Chandra Frank – IF I CAN’T DANCE

Education is a key site through which we share in and contribute to the field of performance. We teach yearly courses at the Dutch Art Institute (ArtEZ) and the School of New Dance Development (Academy of Theatre and Dance), and guest teach and give workshops at institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.

Long-term collaboration with artists and researchers is central to our work. These endeavours take shape in artistic practice (Artist Commissions) and research into performance genealogies (Research Commissions). While these new productions follow their own unique paths, they remain in dialogue with the field of inquiry underlying each respective biannual programme.

Every two-year cycle coalesces around a field of inquiry invested in performance and performativity. Fellows lead a Reading Group to theoretically and artistically explore this material that is grounded in the social and political rituals of daily life. The gleanings are shared in Open Reading Groups guided by guests, and unpacked in conversations with local practitioners on Radio Emma and in Exhibitions presented in our Library. Finally, Readers document this dynamic and collaborative research.

2025

Amsterdam Art Week

Voice as Landscape

horseshoe to heart / togethers in motion

Performance Programme

Saturday 24 May 2025, 16:30–23hr

For Amsterdam Art Week’s West Night, If I Can’t Dance is thrilled to host the second day of horseshoe to heart / togethers in motion, a performance programme by Voice as Landscape.

After an evening at Stichting Perdu on 23 May, the programme unfolds into a day-long gathering — an invitation to experience the different materialisations of time in daily life through eating, shifts in light, mood, and place.

The programme begins in the afternoon at Emmaplein with an offering of food by Kaixin Chen and Sankrit Kulmanochawong, followed by a guided collective siesta by artist Aitana Cordero. The gathering then gently moves to the WG-terrain for artists María Jerez and Élan D’Orphium’s imaginaries of inter-species communication. With the change of light, the programme enters the If I Can’t Dance theater for a dance performance by artist duo Kike García and Jesús Bravo, and culminates with a concert by artist, musician and composer Phantom Wizard.

Voice as Landscape is a performance platform focused on the relationships between body, vibration and territory. It is also an editorial line at Perdu, where it explores poetic experimentation beyond verbal language and into other fields. Voice as Landscape is initiated and curated by Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade. This year, Voice as Landscape is working with the notion of ‘correspondence’, both as a theme and as methodology.

Programme*:

16:30 Gather at Emmaplein

17:00 Dinner with Kaixin Chen and Sankrit Kulmanochawong

19:00 La Siesta with Aitana Cordero

20:00 Gather at old plane tree in front of If I Can’t Dance, WG-Plein 881

20:15 Reclamos with María Jerez and Élan D´Orphium

21:00 Paisaje Tres with Kike García and Jesús Bravo at If I Can’t Dance theatre

22:00 Phantom Wizard at If I Can’t Dance theatre, WG-Plein 881

*Subject to change. Final programme will be communicated to participants via email.

With Kaixin Chen & Sankrit Kulmanochawong, Aitana Cordero, Kike García & Jesús Bravo, María Jerez & Élan D´Orphium, Phantom Wizard

Curated by Voice as Landscape

Image description

A pair of dancers in a slow-dance embrace. One partner, possibly male, faces the camera with short brown hair. Their head is bowed, resting softly on the other’s shoulder. The other dancer, less tall, and is seen from behind. They wear a flowery shirt and have short white hair.

Accessibility information

– If I Can’t Dance is located on the second floor with unfortunately no elevator

– Seated event

– Gender neutral WC

– Language: English

Acknowledgements

horseshoe to heart / togethers in motion is co-hosted by Perdu and If I Can’t Dance and supported by het Cultuurfonds (with support by the Ludo Pieters Gastschrijver Fonds), Acción Cultural Española, and the Spanish Embassy. If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

Emmaplein, WG-Plein & If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam

(meeting point at Emmaplein at 16:30hr)

Tickets

Jennifer Scappettone

Poetry After Barbarism

Reading & conversation

Thursday 22 May 2025

20:30hr (doors open 20-22hr)

We kick off our programme for the Amsterdam Art Week with a special evening featuring poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, who will give a preview presentation of her forthcoming publication Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, September 2025). Following a reading from the book, Scappettone will be in conversation with fellow poet Mia You and If I Can’t Dance curator Sara Giannini.

