Open Call

Over the course of two days, the dance floor will be broken down into its foundational parts, combining movement and voice workshops with discourse, writing and reflection, studying rave as a historical movement and a continuum, with the potential to shape new futures.

On Day 1, Stine Janvin will teach a vocal workshop in which the voice becomes a rhythm machine, invoking the deeply physical experience of repeating beats and melodic patterns using the techniques she developed for Echoic Choir and earlier works such as Fake Synthetic Music. Ula Sickle will guide the participants through the choreographic research for the performance, looking at various practices such as rave shuffle and its links to traditional folk dance, as well as trance dancing and its use of repetitive movement, in an effort to understand the elementary parts of what constitutes the rave experience.

Day 2 is dedicated to the written word. Writer and dramaturge Persis Bekkering will take the participants through a selection of essential texts, both fiction and theory, to collectively read and study the aesthetics and politics of rave. Participants will then be invited to write the rave themselves, understanding rave as a narrative device.

An informal roundtable discussion, open to all, will round off the University of Rave. Collectively we will imagine the dance floors of the future when bodies can safely sweat together again. In this caesura that the pandemic enforces on us, we will reflect on what we want to keep from the party’s past, and what we want to change.

Participation

The lab is open to anyone interested in the subject as well as in exploring related movement and voice practices. Participants can either attend one of the two days, or join for the entire two-day lab.

Registration

By July 31^st via email to mitten@festwochen.at (subject: University of Rave), with a few sentences about yourself and your interest in participating in the workshop. Please also let us know whether you want to participate on both days and just one of the two days. This information will enable the artists to prepare the lab and, in the event of more applications, to select the number of participants according to the room capacity.

Applicants will be notified of their selection by August 14^th.

Stavanger-born vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms, the backbone of Janvin’s projects focus on exploring performance formats, vocal instrumentation and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, tangible/digital, and minimal/dramatic. Her most recent works are SOLD (a dog and pony show) and Fake Synthetic Music, for which she earned an Honorary Mention of the Prix Ars Electronica 2019. Janvin is a fellow at Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in 2020.

Ula Sickle is a choreographer and performer, living and working in Brussels. From a background in contemporary dance, she works across disciplines, drawing from contemporary music and the visual arts. She studied in Toronto and Paris, before attending PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels and Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France. Between 2017 and 2018 she was artist in residence at Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and at WIELS in Brussels. Ula’s performances have been presented in theatres and festivals across Europe including the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Tanz Im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Helsinki) and Les Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris). At Wiener Festwochen 2019, she performed Relay.

Persis Bekkering is a writer and dramaturge based in Brussels. Her recent publications include essays, art criticism and fiction in Dutch and English. Her debut novel Een heldenleven (The Life of a Hero), published in 2018 with Prometheus Press, was shortlisted for the ANV Debutantenprijs 2018. A new novel, Exces, is forthcoming in May; one chapter has been translated into English as Last Utopia, and will be printed in a bibliophile edition by the Jan Van Eyck Academy. Taking the formal aspects of techno music as a narrative device, the two books are an attempt at mapping the emotional landscape of the contemporary, marked by permanent crises. The (historical) rave movement forms the ecstatic, visceral backdrop to a story about loss, love, and trauma.