DANCE
March Dance IV 2020- POSTPONED

Mon, 16.03.2020 -
Sun, 29.03.2020
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Auditorium

Basement 21 in collaboration with Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai, supported by Dance Nucleus Singapore
 
The year 2020 marks the end of a decade and brings with it the need to not just look back, but also to consider the very act of looking itself. From intense and complex political turmoil the world over to devastating climatic developments, performance practice finds itself charged with the need to unravel the assumptions of what the word practice means today. If we were to consider the act of looking back as practice, can the act of looking at be a way to acknowledge the shifting ground under what has constituted the role of the arts in different societies.

March Dance 2020 in its fourth edition raises the question and from a range of differing perspectives challenges our understanding of the word performance while promoting enquiry into the creative process as a whole.

Padmini Chettur (Chennai) in her recent solo, Philosophical Enactment 1, looks at the material of performance rather than the aesthetics of performance as she, together with writer Aveek Sen, juxtaposes the discursive and the visual as a way to bring attention to our own relationships to language and 'meaning'.
 
Ho Rui An (Singapore/Berlin) in his lecture performance, Tropicopolitan Objects, draws upon Srinivas Aravamudan’s concept of the ‘tropicopolitan’ and rewrites the history of European colonialism as an inventory of objects, both fleshy bodies in time and space as well as fictive tropes constructed by the colonial project.
 
Musician Maarten Visser and theatre/visual artist Pravin Kannanur lead the second edition of their workshop on modes of listening and responding between practitioners of different arts that culminates in the creation of performance scores and their enactment by the participants.

Daniel Kok (Singapore), director of Dance Nucleus, engages in a talk on the Dramaturgy of Production to foster a culture of interconnections and empowerment among artists in the pan Asian region. 
 
In The Long and Short of It, Poorna Swami (Bangalore) in collaboration with Marcel Zaes (Switzerland) proposes a durational sound and movement installation designed as a score for one or many bodies. A group of dancers navigate this map as they interpret the set of rules, at once present and redundant as the body weakens and finds new ground.
 
To by Surjit Nongmeikapam (Imphal) manifests certain ideas around the identity that one expects from an individual. Isn’t one’s true identity the embodiment of the experiences that one has lived through and how it has come to being? One may be born into a culture but one’s identity should not be limited by it. The idea is to explore and imbibe one’s experiences and express what one truly desires.