Coalescing two decades of research, the book uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, authors who write this poetry occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies as well as globalization, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil.

Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—Scappettone explores how these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions.

Jennifer Scappettone is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43. She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli.

Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2024) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.

Image description

Book cover of Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism by Jennifer Scappettone. The title appears on the right side against a black background, with the colors of the letters echoing the hues of the artwork on the left half of the cover. This artwork is a watercolor fragment of an open notebook, with horizontal lines layered in turquoise, yellow, orange, and ochre. Arabic words are written along the lines, with a larger, thicker black letter at the center.

Accessibility information

– If I Can’t Dance is located on the second floor with unfortunately no elevator

– Seated event

– Gender neutral WC

– Language: English

Acknowledgements

The event is co-organized with the Utrecht University’s Network for Environmental Humanities. If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

If I Can’t Dance
WG-Plein 881

1054 SM Amsterdam

Tickets: €7.50 & €5 (students)

DAI-COOP Study Group

The Word and the Wound – And Now You Are Ready to Sing
An Invitation to think-in-assembly

Conversation & Performance

Friday 23 May 2025

17–19hr (doors open 16–2hr)

A group of people sits in a half-circle on a blue-and-white patterned tiled floor in a historic space with stone columns and carpets along the walls; painted cloths hang above.

As part of Amsterdam Art Week, If I Can’t Dance’s COOP Study Group at the Dutch Art Institute The Word and Wound: And Now You Are Ready to Sing will convene in our theatre space for a three-day workshop and a public sharing on Friday 23 May. With this event, the group opens up their ongoing practice of ‘thinking-in-assembly’, a method that connects thinking and listening, deepening the relations between personal experiences and collective voice.

Study group tutors Snejanka Mihaylova (artist), Lisa Montan (music composer) and Frédérique Bergholtz (If I Can’t Dance), students Anna Buyvid, Nada Gambier, Patrick Freriksen, Agnese Krivade, Bel McLaughlin, Javier Rodriguez Perez, Alva Roselius, Hannah van der Schaaf, Agnese Spolverini and Mia Tamme, and If I Can’t Dance curators Anik Fournier and Sara Giannini invite you to engage in a conversation about the acts of listening and singing, focusing on their potential as reparational practices in times of grief, violence, and harm.

Taking its cues from the histories, methods, and reflections that the group has encountered in their process of study, the assembly will reflect on questions like: What does it mean to be ready to sing? And what does it mean to sing with others? What is the relation between the individual voice and the voice of the group? How does it connect to the body and to (bodily) memory? What are the resonances of singing (together) in the context of the present wounds? In what way does singing mobilize our critical, political, and artistic potential? How can singing be not only an emanation of sound but an embodied practice of listening?

The event also marks the launch of a new section on If I Can’t Dance’s website dedicated to our long and rich history in teaching workshops at the Dutch Art Institute. This Master Programme works at the intersections of theory, art, activism, performance and curating, and operates as an itinerant school with the students and tutors convening seven times per year at different places throughout Europe (and beyond) to engage in collective study. Since 2008, If I Can’t Dance has been developing workshops for the DAI, engaging over the years the lustrous course tutors Tanja Baudoin, Phil Collins, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jon Mikel Euba, Sara Giannini, Susan Gibb, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Snejanka Mihaylova, Sarah Pierce, Rory Pilgrim, Jimmy Robert, Stefanie Seibold, Hito Steyerl, Ian White, Geo Wyex, and Arnisa Zeqo. On our website we have now added an overview of our successive study groups, sharing a wealth of material, including texts, documentation, and syllabi through which you can get an impression of the different thematics, as well as the performance and pedagogical methodologies, these courses have proposed.

In our physical space, you will find a display of DAI student-made publications and a variety of archival material gleaned from our most recent study groups, composed by Anik Fournier and Frédérique Bergholtz, as well as a reading table focusing on the current COOP The Word and the Wound – And Now You Are Ready to Sing.

We look forward to welcoming you in our space and to thinking and singing together!

Image description

Aerial view of a circle of people seated on a floor with blue floral-patterned tiles, surrounded by stone columns. Adjacent to the circle is a slightly elevated surface covered with red-tinted carpets and a white fabric, on which lie threads and other undefined objects. On the sides hang two white fabrics featuring paintings of circles.

