On Air - Issue 1

Issue 1 September 2010

Steve Paxton Theatre School 2009

Terry Barrett Academy of Fine Arts in Education 2009 – 10

Voices and views from the Artist in Residence programme at the Amsterdam School of the Arts

Paul Koek Theatre School 2010 – 11

Anthony Heidweiller Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2010 – 11

Germaine Acogny / L’Ecole des Sables Theatre School 2009 – 10

Jeroen Kooijmans Academy of Architecture 2009 – 10

Bart Schneemann Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2007 – 08, 2010

John Clayton Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2005-06, 2009-10

Deborah Hay Theatre School 2010

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Yes, we can’t Marijke Hoogenboom

Deborah Hay/Steve Paxton

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Whooosh! A UFO lifting off

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Hester van Hasselt in conversation with Gabriël Smeets

Writing the broken chord

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Deborah Hay

On a journey, backwards

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Konstantina Georgelou

Terry Barrett

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What do I see? What is it about?

How do I know?

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Pushing art to the foreground

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Jaap Vinken in conversation with Robert Smit

Short impressions of ongoing AIRs

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ON AIR Issue 1, September 2010

Printing Rotor offsetdruk

ON AIR is devoted to the Artist in Residence programme at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. This halfyearly publication highlights some of the wide-ranging collaborations between guest artists and institutes, explores the programme’s benefits for educational practices and examines the school’s role as host.

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Editors Marijke Hoogenboom Jacinta Blauw Hester van Hasselt

Photography Thomas Lenden

Publisher Art Practice and Development research group at the Amsterdam School of the Arts T: +31 (0)20-5277707 E: air@ahk.nl www.air.ahk.nl

Graphic Design Thonik

© 2010 Art Practice and Development research group

Translation and English editing Steve Green

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AIR programme director Marijke Hoogenboom reflects on the potential of arts education.

Yes, we can’t 1

In 2009, the Dijkgraaf Committee was set up by the national Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (HBO-raad) to advise on higher arts education policy in the Netherlands. Its report ‘Onderscheiden, verbinden, vernieuwen’ (Differentiate, connect and innovate) was published just after the general elections in June 2010. It opens with the surprisingly encouraging statement, ‘Arts education holds an important key to the future of the Netherlands’2 and points out that our sector’s impact and broad acceptance gives the arts a central role in society. This is a stri­king position to take in a climate hot with disputes on the value and effectiveness of art and culture.

The Committee’s great appreciation of artists, and arts education is reassuring, such as when it recognises the sector’s crucial responsibility in the socio-economic domain. However, some of the conclusions drawn in the report spark questions. It paints a picture of the ideal artist as a modern, flexible and hybrid figure, a cultural entrepreneur equally at home on any of a ‘thousand stages’ (inside and outside the arts) and using creative skills to satisfy the increasing demand for their products and services, against a background of global growth in interest in the economic significance of the arts and culture.3 I wonder whether art education would recognise itself in this analytical reflection on the future. As I see it, those of us fortunate enough to be engaged in arts education are fully aware that we are training young people for activities and professions that are undergoing upheaval worldwide. The higher arts education sector is faced with the choice of responding to the logic of the creative industry (and integrating this thinking into study programmes and policy plans) or proposing its own alternatives. Extending the report’s reasoning, if the valued qualities of the arts are so evident to all, surely the sector is by definition the best qualified and best placed to apply those qualities to the shaping of its own future. Let us prioritise the independence of the creative spirit (something society is sorely in need of) and invest our creative potential and critical ca­pacity in a socio-economic risk venture. I agree with Charles Esche, who said, ‘The academy is not only a place where art is taught, it is essentially a place where we imagine things otherwise.’4 Arts education places trust in the innovative potential of the arts and fully integrates artistic expertise in all aspects of the organisation. We have the privilege of working with artists continually and in a multiplicity of ways. Artists teach, lead study programmes and institutes, connect with professional practice, perform research and advise at every level. The Artist in Residence (AIR) programme is no superfluous luxury in this enterprise. Being part of an educational institution on a day-to-day level does not always provide the ideal fertile environment artists need for their growth and their full benefit to the institution. The AIR programme provides artists with a safe haven in the Academy, where they can further their own research and practice, tapping the institutions’s potential as an international arts laboratory.

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The institutes of the Amsterdam School of the Arts make the best possible use of their artists in residence. Through the AIRs, they engage with progressive practices, update their artistic agendas, set up new collaborations and reexamine their educational ambitions. Arts education focuses attention almost exclusively on individual students, and it is because of this that the AIR programme addresses themes beyond the scope of the curriculum that are certain to impact on the future of young professionals. Together with our remarkable guests, we respond to crucial issues such as the acknowledgment of artistic and cultural differences, identity formation in a mediated world, the fostering of more cohesive communities and connecting mutually isolated domains. And last but not least, we are set on dealing with the ‘tsunami of renewal, extension and change, where the word ‘art’, as defined in a modernist high art tradition, hardly exists anymore’.5 There have been 24 unique AIR programmes at the academy since its inception in 2004, and no fewer than seven artists in residence are active here this academic year (2010–2011). Unfortunately, the experiences and results of these programmes often only impact on those directly involved, leaving little impression on the wider community of the Amsterdam School of the Arts or on the professional field. With ON AIR, we want to bring about a change in that situation. Twice a year, we will use this journal to report back on the initiatives the various departments and institutes have set up within the AIR programme. We hope and believe that this will help the programme make an even more emphatic contribution to the ongoing debate at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and to solving the pressing issues facing arts education, now and in the future.

At the start of her residency, the American choreographer Deborah Hay spoke to a large group of students and teaching staff. She revealed herself to be an artist with a deep sense of the absolute necessity of continually pushing at the boundaries in her work. Tirelessly, she asks herself, ‘What if?’ What would happen if we went beyond what we know, if we developed ever newer ways of observing ourselves and of engaging with the spatial and social environment?

And as she moved through the hall, illustrating how she as an artist is devoted unconditionally to the here and now (“What if every cell in the body at once has the potential to perceive the uniqueness and originality of time?”6), her president’s election slogan came to mind. With a winning smile, she turned it on its head and passed it on to the youthful talents at the Theatre School and perhaps even to the broader Dutch art world: ‘Yes, we can’t!’

It is our responsibility to never be satisfied with what already exists, but to strive for the impossible, the un­ imaginable.

1.

Deborah Hay during her residency Breaking the Chord in February 2010.

