academy provided an opportunity to investigate further – at someone else’s festival and this time relieved of the responsibility of organising the event.

So, back to that cycle path and our first evening. At the end of Tierno Bokar the main character declares: ‘There are three truths: my truth, your truth and the truth.’ In acknowledging the multiplicity of voices and realities in any situation – an idea picked up later by Peter Sellars – this opening performance set the tone for An Academy over the following two weeks. It was with some nervousness that we gathered for the first time the following day, to embark on a journey hardly knowing one another, to meet with Peter Brook. Sitting

in a circle we introduced ourselves and talked with him – about theatre, our response to Tierno Bokar, our practice, our questions. Then something happened that shifted the dynamics dramatically: Peter Brook asked us to stand up and imagine we were walking a tight rope. How would we move? How would we feel? Then the exercise became more demanding.

Could we dance and play on this imaginary tightrope? We were all terrified. Talking was one thing, but here we really felt we were entering into an arena of risk and vulnerability, exposing ourselves without the protection of intellect and words. There could have been no better way to start An Academy. Through play, and in a short time, Peter made us a group; a line had been crossed and we emerged with a new sense of openness. And perhaps this was the key.

Over the next two weeks there was much talking: in response to shows we had seen, to the work we were making. ‘What is the use of the work we make?’ asked theatre director Ong Keng Sen from Singapore. ‘We make work not to illustrate but to create something different,’ insisted participant Basten Stokhuyzen, after experiencing a particularly literal and banal performance. This brought to mind director Romeo Castelluccis’ dictum that the business of theatre is ‘revelation not spectacle’. Provocative conversations were had and preconceptions were challenged; Nicole Beutler pointed out that ‘ultimately, experimentation is a relative concept’.

The shows we attended and the opportunity to meet with the artists involved became a catalyst to open up questions and thoughts we did not know we had.

For me, the simple, still moments were the most affecting: those in which space was left open for the imagination, in which less was more. The exquisitely pure voice of singer Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson in Peter Sellars’ Bach Cantatas, in which body became spirit; the fragile strength of her supplications, and the single naked light bulb swinging with a violent and then caressing movement combined to pierce the heart. In the Sufi concert, time was suspended and held, as in a meditation, allowing an almost mystical, transformative connection with the spiritual. The power of ritual was reasserted as time reclaimed its cyclical aspect in the Hindi and Sufi rhythms, choral music, and chants of the Veil of the Temple in the De Oude Kerk, as the audience – gradually becoming a community – went on a journey from darkness into light; through the night into the dawn. Language became less necessary. Johan Simon’s Elementarteilchen was filled with words. I vaguely remembered the story, but I do not speak a word of German. It did not matter. I simply had to follow the performers, their movements and gestures in the open, empty stage, communicating with each other in sorrow, anger, and indifference. There was a purity and power there. You do not have to understand everything.

I realised that over-staging and clever theatrical devices made me impatient: I was irritated by the over-designed Rages d’Amour, annoyed by the self-conscious banality of Laurie Anderson with her box of tricks. Les Larmes du Ciel was stuffed with decorative dance that crowded out – but thankfully did not suffocate – the music, and this alone sufficed to open up space for our own imaginations; it was the visceral, felt, experience that I responded to.

Of course we did a lot of talking: after lunch, sitting around a huge table in the gleaming new Muziekgebouw, Palace of Culture, looking over the waters as the ships came and went.

We were privileged. It was inspirational to hear everyone talk about his or her work and ask honest, hard questions of their practice, knowing that we could continue and evolve the conversations daily: an accumulative discourse. A privilege it also was to meet so many artists, so passionately articulate about their art. But at times it was almost too intense, too cerebral, sitting around for hours at a time – exhausting physically and mentally.

During our final evaluation discussions we considered some elements we could incorporate into our approach. Nicole Beutler reminded us of the need to enter into a state of disorientation when creating, and allow for intuition, instinct, play. Talking has its limitations.

We needed to get up and do more things. Go into real danger zones. Break up the space, the form and mode of discourse. Perhaps split into smaller groups from time to time. Maybe occasionally shift venue, escape from the central venue and all it represented. Nicola Nord

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suggested a silent walk through the city. Or a day cruise. To change our way of seeing and interacting. Maybe we could have made something as the days went by, like create an evolving installation or cook a meal together. Take more personal risks. Allow our hearts to work, as much as our heads. Fall out of patterns.

And perhaps that is one of the things a festival can encourage us to do. At its best, should a festival not be a framework and a licence for the unexpected to take place? However, as Igor Dobricic pointed out: ‘Success is not just defined by content, but also by social context.’ Did the social context of festivals, characterised by a ritualistic consumption of culture, limit the possibilities for engagement?

So where to next? An Academy is a radical idea and its form should reflect this. What is the relationship between the Holland Festival, Theater Gasthuis and An Academy? How should it be nurtured? Not just during those two weeks, but during the rest of the year. How should it continue and develop a dynamic dialogue? Indeed, could An Academy in some way have an impact on the form and context of the Holland Festival?

I pose these questions from afar. Unlike many of the participants I do not live in Amsterdam. I am sure many encounters between members of the group have taken place since last June. Sharing each other’s work and conversations, leading to new ideas and possibilities. So, after the play ended what did begin in the other participants?

When I got home I was so accustomed to my Amsterdam bike, I had almost forgotten how to ride my London bike. Human beings are immensely adaptable. What is strange soon becomes familiar – for better and for worse. Stay vigilant.

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Igor Dobricic / Of course, we know what to expect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?