Accessibility information

– If I Can’t Dance is located on the second floor with unfortunately no elevator

– Seated event

– Gender neutral WC

– Language: English

Acknowledgements

The Word and the Wound – And Now You Are Ready to Sing is organized in collaboration with the Dutch Art Institute. If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

If I Can’t Dance
WG-Plein 881

1054 SM Amsterdam

Tickets: €7.50 & €5 (students)

2024-25

Master course

DAI-COOP

The Word and the Wound 2 / And Now You Are Ready to Sing

Course

2024-25

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The focus of this study group remains on practice. As a continuation of last year’s study group, the encouraging rephrase of guest tutor Lisa Montan’s “And now you are ready to sing”, is reformulated to reflect on what it means to be ready to sing? What does it mean to sing with others? What is the relation between the individual voice and the voice of the group? How does it connect to the body, to (bodily) memory? What are the resonances of singing (together) – in time and space? In what way does singing mobilise our critical and artistic potential? Singing is proposed not only as an emanation of sound, but as an embodied practice of listening. Therefore, the research is articulated around questions of acts of listening, (a)tuning, transmitting, testing and exercising with sounds, with a particular interest in the somatic element of singing, as well as storytelling, folk traditions, the re-interpreting and re-writing of text. In her workWords to write it. The Word and the Wound (after which the study group is named) the Italian feminist Wanda Tommasi identifies the practice of writing as a process of symbolic creation that leads to repair. Special attention is thus brought to the relation between the performative and the restorative, thinking of the potential of performance to be a reparational practice.

Course tutors: Snejanka Mihaylova, Frédérique Bergholtz

Guest tutors: Lisa Montan, Angelo Custodio, Sara Giannini, Anik Fournier

Students: Anna Buyvid, Agnese Krivade, Alva Roselius, Agnese Spolverini, Bel McLaughlin, Hannah van der Schaaf, Javier Rodriguez Perez, Mia Tamme, Nada Gambier, Patrick Freriksen

Gatherings

PAF, St. Erme

NIDA Art Colony, Vilnius

Nicosia, Cyprus

Bachelor course

SNDO

Codes of in/accessibility within performance practices

Course

2024

In dialogue with If I Can’t Dance’s current research on disability justice and accessibility, this class looks at the different implications that accessibility can take, as well as, the functions it can serve in the creation and circulation of performance practices. In thinking with and alongside access, concepts such as presence, embodiment, perception, interpretation, scoring, and communicability become more layered, leaving space for questioning and deepening. How do bodies-in-performance appear for publics on-stage and off? What are the unconscious ableist structures that enable or disable access within our field and beyond? The dichotomy between abled and disabled bodies is misleading; bodies are rendered enabled or disabled by an uneven construction and distribution of access within racial capitalism and ongoing colonial violence. The seminar aims to unpack those entanglements and explore the correlations between disability and wider mechanics of exclusion, marginalization and harm. Working with material from the If I Can’t Dance archive, a selection of readings, and visits to exhibitions presently open in Amsterdam, the students will be given opportunities to work on small exercises in which they will be asked to explore accessibility in their own work and life.

Course tutors: Anik Fournier and Sara Giannini

Read full syllabus

Sites

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

2023-24

Master course

DAI-COOP

The Word and the Wound

Course

2023-24

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The study group opened a series of reflections on practice and its roots in everyday life. The “word” is synonymous with work; the “wound” denotes an environment. In this sense, the title is open to different questions about the relationship between artistic practice and context. This form of ‘work’ can be viewed in connection to what we can call the creative process. But what is creation? How do we actually initiate a process of creation? How do we form, and how are we formed by, daily life? And how can we – as proposed by Italian feminist Wanda Tommasi – understand working as a process of symbolic creation that leads to repair?

These questions are used to encourage the study group to think about their daily (artistic) practices, and to find methodologies through which individual and collective work can be performed and sustained.

Course tutors: Snejanka Mihaylova, Frédérique Bergholtz

Guest tutors: Angelo Custódio and Lisa Montan.

Students: Ania Yilmaz, Ariell Zéphyr, Cristina Ramos González, Elif Cadoux, Helena Estrela, Lisa Vlamings, Maria Miguel Pratas, Sam Mountford, Seán Bean, Stephen McEvoy, Tereza Darmovzalová, Valeria Moro, and Yi-Hong Wang (Hong).