2.

‘Onderscheiden, verbinden, vernieuwen: de toekomst van het kunstonderwijs’, p 4, The Dijkgraaf Committee’s recommendations for the arts education sector commissioned by the HBO Association, The Hague, May 2010.

3.

Richard Florida described this trend several years ago in The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, New York, 2003.

4.

Charles Esche, ‘How to grow possibility: The potential roles of academies’, edited transcript of Esche’s talk at the book launch of Air# Let’s suppose the Academy is a place for artists…, 11 January 2007.

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5.

Paul De Bruyne, Pascal Gielen (ed.), Being an Artist in PostFordist Times, p 147, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2009.

6.

Deborah Hay, ‘The Match’ in Writings and Notes, www. deborahhay.com.

Marijke Hoogenboom is professor at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and chair of the Art Practice and Development research group.

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Deborah Hay’s Breaking the Chord was made together with all the SNDO students, one Modern Dance student and students of Production and Stage Management and Technical Theatre Arts. Odin Heyligen produced the project and Jeanine Durning assisted Deborah Hay. Breaking the Chord was created in the Muiderkerk, Amsterdam; it was performed twice there and once at the Nicolaikerk, Utrecht, as part of the Springdance festival in April 2010.

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The School for New Dance Development (School voor Nieuwe Dansontwikkeling, SNDO) provides bachelor level training in choreography/dance making. The school believes it is crucial that its students experience the artistic practice of an inter­ nationally renowned choreographer – not just as performing dance artists but primarily as emerging equals participating in a fellow maker’s work. Under the leadership of Gabriël Smeets, this aim has already led to two remarkable AIR projects.

Deborah Hay BREAKING THE CHORD Hosted by the School for New Dance Development, 2010 About the PROJECT Deborah Hay has spent most of her professional career making dances for large groups of people. Her book Lamb at The Altar: The Story of a Dance is a description of making a dance for 41 individuals over the course of four months.

Since 2004, however, she has focused primarily on making dances for highly experienced dancer-choreographers.

The SNDO’s invitation to create a mass choreography gave her the opportunity to return to the large group format with the added knowledge and experience gained over the previous five years working with more subtle choreographic challenges. The result is astonishing: ‘Hay creates an openness on the stage that transfers to the audience through her dancers. Breaking the Chord is an invitation to be swept along to the rhythm of the dancers’ voices and bodies.’

(Springdance festival press release) ABout the artist Deborah Hay is a dancer and choreographer whose work has played a significant role in shaping international dance and performance since the 1960s. She was a member of the Judson Dance Theatre, one of the most radical and explosive 20th-century art movements. In the 1970s, Hay left New York to live in a community in Northern Vermont and distance herself from the performing arena and entered a lengthy period of reflection about how dance is transmitted and presented. In the late 1990s, she focused almost exclusively on enigmatic solo dances, performing them around the world and passing them on to noted performers in the US, Europe and Australia. She is the author of Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet, Lamb at the Altar, and My Body, The Buddhist. In 2009, the Theatre Academy in Helsinki awarded her an honorary Doctor of Dance degree.

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Steve Paxton AVE NUE Hosted by the School for New Dance Development and the Amsterdam Master of Choreography, 2009 About the PROJECT In 1985, the American dance innovator Steve Paxton created Ave Nue in Brussels. Twenty-four years later he worked for three weeks with a diverse group of students on a revision of the piece in a baggage depot in Amsterdam’s old harbour district. Rather than taking movement as its departure point, Ave Nue focuses on architecture and the impact of extreme shifts in perspective on the observer’s perception.

Ave Nue places the audience on two facing platforms that are slowly – all but imperceptibly – pulled away from each other, gradually increasing the size of the dance stage.

Discussing the group process that led to this extraordinary performance, Paxton said, ‘There was no hierarchy of a teacher and his students; there was not even a real teaching situation, but there was a lot of teaching and learning going on. On both sides.’

ABout the artist Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer.

He danced in works by Merce Cunningham, José Limón, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. Paxton was one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s. Like his collaborators, he attempted to break down the traditional barriers between dancers and non-dancers.

He developed the Contact Improvisation technique, in which points of physical contact provide the starting point for exploration through movement improvisation. Paxton all but ceased performing in the 1970s in order to devote himself primarily to training workshops and writing. He nevertheless still performs improvised solos and collaborates with choreographers, composers and artists such as Robert Ashley, Trisha Brown, Boris Charmatz, Lisa Nelson and Vera Mantero. In 2008, Paxton published the DVD-ROM Material for the Spine, which captures his unique dance knowledge.

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Hester van Hasselt met up with Gabriël Smeets, the artistic director of the School for New Dance Development, to discuss the recent AIR projects with Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay. This is an edited account of their conversation.

Whooosh!

A UFO lifting off – Hester van Hasselt Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay are the kind of people I fall for right away. The life they lead isn’t just about dance, it is dance.

Nothing else. It’s something that can touch me so deeply; it’s not often that you encounter this level of body knowledge.

Living history I represent a school that still cherishes the word ‘new’ in its name. But we’ve nonetheless built up quite a tradition ourselves. Our school is rooted in the conceptual dance of 1960s and 1970s New York. I think it’s important to examine tradition. Just who was there at the origin of this school and where are they now? Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay are two icons from the first phase of conceptual dance. But, and I believe this is equally important, they also make contemporary work that places them at the very centre of the current dance scene. Without wanting students to adapt their style, I believe it’s good for them to have very clear reference points and to come into physical contact with dance history.

Filling the gaps I’m always looking for artists who are prepared to open up their artistic practice: artists who, without having to pretend to be teachers, can share their personal artistic journey with the students. The Artist in Residence programme is the perfect opportunity

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to do just this. It allows for a longer period of work beyond the framework of the daily timetable and preferably beyond the walls of the school. It can go far deeper than we can make possible within the standard programme – when any comparable encounter is usually limited to a period no longer than a week and turns into what can only be described as a ‘workshop’.

When it comes to a residency, what would usually please me most would be if the artist would say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m busy doing research and the students are welcome to join in.’ That’s what I’d imagined. But both Paxton and Hay immediately proposed a specific format.

Paxton announced in the very first preparatory discussion that he wanted to redo an existing choreography. It was Ave Nue, a piece that was still itching at him. He originally made it in 1985 in Brussels in the long hallway of a derelict barracks. It meant that we had to go in search of a similarly extremely elongated space in Amsterdam.