The audience is seated, waiting for the performance to start. The houselights are on and while waiting we can see a stage to the right – arranged for the orchestra. An inclined elevated platform on the left gives us a sense of where the action is going to take place. And yet the space remains empty for a long time. Some people start to clap, then talk, and laugh.

The parameters of the event are unclear, and a number of questions occupy me: am I in a theatre, is this a concert, and why is it not starting? My visual focus relaxes and my attention shifts to the anticipation of Bach’s music. Forced to wait for it, I listen for what is going to happen next.

Abruptly, Peter Sellars himself steps out from the wings and onto the stage, stopping just away from the centre of the proscenium, facing the audience. He starts talking, addressing us directly, without a microphone. Some audience members shout out that they cannot hear him. The fact that the situation does not feel staged, that there is no microphone, that some people are complaining openly: all of this creates a sense of urgency that charges the moment.

Although nobody should be surprised to see Sellars talking to his audience – it is something he has often done in the past – I feel awkward about it this time; I wonder if this is part of the performative structure or if it is ‘for real’. As his voice is indeed not loud enough my curiosity heightens to a level beyond pure aesthetic expectation. The intensity with which I listen increases further. It feels as if I am being taken out of theatre into an open, not fully regulated, unstable place, like a street corner or a square where the rules of social engagement are volatile and confrontational, where alertness takes priority over the appetite for entertainment.

So, the performance actually starts with Sellars telling us a story about the performance.

He speaks with an urgency befitting an announcement, but impeccably, in detail and with the skill of genuine storyteller, enticing the audience to listen with careful attention. After the initial turmoil, silence establishes itself in the auditorium. At first it is a consciously imposed silence triggered by the practical need to hear Sellars. Then it becomes the attentive silence of an audience enthralled by the story. We discover that the main performer, singer Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, is the reason for the delay: at this very moment she is in pain – suffering and weak – and will only be able to sing one of the two planned Cantatas.

The external silence of the rapt audience is transformed into the internal silence of the story itself. The shift is palpable. And into this quiet and solemn space at the intersection of external and internal perception, the orchestra and singer walk on.

Watching the musicians I have a strong sense that they are not just taking their designated places on stage, but rather in the invisible and much more complex constellation of time and space wired into my mind by Sellars’ verbal intervention. I have been prevented from observing external action as a formal artistic representation of something else and in this sense I am not even listening to it ‘from the outside’. The event has become observable on a completely different level – inside the knowledge sphere, beyond the senses and in my head – while I am simultaneously well aware that through my physical presence in the Muziekgebouw I also fully implicated in it externally. Perhaps I should be perplexed by this interference of fiction (subjectivity) and reality (objectivity). But no, everything seems crystal clear.

Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson emerges dressed only in a hospital gown. Dancer Michael Schumacher follows her on stage. The lights are finally going down. She will sing, as Sellars has already explained, about death, ‘but not as an enemy, not as panic, not as a farewell and not as the end of something.’

As her voice emerges from the darkness I am grateful for the simple clarity of Peter Sellars’ preparatory words. While the musicians were slotting into the invisible diagram of relationships created by his storytelling skill (as if into a virtual set design), the voice of

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Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson now traverses this virtual diagram, connecting visible appearances with invisible circumstances, filling it in all directions to overflowing with emotional intensity. By apparently being so transparent, Sellars has made me listen to the resonance of his words within myself, in silence. And by assimilating the external action of the musicians into this resonance I internalise the emergence of music. Thus, I become implicated in this narrative of death, out of which a work of art establishes itself as pure sound. I look about me, through the darkened hall. Some people are crying. As am I. And I cannot help but wonder, while letting my tears flow, if the implications of my new enthusiasm for Sellars’ work should be considered in a positive or a negative light. Have I simply been seduced into complicity by a passive voyeurism that neutralises political and personal relevance by refashioning both of these into public spectacle? Or is there a genuine performative/transformative value to Sellars’ presentation that reclaims the emotional reactions of the audience from the domain of middle class sentimentality, placing it back into the realm of pure intensities? Should I consider Sellars a cheat and opportunist or rather a hero: a demolisher of illusion, the disappearance of which at last makes us cry, again – for real?

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In the arena of high art, the overflow of emotion in theatre has not been considered acceptable for two hundred years. But during the staging of the Baroque operas in the eighteenth century it was not unusual for the weak-hearted to succumb to emotional fits of crying, or even fainting. The internal mechanism of rapture prevalent at that time corresponded perfectly with the external mechanisms of stage illusion used to create performances as spectacles.

Paradoxically, to produce a similar effect of emotional catharsis in theatre today it would seem that we have to reverse the direction of this correspondence. Instead of constructing an external illusion in order to invoke its internalised emotional analogue, we should engage in deconstructing the externality of the spectacle to a point where a new diagram of forces is established: one in which subjective inner experiences (illusions) are assembled in advance, a blueprint for the ensuing external reality.

There is no more efficient way of doing this in performance than through the re-invention of ‘direct address’ (aparte, or ‘talking aside’, as it is coded in the dramaturgy of Baroque opera). Storytelling is a form of directed daydreaming; through the intervention of the narrator, the stage can be set virtually, inside our heads. Only then can the externality of the spectacle appear, naked, stripped of all the visual complexities of style.

The specific nature of this post-scientific brand of storytelling – essentially corrosive toward externality of illusion – is that it does not construct a fiction, but rather elaborates an ‘accurate’ narrative made of fragments of past circumstances, incidents and anecdotes related to the artistic process leading to the moment of the performance.