Read full syllabus

Gatherings

Essaouira, Marrakech

PAF, St. Erme

Vleeshal, Middelburg

2024

Symposium

Chandra Frank

Chandra Frank is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the 2024–2027 Taft Professor of the Public Humanities and will be working on collaborative and multi-modal methodologies related to art, ecology, and public histories. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on feminist and queer of colour movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. She is completing her first monograph in progress, Tidal Politics: Feminist Queer Diaspora & Refusal in the Netherlands, which charts the creative and strategic interruption of feminist queer movement work in the 1980s alongside the literal and figurative sinking landscape and racial climate of the Netherlands. Over the last decade, she has been active as an independent curator working across continents and with various institutions such as the Bonnefanten Museum, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, and District Six Museum.

Wigbertson Julian Isenia on Tidal Gatherings

Visitor report

December 2024

At If I Can’t Dance we see the visitor report as a method of documentation. The affectual, relational and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats. To supplement such formats, If I Can’t Dance commissions written visitor reports, which offer subjective responses to a lived experience of a work and its context. The visitor report is, therefore, not to be confused with a critical review. It is first and foremost a form of witnessing. The people commissioned to write the report span a range of positions and practices within and outside the field of art. For Tidal Gatherings, we invited anthropologist and cultural analyst Wigbertson Julian Isenia.

Read the visitor report

Tidal Gatherings

Symposium

4, 5, 6 October 2024

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A three-day symposium on the intersections between water, ecology, and Dutch colonialism curated by Chandra Frank. Connecting different sites and modes of convening, it includes talks, film screenings, and a study group featuring the work of Paula Albuquerque, Sharelly Emanuelson, Desiree Mwalimu Banks, Toni Giselle Stuart, Lisandro Suriel, and Geo Wyex.

Through these different facets, the programme invites to think with water alongside ideas of belonging, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as artistic production.

Acknowledgements

The project continues If I Can’t Dance multi-year collaboration with CBK Zuidoost and takes place in the framework of Sound System Ecologies: Music and Visual Cultures in the Dutch Kingdom & South Africa, a collaborative project between DJ Lynnée Denise and Chandra Frank funded by the Mondriaan Fund Open Call Slavery Memorial Year Grant (2023–2024). Many thanks to SHEBANG.

If I Can’t Dance & CBK Zuidoost,

location SHEBANG, Amsterdam

2022–23

Edition IX

Bodies and Technologies

Finale

September 2023 – February 2024

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to the Finale of Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies, featuring artists (collectives) Black Speaks Back and Constantina Zavitsanos, and researchers Susanne Altmann, Devika Chotoe, Samia Henni, Nuraini Juliastuti, and Grant Watson. During a seasonal festival, taking place from September 2023 through February 2024 across Amsterdam venues, they present their new productions and publications. Each in their own way, they tackle the complex and plural entanglements between bodies and technologies – from experiences of pleasure and intimacy to the ongoing embodied realities of colonial and ableist frameworks.

Image description

Cover of the programme booklet, with text in Times font on white background, stating: Finale Edition IX – Bodies and Technogolgies; names of the participating artists and researchers: Susanne Altmann, Black Speaks Back, Samia Henni, Nuraini Juliastuti, and Constantina Zavitsanos; dates: September 2023-February 2024; and the city where the programme will take place: Amsterdam.

Acknowledgements

The Edition IX commission series is curated by programme curators Sara Giannini and
Megan Hoetger in conversation with the If I Can’t Dance artistic team.

Venues across Amsterdam

Programme booklet

Artist Commissions

Black Speaks Back

Black Speaks Back (est. 2016, Brussels. Based in Amsterdam) is a Belgo-Dutch grassroots media platform for multidimensional Black narratives. Their film tackles issues of hyper-sexualisation, cultural fragmentation and collective remembrance at the boundaries between intimacy and sexuality, freedom and conditioning, and myth and reality. The Zwarte Ibis project is led by Chris (Ci) Rickets and Alexine Gabriela in collaboration with Smita James.

Musoke Nalwoga on ZWARTE IBIS

Visitor report

Spring 2024

Portrait: Musoke Nalwoga, photo by Simara van Bochove.