A return to mass choreography Deborah first had to decide whether she wanted to participate at all. It was only when I made a very concrete proposal that she became truly enthusiastic. The idea was to make a piece with and for all 40 students at the SNDO. After having worked intensively on solos for the previous seven years, this

was a perfect opportunity for her to return to ‘mass choreography’ – something to which she had dedicated a large portion of her life.

After Deborah committed to the project, I endeavoured to make a connection with Springdance festival in Utrecht, because I believe it’s important to place these studies in a broader perspective as quickly as possible.

We soon found suitable locations, two churches: Muiderkerk in Amsterdam and Nikolaikerk in Utrecht.

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Physical experience Deborah and Steve’s strength is in the physicality more than the philosophy.

Everything that they propose, they learned through experience. Recently I was sitting one morning with a student who had initially been hugely resistant to Deborah’s work. We prepare for a residency such as this with a week of lectures and technical lessons and this boy thought everything he heard and saw was so terribly outdated. He actually would have liked nothing more than to have asked permission not to participate. But during the residency, Deborah challenged him so much to fight through it that the doors suddenly burst open wide. He now really uses what he gained from the experience.

And that’s wonderful of course.

Getting together It has a lot to do with Deborah’s extremely intensive approach to work-

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ing. She has everyone constantly on the dance floor, with ongoing simul­ taneous research into movement and into execution. Deborah calls this ‘Practice’. Deborah wrote the libretto in advance, a score which has each dancer doing something different. And from the very first day, she had the students doing the piece four times a day. The motif was set from the start, but just what was to happen on stage changed continually. These were 37 people doing 37 different things, and if things ever came together it was never on purpose.

We brought the whole school together for Deborah Hay. I’m going to do that every year from now on. It was like Whooosh! A UFO lifting off. In the first place it has hugely enriched the students’ physicality – and by that I mean their thinking, too. And secondly, they came into contact with very real and practical tools and working methods for making art.

Working together What is absolutely phenomenal to me is that they have had a personal experience of what it takes to make art. Now they know that art isn’t something you just knock together in an afternoon with a bunch of people. Even if you want a work that looks like it was made in einem Guss, you’re going to have to think long and hard about the conditions you want to create for it. It was an especially good experience for the first-years, because a state of attentive, concentrated preparedness requires being on time every day and being truly present.

The collective nature of this residency was also hugely important from the point of view of didactics. It is of course inherent to many art departments that people prioritise their own development but we still preach that you are also here for the dance, the dance itself, as a form, as an art that needs development. You might make a contribution through focusing exclusively on your own work, but you can also take a step back sometimes and make some room for someone else.

We/Me Felix Ritter, who is attached to the school as a dramaturge, referred to Peter Brook when talking about the project. Brook said something to the effect of how in the 1970s we worked together all the time, we made everything together, we did everything together and we were shouting out, ‘WE, WE, WE’, while in the 90s we were together, we did everything together and we were shouting out ‘ME, ME, ME’. Felix explained that he saw both ‘we’ and ‘me’ simultaneously in Deborah’s piece. This is only possible in a large room where you can create a big

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community while at the same time giving space to the individual. And there was something else Felix said that I thought was exciting: it’s very relevant for students, especially dancers, to reflect on whether there’s anything beyond yourself. Because if you move in empty space thinking there’s something else there, you’ll move differently than if you think there’s nothing there but yourself.

Space as space Working on these site-specific pieces with Steve and Deborah, I came to realize that the size of venues and stages has a crucial impact on how dance develops. In order to truly experience space as space, it’s essential to produce work at a really large site at least once over the course of your education.

That’s something that’s not really available at this school. The largest space for students is the dance theatre here in the building, which is no more than average in size, in professional terms – and it’s certainly not comparable with a major theatre or music theatre. And what’s more, about twenty years ago, under the influence of Guy Debord and his ‘anti-spectacle’ philosophy, young makers took on board the strange notion that larger venues are bastions of vile, commercial entertainment. We’re also faced with the current trend in conceptual dance of taking your solo work and your suitcase and travelling around the world. Students seem to think that being ‘young, promising and hip’ equates with ‘making solos’ – limiting yourself to something very small-scale and mobile.

New perspectives on ancient themes Ten students from the SNDO and three from the Amsterdam Master of Choreography took part in Steve Paxton’s residency in the 75 metrelong baggage depot in Loods 6. Paxton had read in Aristotle that humans have their backs turned towards death, their gaze turned towards a life that is behind them. He applied this notion very literally in Ave Nue. During the performance, the two platforms on which the audience sit are gradually pulled backwards and away from each other. While this is happening, they are watching a dance that is dying as it is being danced. Paxton applied the same notion of time to his work with the students. And what’s funny about it is that it’s not densely theoretical in the least: it’s all very much about how he experiences things on a personal level.

three weeks. Steve cleaned the entire kitchen with a sponge – every day.

And scrubbed the toilet. After a couple of days, the students were doing it too – they’d caught on that it was their studio, their space.

Paxton coming meant that a 70-yearold man landed at the school. That had an impact in itself. It also said something about time. At any school, especially a dance school, you do mostly see young people. Personally, I think it’s totally wrong that dance is exclusively associated with youth and litheness and virtuosity. We are only allowed to accept people up to the age of 27. I’d like to be free of that re­ striction. And we try to break through dance clichés in our selection policy by choosing people who don’t immediately satisfy standard expectations.

This relates closely to the matter of what sort of contribution we as a school want to make to the development of dance.

In this context I think it’s important to present the outcomes of the residencies even if what is presented is not yet a finished work and it puts the artist and the students in a vulnerable position. There was a time that the SNDO was very much turned in on itself; a time when outsiders viewed the school as a kind of sect. This is the last thing that I want. I want people to share what is being made and studied in our school. In that way, perhaps the work can play a role beyond these walls, out there in the dance world.

Hester van Hasselt is a performer, writer and theatre maker.

Getting involved It was fascinating to see the effect Steve’s presence had on the students.

A kitchen had been set up especially for this residency in the warehouse where they were working for the

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It was a historic statement for the SNDO: new dance is willing to look back. This version of Ave Nue is telling those who witness it that something new can be born from something old. New and old share the same space.

–Roger Sala Reyner

Through his whole presence and his ways of sorting out daily routines, Steve became living proof that it is possible to develop a method and at the same time listen to your own body in such a way that your practice empowers it rather than overwhelming it.