The accuracy of this narrative practice is not dependent on any external criterion of historical or biographical truth. It is instead defined as accurate because of its submission to an audience’s perception of what they consider ‘real’, so that it can infiltrate and re-arrange people’s mind frames into an internal stage onto which external appearances can emerge.

Whenever I recall the Bach Cantatas at the Holland Festival, I cannot help but wonder if Sellars’ story about the sickness of the main protagonist, singer Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, was really true. But in fact its accuracy is irrelevant for the dynamics of the emotional experience. It is much more important that we believe it is. The ethical justification for this manipulation is contained in the experience we shared with her. Because it is far more ethical to be with Ms Hunt-Lieberson (if she is truly ill) than to diagnostically scrutinise her state of health from our audience seats. Even if, at the same time, we cannot but acknowledge that she is standing there, singing Bach – barefooted.

Andrea Bozic / Audience vs. Audience The Sufi night experience We enter the grand concert hall of the brand new Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ. It seems to be sold out: people pour in until the huge auditorium is filled with curious faces. The audience is just like that of any other large theatre in the Netherlands, but for the larger-than-usual number of apparently oriental faces.

At last, everyone is seated. Someone appears on stage and asks us not to applaud in the breaks so as not to dispel the trance of the singers and musicians. We prepare to witness the trance. The first group enters. They are small men, shabbily dressed: the dervishes from Northern Afghanistan. They seat themselves on the stage floor and start singing. What follows is a repetitive interplay of questions and answers which gradually brings them up to their knees, their heads and upper bodies swaying along with the chanted rhythm, leaning ever further forwards, into the centre of the circle. Some people in the audience start nodding their heads to the rhythm. Next to perform are the Sufis from Eastern Tadzhikistan who sing to the accompaniment of lutes. Images come to mind of medieval European troubadours. Both traditions take love as their subject matter, but the Sufis are lovers of God, we are told, who use music to achieve religious ecstasy and unity with the object of their love.

More and more people in the audience respond to the music by shaking their heads and shoulders. I see a woman in the first row banging her head forwards ecstatically. We are sent off for a break.

When we return, a group from Iranian Kurdistan takes to the stage. Several of them sing and play huge frame drums, or dafs, while the other three stay seated on the floor remaining motionless for a long time. As the repetitive percussive loops, singing and chanting develop, they all get to their feet, the three quiet men remove their headwear, letting their surprisingly long hair drop down over their shoulders, over their backs, and even over their behinds. They are performing a Zikr ritual of divine remembrance, which builds to the moment when the ‘I’ is surrendered to a collective religious experience. Soon the whole brotherhood is dancing and swaying, moving back and forth: old men’s bodies losing their age in a wild dance. Watching them, I am reminded of a description of Sufi music: ‘A unique style of singing that transports listeners into spiritual ecstasy, it has acquired a steady fan following much like the rock genre of the sixties.’

The most surprising aspect of this four-hour concert, though, was the reaction of the audience. As the number of audience members who openly and physically participated in the enchanting rhythm of the concert increased with every hour, visible splits developed in several areas – open arguments arising in some. People let their bodies move to the sound of music, some even left their seats and went to the sides of the auditorium to dance.

Others remained seated, moving their heads and upper bodies in the rhythm. An elderly lady near me took her little hat off and did an impressively organic dance with her hands.

As for myself, I felt the music become increasingly three-dimensional, encompassing me and transporting me into a sort of a pool of sound. I did not feel the need to throw my hands up in the air but listening made me, simply, happy.

However, a large number of audience members grew increasingly annoyed by their neighbours moving around and shaking their seats, flapping their hair in their sight line or even into their face. So they started complaining, asking their neighbours to be seated and not move around so much, so they could also enjoy the concert. Still others started taking pictures; there were cameras flashing everywhere. I was hoping the host would reappear on stage to ask people not to flash their cameras into the faces of the musicians in trance. A woman behind us tapped An Academy colleague Rose Fenton’s shoulder and asked her to move to the side so she could take a better picture, almost blinding her with the flash. As we walked out at the end of the concert, we found Hester van Hasselt’s friend, his eyes wet with tears. He was both deeply touched by the ritual and furiously angered by the reactions of the audience. ‘Why do we have to be so stiff?’ he kept saying.

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This concert came towards the end of the An Academy sessions but in the middle of our talks about the place of contemporary theatre. The audience reactions – the confusion about expectations – mirrored some of our studio discussions. Is this what one expects from theatre today? Theatre as we know it in the West has its roots in Ancient Greece, where it was a place of contemplation; myths would be retold from an individual perspective, making the stories relevant for that community at that time.

A story contains an experience. This experience is re-examined by new generations of communities. In the theatre, as we have perfected it, we sit at a comfortable distance from the action. The fourth wall is a clear demarcation line between those performing and those observing. Each of us in this theatre is alone. Together, we create a community of individuals watching and contemplating the action on their own, from a distance. We do not want to be disturbed and we certainly do not want to be involved.

Small wonder, then, that the Sufi concert caused such confusion at the Holland Festival.

This music comes from a tradition in which everyone involved in the ritual participates. But here it was placed on the stage of a venue, with the majority of people placed in the position of observer. But music recognises no fourth wall. Suddenly, all these observers found themselves challenged to take part. Core to Sufi ritual is the concept of surrendering the individual and participating in the communal. In order to participate in a ritual, one must abandon aloofness and step in. Surrendering to trance does not imply the loss of self. On the contrary: one gains the world by participating in a collective emotion that becomes something like a religious experience. This is what caused all the confusion in the Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ. The Holland Festival audience did not come to the theatre in order to participate in a religious experience. The person who warned us not to dispel the trance did not mention anything about us being affected by it. We were not prepared for a culture shock. We were not prepared to become involved.