1/2

At If I Can’t Dance we see the visitor report as a method of documentation. The affectual, relational and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats. To supplement such formats, If I Can’t Dance commissions written visitor reports, offer subjective responses to a lived experience of a work and its context. The visitor report is, therefore, not to be confused with a critical review. It is first and foremost a form of witnessing. The people commissioned to write the report span a range of positions and practices within and outside the field of art. For the premiere of Black Speaks Backs’ film ZWARTE IBIS we invited curator and researcher Musoke Nalwoga.

Read the visitor report

Inside ZWARTE IBIS

Artist talk and Film screening

Saturday 3 February 2024, 17hr

Behind-the-scenes documentation of 'Zwarte Ibis', 2023, photo: Henck Pengel.

This moving artist talk connects BSB’s installation at CBK Zuidoost with the Bijlmerbios movie theater. Members of the collective gather to discuss their collaborative production process, as well as the central role of Amsterdam’s Bijlmer neighbourhood within their project.

Acknowledgements

ZWARTE IBIS is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger. The artist talk and screening are realised in partnership with CBK Zuidoost and the Bijlmerbios. Special thanks to CBK event programme curator Claudio Ritfeld for his support of the artist talk.

Begins at CBK Zuidoost
Anton de Komplein 120
1102 DR Amsterdam

Free with registration for the film screening

ZWARTE IBIS

Film premiere

Friday 12 January & Saturday 13 January 2024, 19hr

Poster for 'ZWARTE IBIS'. Design by Naomi Quartey.

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The collective invites audiences to join them for world premiere of ZWARTE IBIS, their newest short film, which portrays a young Black woman’s quest for intimacy in a world where the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the political and the personal, the past and the present, become ever blurrier. The screenings are accompanied by a welcoming DJ set, singing bowl performance, and post-screening panel discussions on black intimacy featuring members of the cast and crew.

Acknowledgements

ZWARTE IBIS is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger who also serves as the film’s production supervisor. The production of the film was made possible with the support of a “Research, Act & Reflect” grant from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, and the premiere programme is realised in partnership with Africadelic, Caribbean Creativity, and Re/Presenting Europe. Special thanks to Melkweg, Amsterdam for hosting the programme.

Co-producer: La Fam

Director: Emma-Lee Amponsah

Composer: Chris “Ci” Rickets

Writing team: Nohely Koeyers, Emma-Lee Amponsah, Chris “Ci” Rickets, and Alexine Gabriela

Director of Photography: Henck Pengel

Edited by: Chris Tjong Ayong

Color grading: Yavuz Salim Isler

Text: Mathieu Charles

Narrator: Burnice Hiwat

Lead Actress: Henriette “Aelia Sapph” Valies

Melkweg

Lijnbaansgracht 234A

1017 PH Amsterdam

Tickets:

€11 regular / Cineville free

First screening (fully booked)

Second screening (fully booked)

Zwarte Ibis: An Exploration of Black Intimacy

Exhibition

Thursday 7 December 2023 – Saturday 3 February 2024

Exhibition Opening Thursday 7 December 2023, 17–20hr

Free with registration here

1/8

As a culmination of their time in CBK Zuidoost’s BijlmAIR residency, the collective’s presents an installation featuring audio and visual materials from their production process, including: recordings from their 2022 Kitchen Table Talks, collective notes from scriptwriting in February 2023 and behind-the-scenes footage from filming in summer 2023.

Accessibility information

– Seats available

– Ground floor, wheelchair accessible

– Wheelchair accessible WC; gender-neutral WC

– Language: Dutch and English

Acknowledgements

ZWARTE IBIS is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger. The installation is realised in the frame of the CBK Zuidoost BijlmAIR Residency programme as part of the exhibition ‘AIR in Zuidoost #2023.’ Special thanks to Renske de Jong and Yazan Maksoud for their support with constructing the installation.

CBK Zuidoost
Anton de Komplein 120
1102 DR Amsterdam

Opening times: Tuesday – Friday 11–17hr; Saturday 10–17hr

Free

The Making of Zwarte Ibis

Work-in-Process

From May 2023

Black Speaks Back, ‘Zwarte Ibis: Preliminary Experiments’ (2022), performance presentation for the If I Can’t Dance Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies Introductory Event, Amsterdam. Photo: Maarten Nauw.

