Jen Rosenblit & Lukas Kötz
Temporary Stays or on the way

Positioned as a performance-oriented space and "werkstatt", this field project offers the rare opportunity to work as a group on solo-authored performance concepts. This temporary space hosts artists eager to consider performance-making as a practice that one must continually return to, distance oneself from, give away, and place in the hands of others. The focus here is on the practice of performance-making, which includes but is not limited to dance, with dancers as central elements. Here, participants can speculate, translate, and experiment with elements such as the dramaturgy of an audience as a flexible architecture containing multitudes, or how a single reference can shift between text, stage design, and movement studies.

Jen offers research methods focused on tangential thinking, familiarity and misinterpretation, erotics, humor, and the poetics of space, with an overarching drive toward each participant’s content and curiosities, which will determine this performance experiment devised by the group.

Co-led with Lukas, a stage designer, participants will be able to propose, be mentored, and work toward feasible stage or spatial design plans, considering construction and architectural forms by way of basic raw and stand-in materials.

Artists are invited to apply with a short and concise concept of a performative situation they would like to further or begin to craft given the format of one week, culminating in a shared group performance open to the festival and the public, where many ideas unfold simultaneously. The flexible duration of the performance allows viewers to come and go as they wish.

Whether it’s a movement study, an object or material, a concept, a reworked piece, a reference, a sound study, or any other prepared proposal, the specificity here is to develop the how rather than the what. The group works together to elaborate and translate each proposed idea, even as they evolve and shift beyond their original form.

The goal for the week is to be ready with content in some aspect, allowing participants to pay closer attention to what the work is asking for. Participants will work as a group of makers focused on the sharing and unfolding of performance, rather than cultivating solo concerts. The collectivity will lend dramaturgy for space and shifting attention in the same room, where many ideas exist – not in a vacuum, but within a shared space with an unfinished boundary. Participants direct and are directed, stand in for one another, edit and are edited, lose grip on authorship, and simultaneously foster varied and singular voices on the way to a co-authored performance project.

The work embraces the limitations of time, encouraging quick sketches and experiments rather than dwelling on precision, insecurity, or doubt. Letting go, misunderstanding, and being misunderstood are all part of the process toward shared articulation and togetherness.