–Rodrigo Sobarzo

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This AIR project was an opportunity to connect with a diverse range of people, many of them are part of the Theatre School, but they normally don’t cross paths.

–Emma Wilson

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Writing the broken chord – Deborah Hay Gabriël Smeets invited me to dinner after teaching a workshop for the SNDO and MTD [Modern Theatre Dance] faculty in March 2009. I felt certain he was going to ask if I would choreograph a new work for a select group of students and I was prepared to say ‘no’ and that my interest was in working with well-seasoned dancer/ choreographers. Instead, Gabriël inquired if I would be interested in making a dance for the entire SNDO student body. His offer was surprising and elegant. He was offering a way to bridge my past with the present.

He was aware of my history.

I started making large group dances in New York during the sixties. In the seventies I made community-size dances, which did not have audiences.

And annually, from 1980 through 1996, I choreographed large group dances that brought trained and untrained dancers to Austin, Texas, to work with me for four to five months at a stretch.

These dances were performed in Austin primarily, and they became the source of my solo performance repertoire.

The original title for the SNDO-based work was Breaking the Cord. However Joost Giesken, the student lighting designer for the project, in an email early in our correspondence, referred to the new dance as Breaking the Chord.

I could not resist his adaptation.

Jeanine Durning was my assistant.

She performed in my dance O, O in New York in 2006 and later in If I Sing

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to You in 2008/9. It was a privilege to see how my language deepened her skills as a performer. She also had a visible rapport with many of the students who would be working in this project.

I arrived in Amsterdam with a written dance score for Breaking the Chord. Watching the dancers adapt to the movement directions, offered solely through language, resulted in many alterations, adaptations, and the emergence of entirely new material.

Unlike my chosen casts with four to seven dancers, working with a large group was more like visioning impressionism versus minimalism, or the environmental versus the architectural; more like summer than winter, or thanks­giving than lent; a symphony rather than a string quartet; a bouquet instead of a single rose. It was like returning home after years of exotic self-imposed inquiry elsewhere. And I cherished how the austerity of that elsewhere informed this homecoming.

The students began cautiously and Jeanine was essential in hastening their process because of her personal experience with what was being asked of them as young dancer/choreographers. Each day, resistance loosened until almost all signs of mistrust or fear transformed into cogency and beauty.

I fell in love with 34 dancers.

the life of me I could not recall what the movement directions were because I could not identify anything the dan­ cers were doing. Yet each individual performed with unhidden self-possess­ ion and inclusion, with unbroken interest. It was remarkable to see how far they had travelled in the brief three weeks we were together.

At the end of nearly every day in the Muiderkerk, we would stand in a circle singing Come Together by The Beatles, with the words printed on handheld song sheets. By the end of the song we were screaming and crying the lyrics and the circle would dis­integrate into a mob scene.

He roller-coaster he got early warning He got muddy water he one mojo filter He say, ‘One and one and one is three’ Got to be good-looking ‘cause he’s so hard to see Come together right now over me I believe we managed to bring something of the spirit of The Beatles then into Breaking the Chord now.

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This past week at home in Austin, Texas, I watched a DVD of Breaking the Chord, performed at the Muiderkerk in February 2010 and for

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Steve Paxton’s Ave Nue was created and performed at the baggage depot in Loods 6 in Amsterdam in February 2009.

Peter van der Hoop and Odin Heyligen produced the project. Ave Nue was performed by SNDO students in collaboration with students of Production and Stage Management and Technical Theatre Arts. Myriam Van Imschoot participated as researcher.

Participants from the Amsterdam Master of Choreography produced a collection of critical writings that will be published in 2011.

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The AIR programme regularly invites external experts to follow a project and reflect on it.

Dramaturge and dance writer Konstantina Georgelou observed the process of remaking Paxton’s Ave Nue.

On a journey, backwards – Konstantina Georgelou A journey signifies the process of some kind of change, a movement forward; eyes and bodies turned ahead, towards a final destination. But, let us also consider a sea voyage, when on departure most travellers gather at the stern watching the land recede; sometimes waving goodbye, measuring the distance, anticipating. How significant are the gestures of looking back and moving backwards during a journey? Both presuppose setting the eyes in the opposite direction to the movement and form something like a transition phrase, an in-between zone prior to a change.

Yet – and this is a separate subject in itself – it is a dis­ orienting experience of movement and time.

And this is how Steve Paxton’s three-week residency project was organised by the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) and the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh) in 2009, during which he reenvisioned the performance Ave Nue with the students: a journey backwards. This journey can be seen as having three components: the audience travelling backwards during the performance itself, Paxton re-envisioning Ave Nue (created in 1985) and the Amsterdam School of the Arts departments looking back to the era of postmodern dance.

By proposing the notion of a journey as a medium for reflection on this specific event, I seek to infuse actual movement into the act of thinking about movement. This has the potential to produce a shift in our understanding of temporality (which usually presumes a clear separation between the three positions of linear time: past, present and future) and foster an engagement with a dynamic experience of time that can cause disorientation, something that can expose the potential of any artistic event. By ‘de-creating’

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and reinventing an artistic event within time, it can be made to resist classification and closure; it remains open and can produce new ideas and imaginings.

This text is also moving backwards in time, from the performance of Ave Nue to the project’s inception.

Ave Nue (2009) Steve Paxton’s Ave Nue is being performed in the long hallway of the baggage depot at Loods 6, Amsterdam. The audience is divided and seated on two raised platforms facing one another. Their proximity allows for immediate interaction to take place among the spectators. But once the performance begins, these two platforms start to move backwards and away from one another until they reach their respective ends of the very long corridor. Their movement is extremely slow and remains imperceptible to the audience for a long time, evoking an initially unconscious experience.

Ave Nue is a journey concerned with perceptions of movement, light and space. Bodies, lights and colours appear and disappear continuously in various shades and proportions.

As Paxton explains, ‘The rostra start very close to each other, creating a kind of social relationship among the audience sitting on them. Moving away is like waving goodbye, something like standing on the back of a boat, watching the land and feeling oneself moving backwards.’

From the outset, there is the promise of a puzzling perceptual effect, as a large white hand gives birth to a smaller one between two frames of flimsy fabric that partially obscure the spectator’s view of the scene, contributing to a dreamlike state of mind as the wheels begin to roll and the journey begins. Moving slowly backwards allows the audience to experience a multiplicity of abstract events. The sizes of

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bodies and objects become obscure since perception of them is affected by their proximity to the platforms and the changing lighting. At times, dancers moving at different positions in the hallway begin to synchronize, rendering perspectives and proportions even more disorienting. At other times, they make very grounded movements or hide themselves behind the columns in the space. The spec­ tator’s geometrical perception of space becomes twisted and confused, making for a haunting experience.