As the audience was confronted with the situation, it was up to each individual how they dealt with it. Some embraced the foreign experience, while others protested against it.

Many, as loyal representatives of our materialistic culture, translated the experience into a trophy: a photograph, an object to take home and add to a collection of objects.

What kind of community is the audience of an international festival like this one? Which society does it contemplate? With which culture does it identify with and which cultures does it question? People seated around me in the audience at the Sufi night could have come from any continent. This audience was no community because it was given no cultural framework to identify itself as such, not even by the Festival. As the confusion grew, our expectations apparently impeded exchange.

When I asked a friend what she expected from theatre, she said that if no transformation occurred, the performance was not worth it. But where does this transformation take place?

On the stage? In the audience? In the expectations of the audience? In the community? In society?

Peter Sellars describes his Mozart festival in Austria as a political message to the political and business leadership of the world – about what they have failed to provide. Ong Keng Sen asks ‘What is the use of our art?’, when elaborating on his attempts to link art to real communities: to give it a social function, to make it ‘useful’. And how about Lemi Ponifasio who tells us that in the West Pacific there are no artists, but instead prophets and visionaries, who have a constant responsibility towards society? ‘If it doesn’t rain, they’ve got a problem.’ A heavy responsibility in times of global warming.

The Holland Festival 2005 opened with Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar in which Tierno repeatedly uses the phrase ‘my truth, your truth, and the truth’. ‘The truth’, as Peter Brook later explained to us, refers to the space between you and me. Basten Stokhuyzen talked about the repetitive loops played by the Sufis that roll like waves – and this is what takes both the singer and the listener to an area in between. Further, in a monologue that left most of us questionless, Peter Sellars talked about the point when a body becomes a ghost in theatre, when it is present and absent, when one is in between and at two different places at the

same time. He did not specify which body in particular he had in mind but somehow it was clear to us that he meant both the body of the performer and the body of any individual audience member – with or without the fourth wall.

The confrontation between the audience and the audience during the Sufi concert revealed many uncertainties of our individualist culture. However, I still go to the theatre and I still expect it to take me out of myself and into that hazy area in between.

Remember what it was like to be sung to sleep. If you are fortunate, the memory will be more recent than childhood. The repeated lines of words and music are like paths. These paths are circular and the rings they make are linked together like those of a chain. You walk along these paths and are led by them in circles which lead from one to the other, further and further away.

The field upon which you walk and upon which the chain is laid is the song.

(John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London 1997 )

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Marijke Hoogenboom / Who’s afraid of (art) education?

Some indecent proposals

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The following is the edited version of a public lecture held on the occasion of DasArts’ 11th anniversary, Amsterdam 17 June 2005 When I left DasArts in 2001 I was filled with doubts: doubts about art academies in general and doubts about our little school in particular. For a long time, I had felt stuck in my own ways of thinking, full of slogans and ideologies that did not want to leave me. I felt I would be repeating the same story forevermore, mumbling about participants being the theatre of the future whenever the issue of education came up. Notions that had once functioned as keywords had come to sound more like slippery clichés. But let us face facts: we have heard this sort of overused slogan too often. And anyway many of DasArts’ principles are being promoted by a growing number of initiatives.

One of the core precepts of DasArts was, and is, that with every new learning period, or ‘block’, the school would be questioned and reinvented. But having been involved in eleven study programmes I wondered if we had really kept our promise; what was really needed was not merely to expand our system yet again, but to forcibly eject ourselves from our own territory, forever.

Let me put it like this: I did not get into education because I was specifically interested in teaching and learning per se. I was excited by the uncertainty of the situation that Ritsaert ten Cate offered to me. And I was interested in creating innovative work in the performing arts. The challenge remains: how can you think these objectives together?

Returning to my departure from DasArts: I was under the strong impression that we were almost incapable of taking critical distance from our own practice. We had been on a highly intuitive journey, during which we had had the courage to trust in the paths we were travelling without necessarily needing, or being able, to fully articulate what we were doing or why we were doing it.

Now that I am searching for a more fundamental criticality towards the educational platforms I identify with, I keep asking myself these four crucial questions: Why is it that we want to ‘do right’ in education?

How do we know what knowledge is useful?

What will succeed the concept of interdisciplinarity?

What are the specific characteristics of the field of the performing arts?

The school I would like to discuss, then, is not the school I created with Ritsaert ten Cate, neither is it the Amsterdam School of the Arts with which I am affiliated at the moment, it is a school as a speculation, a series of thoughts that might – or might not – lead to new potentials.

1 / When we celebrate the anniversary of a school, what is it exactly that we are celebrating? Is it the great effect this school has on the individuals and groups involved (as evidenced by the works presented), or are we specifically celebrating the practice of the school itself: the educational strategies that make DasArts a school?

On a more general level one could argue that with DasArts’ anniversary, we are celebrating our faith in a very particular type of enterprise – the enterprise of education, the enterprise of obtaining some knowledge or skill by a learning process.

As educators we are – I am afraid – full of good intentions. We believe in progress: we make a conscious effort to bridge the gap between the informed and the uninformed; we want to foster individual development and enable people to upgrade their abilities; we are interested in good people and want to make them capable citizens or professionals. We are also, and I say this without cynicism, constantly thinking of how to change and improve the learning environments we have created, in order to change and improve the effect they have on our students.