The grassroots media collective introduces aspects of their film-in-the-making Zwarte Ibis through a series of three media campaigns that share elements of their research, scriptwriting and filming processes. Featuring a Zwarte Ibis music playlist, the studio page includes re-broadcasted material from the group’s Instagram story archive and a wide network of hyperlinks to follow, taking visitors inside the topic of intimacy, histories of (Black) cinema and the behind-the-scenes of their film set.

Image description

Full colour photo depicting in the foreground a row of three, loosely positioned full-length mirrors, free standing on wheels, with each having several wax lights on their base. In the background are two people sitting on a table, in front of a wall covered in a red glow and depicting the video-projected sentence: ‘Has your Blackness formed your experience of intimacy?’. The mirrors reflect fragments of a theatre tribune, flight cases and the audience.

Acknowledgements

ZWARTE IBIS is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger who conceived and realised the online studio room in collaboration with Kommerz design studio.

If I Can’t Dance Studio

Zwarte Ibis: The Spirit of Black Intimacies

Screening & Performance

Saturday 2 July 2022, 11–19hr

Black Speaks Back, ‘Zwarte Ibis: The Spirit of Black Intimacies’ (2022), screening and performance. Photo: Maarten Nauw.

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A multimedia performance in which the collective experiments with audio, visual and somatic strategies for approaching the question, ‘how do Black people navigate the intimate sphere in a context where their bodies are heavily politicised and under constant interrogation?’ The mirror plays a key role, foregrounding the frameworks of projection and internalisation through which intimacies with self and others are formed.

Image description

Square graphic logo in black-and-white monochromatic colour scheme where ‘the ground’ is flat black and ‘the figure’ a stark white pairing of the words ‘Zwarte’ and ‘Ibis’. ‘Zwarte’ appears more-or-less in the centre of the graphic, and ‘Ibis’ is right-centred with the ‘Ibi’ aligned directly below the ‘te’ of Zwarte. The ‘s’ in Ibis transforms into the long-beaked head of an ibis bird.

Acknowledgements

ZWARTE IBIS is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger.

If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts); the productions in Edition IX are realized with financial support of Ammodo and Cultuurfonds.

Special thanks to Likeminds for hosting the event.

Likeminds (formerly Dansmakers)
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203
1021 KP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€17 regular / €13 student
(includes meal)

Part of Edition IX Introductory Event

For tickets see Introductory Event listing

Jessika Khazrik

Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991, Beirut. Lives in Beirut and Berlin) is an artist, composer, writer and technologist whose ‘indisciplinary’ practice involves performance, machine learning, ecotoxicology, cryptography, visual art, history of science and music. Working towards a hyper-media performance, she explores the convergences of the histories of science and magic through fieldwork and rehearsals in environmental medicine research centres and scientific laboratories for sonocytology, biomedical imagery and exposome studies.

قرابادين Pharmakopoeia

Essay-Performance

Saturday 2 July 2022, 11–19hr

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The artist maps out the plural strands of research that depart from pharmacopoeia, the formularies of shared remedies that would, up until some centuries ago, thoroughly instruct how to identify ailments and prepare compound medicines. Questioning the linguistic, environmental and techno-political links between remedies, medicine and media, Khazrik delves into the divinatory afterlives and militarised roots of biomedical practices of sonification, sensing, imaging and anamnesis.

Image description

Palimpsestic project image of قرابادين Pharmakopoeia. Realised digitally, the graphics mixes, almost in a steganographic way, different colours (ranging from acid green, to red, purple and pink), geometric patterns (mainly circles, crescents, lines and triangles), slightly floral shapes, images and Arabic scripts. The composition has a square landscape orientation. It centres the project title in light fluorescent green and an image of colourful small balls or pearls. These two elements are positioned against a light, patterned, square background that is framed by stronger green- and purple-coloured shapes.

Acknowledgements

Commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and co-produced with Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts as part of their Holes, Spirals, Waves (2022) programme. Part of the research is carried out at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Munich where Khazrik is an artist in residence from spring 2022 to spring 2023.

Special thanks to Likeminds for hosting the event.