The long hallway is framed by columns that enter into view as the wheeled platforms pass them. Covered with scrims and painted with a series of colour tints (from warm to cold shades) they generate a spectrum that is visible from either end of the hall. Contrary to traditional theatre stages, this long and relatively narrow space allows just a single field of focus. The performers have to exploit this restricted field in qualitative way, and rhythmic alterations and appearance/disappearance play important roles. But the lighting changes, mainly improvised, do not necessarily follow the dancers. The lights seem to have a quite independent route that directs the audience’s vision and attention away from the spaces where there is movement – it often illuminates the coloured columns or empty areas, for example.

‘The performance has slowly appeared, stayed, and dis­ appeared… and has now become a memory,’ says Paxton.

The overriding experiential quality of this journey is its paralyzing effect caused by the blurred forms and fading movements that are not easy to assimilate. Perceived or not, they remain incomplete.

Re-envisioning Ave Nue Paxton suggested revising Ave Nue, a group piece he created in Belgium in 1985. As he announced before the project started, ‘This will be a re-envisioning of Ave Nue rather than a reconstruction.’

After Ave Nue was performed in 1985 in an old military building in Belgium, only a video recording of the event and some articles remained – and the building itself was demolished some years later. The choreography for the original performance was based entirely on scores derived from football photos and everyday movements. It was concerned with the perception of light, space and movement. Everything developed from simple observations about vision, such as the interrelationship between size and distance (parallax vision), colour perspectives, the mono-focus effects created by a hallway, the articulation of shapes in perspective, the disappearance of movement in the distance and the power that light has to shift the focus of vision. He invoked the same choreographic thinking in 2009 – despite the inter­ vening fourteen years, a new group of dancers, a wider space with shorter corridors and more materials and lights.

At the outset, Paxton explained that the movement of the piece would be similar to the one in 1985 – movement that is perhaps best described as ‘reduced ballet’, movement that is extended, broad and relaxed. In this version, however, narrative and humour were to be more overtly present, mainly through the use of two hands rather than the single one used in 1985. ‘The hand will have a more interesting life in today’s version!’ Paxton explained. For instance, at one point rubbish is thrown over the mother hand and she dies.

A funeral follows. When the baby hand becomes aware of its mother’s death, it feels sad and lonely. This simple and clear story weaves together the abstract moments with dramatic and comic tension, narrative and humour and provides a counterweight to the perceptual paralysis.

Paxton is on a continual quest for simplicity: ‘I question things that are too basic to be questioned, not in order to get answers but to get different platforms of questions.’ By re-envisioning Ave Nue and re-asking basic questions, he engaged dynamically with ‘the past’, rather than cutting it off from the present and the future. He exploited the past, cautiously de-creating it, re-exploring it and opening it up to reveal its contemporary potential.

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The project Western ‘contemporary’ dance evolved from what we call ‘postmodern dance’, the era of dance that Paxton is identified with. This dance form is associated with aesthetic and political ideas that may well be very useful for our times.

But in what ways can the postmodern and the contemporary communicate within the context of dance creation today? Can a productive engagement take place – one that does not condemn the past or repeat it but instead redirects it such that new imaginations can emerge? The Amsterdam School of the Arts invited Paxton to become an Artist in Residence in 2009. In other words, it not only looked back to one of the most important figures that initiated postmodern dance in the 1970s, it also moved along with him.

During the rehearsals at Loods 6, Paxton inspired the participants to approach the work in a way that was simple, relaxed and mutually trusting – values heralded by the dawn of postmodern dance. Experimenting for many years with the everyday actions of walking, standing still and sitting, Paxton circulated his investigations around ‘the dance of physical and ordinary things’.1 And contact improvisation (a technique he developed together with other artists at Judson Church) is also based on ideas of touching, giving and receiving weight, balancing and trusting. In his presentation, he explained that his technique transformed fundamentally from the moment he started dancing with the image in his mind of his body being a ‘container of fluids’ or a mass, rather than a body aiming for alignment. ‘I was feeling like a big mass of water: very nice and plain thought to work on instead of complex coordination.2 The relationship between fluid and gravity became my mental state.’

The SNDO and AMCh are attempting to understand dance beyond the rigid determination of temporal and aesthetic categories, intertwining the postmodern with the contemporary. In this way, we can show that dance’s past, it’s history, need not be viewed as an inert black box of facts, and its future need not be threatened by questions of a simplistic and fundamental nature.

Opaque destinations At their beginning, none of the journeys has a clear destination: the audience cannot know in advance the geometry of the space (hence, its endpoint); the re-visioned choreography of Ave Nue cannot be predetermined; and it cannot be known how Paxton will have influenced the young participant artists. Thus, the experience of the journeys is enhanced with the potentiality for imagination and creativity.

What’s more, these events resist closure and re-engage with the past by de-creating it in dynamic encounters between harmonies and discords. For philosopher G. Agamben ‘decreation’ is, as De la Durantaye explains, an operation inherent to potentiality and to eventual creation, ‘making the complete of the dictated incomplete’ – that is to reopen the past and ask ‘What did not happen?’ or ‘What could have happened differently?’3 Similarly, philosopher and dramaturge Bojana Kunst uses the notion of potentiality to talk about the future of performance, elucidating the distinction between something actualized and something potential. She remarks that only when an act is not actualized is there potentiality. Under this light, she can imagine performance to be ‘a continuation and disclosure of lesser acts, acts which don’t end in their own finalization, a kind of active present that is intertwined with the unrealized thought of the real.’4 Likewise, the words you are reading do not complete the journeys they discuss. Let them instead be interrupted and re-activated in unexpected ways.

1.

Sally Banes, ‘Steve Paxton: Physical Things’ in Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, Wesleyan University Press, 1986, p. 57.

2.

Paxton presented the DVD-ROM Material for the Spine at the Theatre School in Amsterdam.

Published by Centre National de la Danse; edited and produced by Contredanse, Brussels, 2008.

3.

Leland de la Durantaye, ‘Agamben’s Potential’, in Diacritics 30.2, p. 22.

4.