‘Wanting to do right in education’ means accepting the system of education and wanting to make it work. But if this approach constantly justifies itself, then one may wonder how education can be critically examined.

During Mode05, a recent expert meeting on choreography and education in Potsdam, I was introduced to a provocative book written by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 1) Primarily it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher, who in 1818 devised an unconventional teaching method that caused uproar within the European academic community. Jacotot, who knew no Flemish, found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French. Knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, neither was explication necessary to learn.

The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent, and to devise a philosophy and method for what he called ‘intellectual emancipation’.

Rancière, commenting on his own book, emphasises the contemporary implications of the story: ‘I would like (...) to show that what we are dealing with here is not merely an amusing journey into the history of pedagogy, but a philosophical reflection, entirely up-to-date, on the manner in which pedagogical reason and social reason hold together.’ 2) Rancière’s core proposition is that the school does not wish to know. It fails in its intension of reducing social and intellectual inequality because it is ignorant of the functioning of its own logic, which propagates inequality by its very efforts to mitigate it.

The enterprise of education always consists – however and wherever it is carried out – of a person or group doing the educating, and a person or group being educated. Pedagogical reason presents itself as the act that lifts the veil and reveals things. The usual mechanism is ‘explanation’, which is considered a social method for laying out the elements of a particular area of knowledge that must be transmitted in a manner appropriate for the limited capacity of the minds under instruction. But this apparently simple concept is, on closer inspection, subject to infinite regression: explanation is generally accompanied by an explanation of the explanation, for example by educators who explain the explanation that permits the student to comprehend. And so on.

In Rancière’s view, school is a place where control and knowledge should come together in harmony and optimise the social function of the institution. His critique does not proscribe the construction of schools, programmes or pedagogies, but he attacks over-inflated expectations of a school charged with overcoming the actual inequality.

So what are the consequences of the ignorant schoolmaster’s work? He decides not to explain, and sets out to activate the latent capability of the person seeking knowledge. He obliges another intelligence to exercise itself – independent of any knowledge the educator possesses.

The method Jacotot proposes is the oldest in the world, and it is verified daily in all circumstances where an individual must learn something when no explanation is available.

But here lies the paradox: ‘No one wants to recognise it, no one wants to cope with the intellectual revolution it signifies. The social circle, the order of things, prevents it from being recognised for what it is: the true method by which everyone learns and by which everyone can take the measure of his capacity. One must dare to recognise it and pursue an open verification of its power – otherwise the method of powerlessness, the Old Master, will last as long as the order of things.’ 3) Seen in the light of Jacotot’s story, ‘wanting to do right in education’ is apparently a trap.

But what would be the alternative to ‘doing right’, of serving the traditional logic of education and confirming the circle of power? Deliberately doing wrong? I do not think so. But I do believe that if a school, as a producer within society, wants to propose or provide an opportunity for emancipation, it must reassess the functioning of the educational machine as a social machine. And it must reassess the relationship in which education takes place – the relationship between educator and student ‘Who, then, would want to begin?’ Jacotot asks. 4)

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One of the most radical critics of institutionalised education in modern economies is the Austrian historian Ivan Illich. Already in the early 1970s he called for ‘deschooling’: the deconstruction of centralised control, nationalised curricula, and the increasing bureaucratic accreditation of learning. Although his passionate advocacy of more convivial forms of education was never likely to make much headway – then or now – it is striking that long before one could speak of a common network culture, he suggested the use of advanced technology to support learning webs in which each participant both teaches and learns.

With this early vision on education as a web of ‘informal connectedness’, Illich introduces a notion that I happily add to my list of speculative queries: how can a school embrace diverse educational relationships, provide a variety of opportunities for involvement, and consider equality not as a goal to be achieved, but as a point of departure?

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2 / In addition to my doubts about the process of learning in educational systems, I am extremely uncertain as to how I should relate to the idea of knowledge itself. The situation we set up during my time at DasArts was contradictory. On the one hand, we claimed that our understanding of knowledge is exclusively linked to (the formation of) the individual.

And this makes sense within the context of the arts: ‘Everyone agrees that there are techniques, skills and even tricks that can be learnt. But the construction of one’s own creative method is probably one of the most intimate, personal and almost indescribable human occupations, since it is rooted in the deepest inner being of man.’ 5) On the other hand, we were still introducing huge amounts of information, study material and experience that we expected people to learn from. From time to time there was confusion, and I still wonder how the two domains relate to each other. Who knows?

I think we are aware of the function of knowledge to gain certainty (or, if you prefer, to reduce uncertainty). In respect to art education, though, I am interested in how the complexity of knowledge can be explored in a creative way, and how a school can keep investigating the function of knowledge in a ‘state of risking’.

An example: Hannah Hurtzig (mentor at DasArts in 1996) recently developed an exciting format for researching knowledge as an economical, political and cultural resource. For one night only, she turned Berlin’s HAU Theater into a showroom for the Black Market of Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge. At 40 small tables, 100 experts in different fields offered 30 minutes of their product to individual members of the audience. The audience could book an expert and acquire this knowledge in a private dialogue.

I was particularly struck by two aspects of my experiences at the Black Market. Firstly, the subversion of the hierarchy of different qualities of knowledge: the Black Market allowed engagement with knowledge from the most sophisticated and the most trivial perspectives, and presented the experts from science, craft, philosophy, art or just daily life as complementary to one another. Secondly, the event was based on the performative character of knowledge as an encounter, and during this encounter the ‘state of knowing’ constantly changes ownership. On this night, knowledge appeared as a living archive, as a collective, whispered story – growing and evolving as we participated.