Likeminds (formerly Dansmakers)
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203
1021 KP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€17 regular / €13 student
(includes meal)

Part of Edition IX Introductory Event

For tickets see Introductory Event listing

Constantina Zavitsanos

Constantina Zavitsanos (b. 1977, Reading, United States. Lives in New York City, United States) works in sculpture, performance, text and sound to elaborate what’s invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency and means beyond measure – sometimes sculpting inaudible sound waves or the performance of everyday life like school loan debt or years of sleep. Continuing their interference with what is perceivably accessed, they experiment with heat, infrared light, infrasound, haptics and written scores beyond sight and fixed form.

Staci Bu Shea on Entrophy

Visitor report

Spring 2024

Portrait: Staci Bu Shea, photo by Zazie Stevens.

1/2

At If I Can’t Dance we see the visitor report as a method of documentation. The affectual, relational and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats. To supplement such formats, If I Can’t Dance commissions written visitor reports, which offer subjective responses to a lived experience of a work and its context. The visitor report is, therefore, not to be confused with a critical review. It is first and foremost a form of witnessing. The people commissioned to write the report span a range of positions and practices within and outside the field of art. For Entrophy we invited curator and writer Staci Bu Shea.

Read the visitor report

Entrophy

Performance(s)

Saturday 30 September 2023, 15hr & 18hr

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A set of three performances (on-site and online) catalysed by the artist and conjured with the performers who co-create them through an experimental score belonging to no one. In a space of collaboration and not-knowing, the works unfold through chance, improvisation, shared in/capacities and desire. Moving across thresholds of perception, the performance(s) are inhabited by sound, infrasound and infrared light. Each has air and water; some have fire and only one has earth. Repeated twice at different tempos, time flows in many directions as well as through layered descriptions, interpretations and captions.

Performers and co-creators of the score: Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex

Image description

A cropped photograph taken in a two-mirror Schlieren system (with knife edge) shows a black background that hosts otherwise invisible entropic air currents against the shadowed ground of a telescope mirror. Two fingers curl over an igniting open flame that lights a candle. It’s serving something in the blur of mourning and celebration; the vibe is a bit of a full moon feel.

Accessibility information

– Hybrid performance(s), online and on-site
– Live-stream on Zoom
– The on-site performance(s) are seated. There will be priority seats for wheelchair users as well as for deaf and hard of hearing audiences. If you come a bit earlier, our hosts will help you find a spot
– Ground floor, wheelchair accessible
– Wheelchair accessible WC downstairs via elevator; gender-neutral WC
– Language: English
– The performance(s) employ sound and infrasound (vibrations)
– Sign language interpretation (NGT on-site, ASL online)
– CART captioning (Dutch and English on-site, English online)
– Poetic audio description (English, both on-site and online)
– Masking during the performance(s) is welcome and highly encouraged; masks are available at the entrance
– Splendor has a café where you can hang out before and after the event

Acknowledgements

Concept: Constantina Zavitsanos
Initiator of the score: Constantina Zavitsanos
Performers and co-creators of the score: Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex
Curator and production manager: Sara Giannini
Stage manager: Annick Kleizen
Set design: Constantina Zavitsanos with the performers
AV: Leroy Chaar
Light design: Marion Tränkle
In-house technician and floor manager: Thomas Myrmel
Live-stream production: Hans van Eck, Barry Jonas and Zsolt Szederkényi
Production assistance: Sancha Meca Castro
NGT interpreters and Dutch CART: Faye Schippers and Clarissa van den Elzen
ASL interpreters: Candace Davider and company
English CART: Veerle Haverhals
Audio description on-site and online: Constantina Zavitsanos
Front of house team: Naomi Collier Broms and Sancha Meca Castro
Accessibility advisors: Staci Bu Shea and Annick Kleizen
Zoom production advisors: Patrick Mahaney and Lauren Parrish
Accessibility financial support: I Wanna Be With You Everywhere

We would like to thank I Wanna Be With You Everywhere for their generous contribution in making the event more widely accessible. We are also very grateful to Eliane Baudet, Staci Bu Shea, Marja de Kinderen, Annick Kleizen, Patrick Mahaney, Lauren Parrish and Simon(e) van Saarlos for sharing their expertise and advising us in different phases of the project. Finally, a warm thank you to the Splendor collective, and in particular to Nora Fisher, for hosting the programme.