Bojana Kunst, ‘On potentiality and future of performance’, lecture at (Precise) Woodstock of Thinking, Tanzquartier, Vienna, 2009.

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Konstantina Georgelou is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Utrecht. She has an MA in Arts Criticism, Arts Management and Cultural Analysis.

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Terry Barrett No Landscapes Academy of Fine Arts in Education, in collaboration with Basisburo Centre for Contemporary Art Education, 2009–2010 Discussing contemporary art is no simple matter. What knowledge can one transfer if there is so little one can be sure of? Where is one to start? The world of contemporary art is huge and multifaceted by its very nature. Are we to view art teachers as professionals with a monopoly on authoritative interpretations or can the student also make valuable contributions? And, last but not least, what is to be done about the often inadequate standard of study materials?

These were the art education-related issues that formed the backdrop to our decision to introduce Terry Barrett to the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts in Education (Academie voor Beeldende Vormgeving, BVO) and to initiate the No Landscapes project.

No Landscapes was realised in collaboration with Basisburo Centre for Contemporary Art Education, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, various primary, secondary and special schools and De Poort nursing home in Amsterdam. The project was coordinated

by Aaltje van Zweden van Buuren and Wytske de Man. Kunst werkt: Mensen reageren op hedendaagse kunst (Art works: people respond to contemporary art) is published

by Thieme Art, Amsterdam 2010, ISBN 978 90 78964 60 5 (NLD).

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About the PROJECT No Landscapes introduced students to Barrett’s unique teaching method that involves discussing contemporary art in such a way as to activate and open up the responses of people who do not encounter art and culture on a daily basis. Students took works by three renowned Dutch artists, Jeroen Kooijmans, Luna Maurer and Robert Wevers on their visits to schools and healthcare institutions in Amsterdam.

Here they invited children, elderly people and young people with developmental problems to respond to the art works.

A selection of the participants’ responses appears in the publication Kunst werkt, which was compiled by Barrett.

This book also includes images and reflections from other people along with interviews with the artists involved. It seeks to inspire students and teaching staff in art, primary and secondary education in their contemplation of contemporary art.

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About the Artist Terry Barrett is an American art critic and professor of art education at the University of North Texas, USA. He is also Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, with an honorary appointment to the Department of Art where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award for his educational practice. He has produced many books, anthology chapters and articles about photographic media, contemporary art, art criticism and aesthetics, and about the teaching of these subjects; this work has had a significant impact on the field. Barrett is the author of Why is That Art?, Criticizing Photographs, Criticizing Art and Talking about Student Art. His most recent book Making Art was published in 2010. Barrett is a visiting scholar, critic, juror, and educator at many universities and art museums in the US and internationally.

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Terry Barrett’s project as AIR saw academy students gathering fascinating ‘true stories’, by guiding non-artists to provide open and honest responses to three works of art. Rather than lecturing on the works, they invited viewers to look at them carefully and then explain what they saw, felt and learned.

What do I see?

What is it about?

How do I know?

Robert Wevers, Landschap voor Jagers (Before the Hunt), mixed media painting, www. weteringgalerie. nl, 2006

When I look at the painting I want to jump right into it.

Because I would like to have a snowball fight. Or just look peacefully at the forest.

– Jana, 9 Chaos. It looks like the painting is on fire.

– Milan, teenager with autism I’m standing outside. Everything I can see is covered with snow. It feels like I’m far from home. Alone.

– Jessie, 25-year-old BVO student

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I showed the painting to my father. He’s not all that interested in art. At first he thought the painting looked realistic and he enjoyed looking at it. First he thought there was a tiger and then he wasn’t sure anymore. He stopped liking it because what he saw didn’t equate with reality. I asked him if he had any idea of the location. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, ‘The Netherlands. Maybe around here, maybe here in the dunes.’ He could place it in his own world, and that he did like.

– Chantal, 19-year-old BVO student

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Luna Maurer, Skycatcher, an interactive, live internet project, www.poly-luna. com, www.conditionaldesign. org, 2009

A secondary school for pupils with autism spectrum disorder is participating in this project, and some of those participating also have ADHD. Barrett was a stranger to these mid-stream fourth-year students, but the lesson nonetheless flowed surprisingly easily. One student was absolutely fascinated by the images of clouds that feature in Luna Maurer’s Skycatcher. It turned out that he had studied every single Amsterdam weather chart for recent years! He could recall them in minute detail and this knowledge allowed him to engage with the discussion of the work, which in turn stimulated the other students to think about important days in their life and to recall what the weather was like at the time.

When Barrett asked the students whether the preceding 30 minutes had felt like a lesson, they responded with a resounding, ‘No’. They explained that they had talked for longer than Barrett (in a ‘real’ lesson the reverse would have been true) and that they had learned from one another rather than from a teacher. They felt as if the half hour had simply flown by because there was so much to see in just a single work of art and so much to say about it. On further reflection, the students agreed that it had indeed been a lesson, but a very different kind of lesson from what they were used to, and that this was because Barrett had asked the right questions.

– Melvin Crone, ‘No Landscapes’ in Kunstzone magazine, June 2009.

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Jeroen Kooijmans, The Carpet Told Me, a continuous film loop, www. jeroenkooijmans. com, 2007

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We showed The Carpet Told Me to a group of elderly women and men in an assisted living community. They watched the video intently for a while, and then I began the discussion by asking, ‘What do you see?’ The first two to respond named things they saw (a floating carpet, reeds, etc.) and sounds they heard (sheep in the background and a breeze).

A third person, a woman in a wheelchair, said, ‘I see me and my husband making love on the carpet when we were forty.’

The group was silent for a moment, and then broke into laughter. Someone playfully teased the woman: ‘Was that your first time?’ She smiled and nodded ‘No.’ I asked, ‘Was your carpet inside or outside?’ She said, ‘Inside,’ smiling.

We discussed many other aspects of the carpet, including its social implications of integration and segregation of

different cultures in the Netherlands in the past and in the present. The discussion lasted about 45 minutes. Toward the end of the discussion when I was trying to come to some closure by asking the group to summarise what they thought the carpet was expressing, the woman again retold her story about she and her husband making love on the carpet. It seemed to be all that she could see or wanted to see.

– Terry Barrett, ‘Altering the educational landscape’ in Kunst werkt: Mensen reageren op hedendaagse kunst (Art works: people respond to contemporary art), Thieme Art, Amsterdam 2010.

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Jaap Vinken in conversation with the director of the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Education Robert Smit about AIR Terry Barrett and the No Landscapes project.