So how can a school investigate the function of knowledge in a ‘state of risking’? What are the risky moments for a school? Tim Etchells, the UK artist and leader of Forced Entertainment, expands on this subject in his collection of writings on performance, In Certain Fragments: ‘Risk and investment in the strangest places, slipping and hiding. Risk is the thing we are striving for in performance but not a thing we can look for. We look for something else and hope (or pray to the gods we don’t believe in) that risk shows up. We know it when we see it, I’m sure of that. Risk surprises us, always fleeting – we’re slightly out of control.’ 6) Slipping, hiding, fleeting, praying – these are not words usually applied in education. But I would like to propose at least two ‘states of risking’ that could be relevant for both the individual student and the educational organisation: the notion of research and the notion of failure.

For the Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan, an open approach to the concept of ‘useful and non-useful knowledge’ (as performed by Hannah Hurtzig) is a prerequisite for artistic research even to take place. He claims: ‘The idea that art should be a research takes profile when the art itself is not stably inserted in a knowledge system, and when the knowledge itself is not conceived as a closed and unitary system anymore. The art as research does not start from the given values.’ 7) I feel that the opportunity – or even the need – for research processes has been fairly well integrated into educational settings. It might be that research has become a cheap and unfinished mode of production that offers few insights into its methodology, objectives or degree of self-reflection that would make it different from any other product in the arts.

It is far more difficult to incorporate the right to fail into the larger scheme of a school. How, for example, does failure become a form of knowledge? Is there any place for the term ‘failure’ in the context of learning? And I do not mean a situation where we are merely not doing very well, but the truly traumatic experience of incapability: when plans collapse and great hopes die.

Failure is mostly viewed as an exit. But let us suppose, in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze, and in this school as a speculation, that failure is a beginning. Let us suppose from the very outset that it is of a process intrinsic to its potentialities: failure and non-failure need each other at any moment of their progress and development. Just as, while being developed, knowledge needs non-knowledge, art needs non-art, or philosophy needs non-philosophy.

I have avoided speaking about the apparent opposite of knowledge – not-knowing, or ignorance – as a motor for producing sense. In an age of information overkill (whether cognitive or sensory), it might seem something of an affectation to pretend not to know, or even to use ‘not-knowing’ as a playful strategy. In a workshop that my research group recently organised with the Springdance festival and the postgraduate studies programme Dance Unlimited, the Belgian dance writer Jeroen Peeters critically examined our proposal to treat performance As if We Don’t Know What it Is (title). He asked: ‘How do we relate to things we don’t know? How do we acknowledge not-knowing? How do we remain silent in front of things we don’t know? How do we represent not-knowing? How do we construct not-knowing? How do we provoke not-knowing? How do we claim not-knowing? How do we disclaim not-knowing? How do we make not-knowing productive?’ 8) In fact, Peeters was expressing his doubt that the blind spot of our action, perception and communication can ever be distinguished from our mental constructions and projections.

The ‘not-knowing’ is in his view a discursive site that is always affected by knowledge – especially bodily knowledge – without us even being aware of it.

The French choreographer Boris Charmatz (a guest artist in the workshop) responded to this with an interesting artistic method, his Guessing Strategies, whereby an imagined dance is created rather than an executed one, or a story rather than an action: ‘There is always a space behind oneself, a presence at the back that gnaws what manifests itself in the body, in the lights, in the sound, in the space. Tribes of phantoms organise the work, a constant game between the manifested and the non-manifested.’ 9) Can a school allow itself to guess about knowledge? I would hope so. Knowledge as desire, as performance, as ghosts, as research, as failure. Could Hannah Hurtzig’s Black Market be a school, a resource-based community of learning? Immediate, inclusive and performative?

Does it matter that it only lasts for one night?

3 / Although I am much inspired by non-institutional learning environments, for the last two years I have been working as Professor at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and leading a research group for Art Practice & Development. Part of my job is to look at art practice in an interdisciplinary context and to stimulate the exchange with crossovers in the professional arts world. I love my job, and I think it is very valuable to throw the doors of the initial training programmes wide open. But I must confess that it also bothers me that interdisciplinarity is still introduced as a novel concept, or at least as an innovative practice that we

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should strive for. I am convinced that this mission has already been accomplished and that the term is no longer useful when considering the artistic developments of our time.

We have reached a point where the very existence of interdisciplinary work is no longer an issue, and it can finally be taken for granted that an approach across unusual divides belongs to the reality of contemporary art practice. That interdisciplinarity is still spoken of as a practice separate, or excluded from, other practices in the arts, might then be a misunderstanding, or at best a political strategy in a time when interdisciplinarity is insufficiently acknowledged in institutional settings.

In her paper Academy as Potentiality, Irit Rogoff dispels some of the illusions that most of us held on to throughout the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Interdisciplinarity is really nothing more than a play with boundaries. (...) No, what we have to do is to juxtapose to this logic another logic and ask how would it look if we operated differently?’ 10) Rogoff reminds us that the story of interdisciplinarity is the story of thinking in terms of similarity and difference, one that encourages homogeneity; the defining of the one in the light of the other.