Pushing art to the foreground – Jaap Vinken

Why did you choose to invite Barrett specifically?

Barrett is a defining figure in art education at an international level. He has great passion for his profession and for art. And that passion is something I wanted to see at work in my department. Beyond that, it was pretty much intuitive. But it turned out that choosing him slotted perfectly into the stage we’re at in the department, at the moment.

In 2007, I visited the United States on a study trip with Emiel Heijne, Melvin Crone [lecturer and director of studies at the academy] and Folkert Haanstra [professor of Art and Culture education at the Amsterdam School of the Arts].

We were all excited and full of expectations about the visit to Ohio State University, which is Barrett’s study group’s home base. We know a lot of the people there as authors of leading literature in the field. Folkert had often talked about how they did things at the university. You can imagine: thirteen top dogs from the same field all in one place, that’s bound to lead to interchange. And it’s made the university probably the most important international player in the field of art

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education. As part of the debate process that’s going on there, you can see the emergence of a new generation of thinkers on art education – of groundbreakers – before your very eyes. Generally speaking, visual culture is very polarised, but at Ohio State there’s the sense of a whole landscape of opinions that coexist without conflict and developing in open debate – unlike in the Netherlands.

So as well as bringing passion into your department, were you also keen to import that debate?

Absolutely, but it wasn’t the primary motive. Terry Barrett used to be a visual artist, a painter, but he’d come to the conclusion that he wasn’t a creative artist but was actually more interested in communicating about it.

And he took it very seriously; it was an enormously courageous choice and worthy of respect as an act in itself.

In time, this communication about art led him to a new form of art education.

It’s nothing like the idea of hardcore art education born out of a societal imperative, the prevailing paradigm in both America and the Netherlands.

And neither is it rooted in educational science. Both are sources of occasional

problems in the department because the art itself gets placed in the background.

How would you describe this notion of art education? Is it a methodology?

Barrett sees the role of the educator primarily as one of facilitating conversation. He takes an existing, tangible work of art as the departure point for a conversation. The social or educational value takes something of a back seat – although these are always present in his work. Barrett poses three simple questions: what do you see, what does it mean (to you), and how do you know? He does this to ensure that the art work ‘moves back and forth’ among a group of students or participants, as it were. It’s a collective examination of how the work affects each person’s thought processes. Barrett listens to both the questions and the answers people come up with. He’s interested in everything from the most complex abstractions to the most banal things that come up. And he repeatedly gives the conversation an extra push, floating above it and connecting external elements to the work and to the group.

But he always returns to the artwork.

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He is a scholar, you can sense that, but his scholarship – his learning – is accessible, available, to others. You can just see that everyone is learning. And on top of that, a relationship develops within the group; people get to know each other in a new way. And that’s quite an achievement, of course.

Is it important that Barrett is a former artist?

You can sense his engagement with the artwork, with art. He’s a true believer in the power of art, without getting all soppy about it. He gets to grips with the artwork without undue ceremony and uses it. Because he knows that as long as you treat art with respect, it can take a few knocks.

And his approach is quite refreshing in that he assumes the creator of the artwork didn’t have absolute mastery of intention and meaning. And it’s only when this happens that it’s possible to connect people to meaning. Any artwork can influence our values and anyone who says something about an artwork therefore takes a position of responsibility with respect to others.

Is Barrett’s approach relevant to processes of change taking place within the academy?

Terry Barrett excludes irony, strategies and any externally imposed goals in his conversations with his students.

Maybe I’m doing that now in our dialogue on the goal of this AIR project.

Barrett brings people together in the space and organises a conversation in which people are different but of equal standing. Who the shoe fits, let them wear it. It’s a simple and hopeful message. I’m striving for a similar level of passion and debate in the department.

I would like the academy to function as a natural link between people with wide-ranging opinions so that we can more easily enter into conversation with each other, precisely because we are all connected with the same school.

Barrett’s practice also reveals how easy it is to combine the experience of making art with knowledge transfer in the social and didactic spheres. His methods and theories can easily be applied in the context of the Academy of Fine Arts and Education. And yes I very much hope it will be part of our future.

But I didn’t leave Ohio with the thought that I was going to invite Barrett just for that reason. The idea only came up when I met him again at the annual NAEA [National Art Education Association] conference in New Orleans in 2008. It suddenly struck me that here was someone who fitted in with the aims of Marijke

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Hoogenboom’s programme to invite professional practitioners as artists in residence. The AHK faculties do this with the explicit intention of bringing people held in high regard in their field into the organisation – people who can operate at a distance from a given department’s practice, people who can speak authoritatively about developments in the arts or in professional practice and about where they’re coming from. People who, through a project or study, can ‘bring about’ an answer to the question of whether a department can, or should want to connect with these new ideas.

In that light, how was Barrett’s tenure designed as an itinerary with a starting and finishing point?

Barrett was immediately very enthusiastic about the aims of the AIR programme: keeping education up to date. I’d guess that a rather sobering experience in his life also played a part in his agreeing. I’ve not heard him explicitly state his motivation, but I think perhaps he was ready for a new step, ready to apply his ideas elsewhere. So in that sense, we were of interest to him as a bridge between theory and practice. We are, after all, part of a vocational educational environment, not an academic one. I’m sure that he saw us as a test case. He said that he’d never dared to reveal too much before when realising a project, but this time he really stuck his neck out – from the first visit to the academy right up to the final output of Kunst werkt. This publication is not only an account of our project, moreover it offers guidance on viewing art to students and teachers in higher arts education and in primary and secondary education.

The plan for our residency was seductively simple. Together with a committed project team we came up with the irreverent title No Landscapes as appropriate for Dutch art education, because we wanted to shift the focus from the old masters to contemporary art. We selected a number of contemporary art works that could take centre stage, works with a wide variety of themes, working processes and media made by Dutch artists with solid reputations who were also prepared to participate. Other participants included secondary school students with an autism spectrum disorder in special needs education and residents of various geriatric care centres, including Korsakoff patients.

groups of younger and older people interpret the art works. Pretty much organically, a discussion developed about transfer in general. Discussing contemporary art can be pretty tricky; it’s often difficult to know where to start. Teachers want to pass on information, but there are so many unknowables in contemporary art. It’s a huge subject and there are many different takes on it. It means that standard study resources are often simply not up to the job.

Students also interviewed Jeroen Kooijmans, Luna Maurer and Robert Wevers about their artistic practice.

Images, statements and views are recorded in the publication Kunst werkt: Mensen reageren op hedendaagse kunst (Art works: people respond to contemporary art). It was published by Thieme Art for a broader readership on completion of the project.

With the book, the summary of the project’s results, to hand, could you describe how this AIR’s activities impacted on the academy?

In fact, the publication also reveals the intermediate result of our own process in the department. An AIR can only work efficiently if the department can be set into action or, even better, if it’s already in action. So for us, this residency came at exactly the right moment. The residency connects to everything we’re doing to further develop the department. First: we are going to continue to apply Barrett’s method in our curriculum and imbed it as a crucial tool for future art teachers. But also, Barrett demonstrably challenged some internal processes.

One example is where we attempt to improve the culture of conversation on the educational work floor; just last week I heard how a few teachers entered into a debate together on ways of working that have been generally accepted for years – spontaneously, and without us organising a special meeting day or something. There was mutual respect! And all that comes from the realisation that going for one thing doesn’t automatically mean you’re going against another.

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Jaap Vinken is a policy advisor at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and a freelancer in the field of the arts and culture.

Barrett then coached students at our department to teach and to enter into discussion themselves. So they were now themselves fulfilling the role of mediator and they had these varied

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Ongoing AIRs The Amsterdam School of the Arts’ Artist in Residence programme stimulates innovation and facilitates encounters between art education and contemporary art practice. Instigated by the Art Practice and Development research group, this programme brings renowned and respected artists into the academy, where the host institutes benefit from the new energy they breathe into educational and artistic structures. The programme focuses on current interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary developments, as well as interaction with the international ‘state of the art’.

The research group provides active support to institutes and departments in the realisation of their Artist in Residence programmes. By combining our energies, embryonic ideas can mature into substantive plans, a tailored organisation and ultimately a fully fledged coproduction. The format of the programme is flexible, and it is accessible academy-wide.

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The Space in Which I Create my Own Borders Anthony Heidweiller Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2010–2011

Living Dance, Dancing Life Germaine Acogny and École des Sables Theatre School, Bachelor of Dance in Education 2009-2010

Anthony Heidweiller believes that, ‘Youth opera applies the dramatic power of opera as an art form in giving a musical answer to the many questions that young people face today’. He is challenging teachers and students to reach out to a wider audience and to engage in a broader social context and opera’s potential place in it. A key strategy of his approach is the interdisciplinary collaboration between institutes in order to explore the relevance of his art practice to education throughout the academy.

Anthony Heidweiller is a singer, opera maker and the founder and artistic director of the international Yo! Opera festival and workspace.

Dance teachers working today are operating at the very centre of contemporary urban reality, where the demand that what they produce relates to people from diverse origins is continuing to grow. Germaine Acogny’s unique practice offers teachers and students alike insights into bridging the gaps between the norms and values bound up in European and African dance styles. This collaboration is triggering debate on renewal and traditions within the faculty, giving a powerful boost to its intercultural ambitions.

Germaine Acogny is the artistic director of Jant-Bi dance company and the founding director of the École des Sables, Africa’s most important institute for the development of professional dance.

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Wild Blossom Bart Schneemann Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2008, 2010

Exploring the Black Roots of Jazz John Clayton Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010

‘Society is undergoing rapid change, and the demands of the audience are changing along with it,’ says Bart Schneemann. His Wilde Bloesem (Wild Blossom) project challenges students from a broad range of musical dis­ ciplines to experiment collectively with unusual ideas for concerts. The dynamics and synergy of this heterogeneous group form the basis of an innovative performance.

Schneemann wants to give new impulses to a music education system generally more focused on preparing students for traditional concert practice.

Bart Schneemann is the principal oboist and the music director of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, widely con­ sidered to be one of the finest of its kind in the world.

Although jazz education has become commonplace throughout the world, few programmes place the emphasis on connecting the music to its African American roots in practical and meaningful ways. Exploring the Black Roots of Jazz is an intensive music-centred project that fuses performance, lecture, and discussion aimed at an effective examination of the multi-faceted nature of jazz in particular and black music in general. American double-bassist John Clayton is the key figure in this five-year trajectory, each year the school is invites an additional guest artist with a specific expertise.

John Clayton is a renowned performer and award-winning composer and arranger of jazz and classical music.

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Into the Polder with Koek Paul Koek Theatre School, Performing Arts Production 2009–2011

Miraculous Transformations Jeroen Kooijmans Academy of Architecture 2009–2010

New developments in the performing arts confront professional training programmes with the need to constantly update their outlook on education. Musician, composer and theatre maker Paul Koek is working with teachers and students at the Performing Arts Production department to develop their vision on the production and stage manager of the future and to build bridges between innovative artistic and educational practices. The activities centre on De Veenfabriek’s latest project Het Platteland als Podium (The Countryside as a Stage), ‘A series of theatrical/musical events of a socially relevant nature focusing on farming life.’

Paul Koek is the artistic director of the internationally renowned music theatre ensemble De Veenfabriek. In 1987 he co-founded Hollandia theatre group.

Visual artist Jeroen Kooijmans and collaborator Roé Cerpac are joining master students at the Academy of Architecture’s temporary research lab in a search for transformations in architecture. They are seeking their inspiration in fields such as biology, art history, film, literature, alchemy, physics, history and theology. Kooijmans believes that art is inherently transformative. ‘There are no boundaries for me as an artist; you can think anything. I can construct a fantasy world without limitations. This helps to create real inspiration and push boundaries – something that architects often find difficult.’

Jeroen Kooijmans works with video, photography, architecture, sound sculptures and performance. His art is exhibited worldwide.

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Pierre Audi Interfaculty 2004 – 05

Adriaan Beukers / Ed van Hinte Academy of Architecture 2008 – 09

Luc Deleu Academy of Architecture 2004 – 05

LISA Theatre School 2008

Emio Greco | PC Theatre School 2004 – 05

Erik Kessels Academy of Architecture 2007 – 08

Peter Delpeut Netherlands Film and Television Academy 2004 – 05

Nita Liem Theatre School 2007 – 08

Joël Bons Conservatorium van Amsterdam 2004 – 05

Horst Rickels Netherlands Film and Television Academy 2006 – 07

Krisztina de Châtel Academy of Architecture 2006 – 07

Maaike Bleeker Theatre School 2006 – 07

Paul Shepheard Academy of Architecture 2005 – 06

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