In that sense, the focus on, or the belief in, interdisciplinarity, has probably distracted us from acknowledging the artistic developments that have taken place within certain genres and that have destabilised traditional disciplines and changed the perception of current theatre, dance, music, film, architecture or visual arts. It is unhelpful to continue claiming a separate place for the use of ‘inter-’, ‘mixed-’, ‘multi-’ or ‘trans-’ strategies as long as it confuses the challenge to be more specific about distinctive attachments and desires of cultural formats: ‘The law of touching in this context is not fusion, but separation. It is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Heterogeneity that stimulates further heterogenesis.’ 11) In relation to dance, the Swedish dramaturg Mårten Spångberg proposed replacing the term ‘multimedia’, with ‘media-multi’: ‘It’s not a question of mixing and collaborating across media and disciplines,’ he said, ‘but specifically doing choreography by way of other media and disciplines.’ 12) In accordance with this view, then, innovative dance makers are not intent on leaving the field of dance, but seek to penetrate the edge of the discipline as part of a constant negotiation, creating a situation whereby – from the point of view of the moving body – a variety of dissimilar domains (such as media, speech, music and social or cultural contexts) are set into motion.

In a recent project with opera director Pierre Audi on the adaptation of opera for film and other media, I observed that young artists in interdisciplinary collaborations often tend to synchronize their behaviour, and only slowly discover the method of co-existence whereby there is not a unified single entity, but abandonment and exposure to one another.

Probably it would be only a slight shift, but I believe that if we were to stop calling for the recognition of interdisciplinarity as a new zone, a hybrid practice would have to be taken for what it is: not as a play with boundaries, but as a desire to exhaustively explore a discipline – a real struggle for meaning within a particular field of the arts. For a school however, this operation is almost an ethical issue, because if we do not want to limit the aesthetic frame, we find ourselves operating within an infinite network of structures. And then what?

How do we ensure that we do not provoke indifference and lose ourselves in the unrestricted production of cultural events? How do we make sure that we care, and insist on the necessity of a point of view?

4 / A final consideration: I have set myself the task of addressing the question of whether there is anything specific about the performing arts that could apply to educational principles. Or in slightly more simple terms: does it matter that a school is concerned particularly with theatre?

To illuminate this facet of the subject I collected some beautiful quotes – from Jan Ritsema, Tim Etchells, Hans-Thies Lehmann, even Paolo Virno – that are all passionate about the uniqueness of theatre as one of the last places in our cultural landscape where we gather life and where we are invited to be here and to be now: to feel exactly what it is to be in this place and in this time. These are thoughts about the political nature of theatre

as an organised public space that cannot exist without an audience and cannot exist – because of its ephemeral nature – without topicality. All together more than desirable ambitions that I happily take into account when I ‘make school’.

But there is another example that I am almost too embarrassed to mention.

In June of 2005, with peers from my temporary initiative An Academy at the Holland Festival, I was about to watch Peter Sellars’ Bach Cantatas, when, all of a sudden, Sellars got on stage and announced that the central character, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, was in a great deal of pain and would only be able to perform the second part of the programme, Cantata No.82 ‘Ich habe genug’. Sellars took some time to inform the full house of how his own encounter with Bach’s Cantatas and the rehearsal period had been affected by great crisis and how the music answered their need for comfort and hope, up to a point where death appeared, not as an enemy, not as panic, not as a farewell, but as the beginning of something. Before Sellars quit the stage, he left us with questions of uncomplicated clarity: ‘What is a good death? What do we see when these eyes close and the inner light opens?’ 13) For god’s sake! I thought. How dare he use his seductive storytelling to trigger the emotional reactions of the audience? How dare he ask such questions on some ordinary Thursday night? How dare he expose me to suffering and loss while I sit here next to someone I have never met? Is it just another trick or am I really involved?

But from the moment the music started and the marvellous singer’s voice issued forth, there was no doubt that Sellars’ Bach Cantatas did indeed dare. And without delay I was cut into my deepest fears and emotions.

I cannot help it, it keeps happening to me, and although very rare, moments such as these are the most satisfying that I know of in theatre: it is the sense of community that turns ‘me’ into ‘we’, and reminds me that my being is full of a wanting, a wanting to ‘be with’ and to be part of the shared sensations that make us human.

The question remains: can a school recreate any of this?

1) Jaques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford 1991. 2) Jaques Rancière, opening address at the 5th International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, August 20, 2004. 3) Ibid. 4) Jaques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford 1991, p. 17. 5) Marianne Van Kerkhoven On the (im)possibility of art education, her first, unpublished, text on DasArts, Brussels 1998. 6) Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments, London 1999. 7) Giulio Carlo Argan, after: Matko Mestrovic, Computer and Visual Research – Ways of thinking and scope of acting, lecture at Stuttgart 1960, ‘Computers in theory and art’, Schloss Solitude, 2004. 8) Jeroen Peeters, As if we don’t know what it is, proposals for performance in shifting contexts; reading the proposal, phrasing words, strands and questions, written for the mini-conference organised by Dance Unlimited, Springdance and the research group for Art Practice and Development, April 8-10, 2005. 9) Ibid. 10) Irit Rogoff, Academy as Potentiality, address given at Mode05 on March 19, 2005, www.mode05.org. 11) Bojana Cvejic, Collectivity? You mean Collaboration, Brussels 2005. 12) Mårten Spångberg, quoted from my notes on Mode05, Potsdam March 13-19, 2005. 13) Quote from the introduction to Bach Cantatas on June 16, 2005, Holland Festival.

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Nicola Nord / SPREAD! An Academy

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Be there. Breathe in.

Breathe out in silence.

Break it.

Open oh open the door not, but never close it.

Lift your foot as if about to walk, but stay.

Stay moving.

Say a word for the first time, but know it well.

Forget it. Remember.

Remember a gesture very dear to you.

Execute the gesture slowly.

Repeat, but make a comment about it.

Be there. Breathe in.

Breathe out in great laughter.

Open oh open your mouth not, but release.

Close your eyes.

Turn around.

Turn around.

Look.

Think of an image.

Raise your hand as if about to touch.

And touch.

Touch.

This is an epic.

Now you may dance.

What is An Academy?

An Academy as a temporary learning zone, a little parasite in the big universe of an international festival, something to take away and turn into something else? Give it wheels and it will turn into a mobile academy, a mobile think-tank for makers and art-workers. What can it teach? Practice and theory? Art and action? The question is: is there really a desire to spread the word? Let us look more closely at the methods of making in order to make them transparent. In these times of multiplicity, the spider’s web no longer suffices as a metaphor for artistic networks; the gossamer threads disappear into a diversity that representation cannot capture. So, how does one identify the way in which artistic networks work, travel, appear and disappear? If they continue to expand and multiply themselves at the present rate, is it not natural that the ‘big houses’, the established art institutions, withdraw and create even higher walls around their temples? During the present explosive growth in the diversity of performance practice, connections, collaborations and artistic interaction, are theatres closing themselves off? In Germany and Switzerland some of the great theatre empires, including the Stadt- and Staatstheater, have opened their doors. When a biologist (Xavier Le Roy) can become a dancer who does not dance; when a former student of ‘applied theatre science’ (Gießen) tells stories by putting ‘experts of everyday life’ on stage (Rimini Protokoll and others); when a master in economics becomes the director of a municipal theatre, only to curate political conferences (Matthias von Hartz): it looks like postdramatic forms of theatre finally taken their place on the main stage. But is this a success story, or a symptom of something else?

Even when ‘outsiders’ enter established venues, even when the audiences of good old dramatic theatre become interested in reality shows on stage or audio tours in the city, that does not mean that new theatre has taken over. As Brecht said: ‘Das Theater theatert alles ein’, or ‘the theatre turns everything into theatre’, meaning: the apparatus swallows – and digests.

The makers – workers – are more concerned with producing than presenting products. René Pollesch, although used to large-scale productions, also insists on an independent stage associated with a bigger institution, such as Prater at Volksbühne in Berlin. His first pieces were produced at the famous ‘Daimlerstraße’, or OFF-TAT (Theatre am Turm) in Frankfurt am Main. But the tradition of off-stages, or Probebühnen (tryout stages), is declining. Avant-garde theatres like TAT, or the Mickery in Amsterdam, have disappeared. Even if other places survive, their future is truly precarious in these times of economic crisis – as precarious as the future of the artists who work there. Is that why producers and artists tend to have rather loose relationships nowadays?

While the fringe is fighting harder and harder to create a sustainable environment, it is disappointing if major festivals resist acknowledging innovative artistic developments. But why would they acknowledge us, as long as we continue creating our own comfort zones for ‘The Young’ and ‘The Experimental’? Why don’t we turn it around for once: let the little fish eat the big fish; put small festivals in the venues of the big festivals (and vice versa)?

In What are you looking at? (1998), the American ensemble Gob Squad invites the audience to look into the performance space through a perspex two-way mirror. But sometimes the light changes so that the audience can no longer see inside and only see themselves reflected. If a festival could function like this, then Peter Sellars’ wish, as expressed at the LA Festival in 1991, might come true: ‘We hope that this festival marks an occasion (...) to look outward as well as inward, and for the world to look back. We hope that after looking, there will be talk, and after talk, listening and then action.’

As for our own experiences: what was the Holland Festival? Inside, the impressive Muziekgebouw building is a beautiful idea given form in glass and wood – a true temple of art – where people come to meditate for a while to beautiful music from Iran, cry and bite their nails in anguish while listening to Peter Sellars’ breathtaking Bach Cantatas, and open their ears not to miss a single word of Johan Simons’ Elementarteilchen.

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Such moments can open the roof of any temple, revealing the starry sky, turning the Muziekgebouw into a giant ship. And there it is: the mobile theatre, it is floating! Let us make appropriation an art: investigate a festival, do performance research on theatre or make roving art academies.

It is not about establishment versus avant-garde, mainstream versus fringe, high versus low; it is about what we are looking for. Perhaps newer forms of theatre are yet to come.

Perhaps everything is still to come. Perhaps this is the only possible attitude to have in order to make something possible: simply, to look forward to seeing theatre!

(And after looking there will be talk, and after talk, listening and then action...)

Credits editors / Marijke Hoogenboom and Hester van Hasselt notebook / Hester van Hasselt photography / Tatyana van Walsum, Hester van Hasselt, Andrea Bozic translation and text editing / Steve Green graphic design / Esther Noyons printing / SSP An Academy 2005 took place from June 12–26.

It was generously supported by the research group for Art Practice and Development (Amsterdam School of the Arts), Theater Gasthuis and the Holland Festival. The initiative was a follow-up to the Young Makers Tour, conceived by Nicole Beutler/LISA and Maaike van Geijn for the Holland Festival 2004.

Under the title An Academy, the research group for Art Practice and Development and Theater Gasthuis co-produce a series of experimental, non-institutional learning situations, that keep changing location, time and context.

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© 2006 An Academy and the authors published by / An Academy c/o Art Practice and Development Amsterdam School of the Arts P.O. Box 15079 NL – 1001 MB Amsterdam T +31(0)20 527 78 04 www.anacademy.org

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