On-site:
Splendor
Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116,
1011 LX Amsterdam

Tickets:

€16,50 regular / €10 students

– First slot: Saturday 30 September 2023, 15-16:30hr (Fully booked)*

– Second slot: Saturday 30 September 2023, 18-19:30hr (Fully booked)*

Online:
The event will be live-streamed on zoom
Free with registration

* Each slot includes all three performances.
They are presented one after the other with no intermission.

Entrophy

Score

A twist on the deductive reasoning game Twenty Questions, this performance score reflects the artist’s research into entropy, polyvocality and indeterminacy. Initiated by the artist, it is formed collectively with the performers who will stage it. With Zavitsanos in the role of the guesser, the performers are asked to think of ‘absolutely nothing’ before answering a set of twenty yes/no questions about the performance they will enact. Their answers determine the performances in a space of collaboration and not-knowing, unfolding through chance, improvisation, shared in/capacities and desire.

Acknowledgements

Concept and score: Constantina Zavitsanos
Performers, interpreters and co-creators of the score: Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex

Experimenting with Entrophy

Work-in-Process

From May 2023

Two images of the glowing filaments mounted above the central plane of the methanol pool fire

In their studio room, the artist opens a window into their own studio while working towards Entrophy, a series of collaborative performances riffing on questions of entropy, heat, interdependency and shared in/capacities. Here they share the research and experimentations that underlie these performances: from visual references and tests with heat and infrared cameras, to different engagements with accessibility and modes of seeing.

Image description

Two side by side images. Against a dark background, cold blue smoke-like shadows are scored by repeating horizontal lines of bright light.

If I Can’t Dance Studio

Entrophy

Lecture-Performance

Saturday 2 July 2022, 11–19hr

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The artist shares their experimentation with heat through technologies and performance tactics that unravel at the perceived limits of the sensorial, opening up sight, sound and measurability to a dimension of feeling. Instead of treating heat as something that can be captured for observance by an audience, the artist works with the felt, shared qualities of heat among bodies in space.

Image description

A black screen hosts two lines of overlapping projected captions in white and grey. The two texts interrupt and join one another in partial occlusion that complicates the legibility of one and produces new texture. Joined text reads as: ‘Slick in the The way up and down is the same the Heisenberg cut like a band Each lives the death of the other cedes our birth.’

A black screen hosts two lines of overlapping projected captions in white and grey. The two texts interrupt and join one another in partial occlusion that complicate the legibility of one and produces new texture. Joined text reads: ‘Hotel, motel, you don’t tell. She got a boson for her birthday and wore it out in quar.’

Acknowledgements

Entrophy is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Sara Giannini.

Special thanks to Likeminds for hosting the event.

Likeminds (formerly Dansmakers)
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203
1021 KP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€17 regular / €13 student
(includes meal)

Part of Edition IX Introductory Event

For tickets see Introductory Event listing

Research Commissions

Susanne Altmann

Susanne Altmann (lives and works in Dresden) is a feminist art historian, curator, and leading scholar in the contextualisation of women’s artistic production in former East Germany, working to reorient historical understandings of the region in relation to Eastern Europe rather than to the West. Her new research investigates media experimentation connecting women’s art and working methods, from the early Soviet avant-garde through the last years of the Eastern Bloc.

Elisabeth Rafstedt on When Technology Was Female

Visitor report

Spring 2024

Portrait: Elisabeth Rafstedt, photo by Rietlanden Women's Office.

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At If I Can’t Dance we see the visitor report as a method of documentation. The affectual, relational and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats. To supplement such formats, If I Can’t Dance commissions written visitor reports, which offer subjective responses to a lived experience of a work and its context. The visitor report is, therefore, not to be confused with a critical review. It is first and foremost a form of witnessing. The people commissioned to write the report span a range of positions and practices within and outside the field of art. For the conversation and film programme accompanying the launch of Susanne Altman’s publication we invited designer Elisabeth Rafstedt.

Read the visitor report

When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

Publication

Available via the If I Can’t Dance webshop

Continuities and ruptures between the early Soviet (c.1917) and late state socialist (c.1980s) periods are examined through detailed discussions of a wide range of women’s artistic practices, including Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Věra Chytilová, Natalia LL, Dora Maurer, the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group, Běla Kolářová, Evelyn Richter, Zorka Ságlová, and many others. Featuring over one hundred images of works ranging from costume sketches and stage maquettes, to photographs and film stills, the book offers a sweeping study of over seventy years of women’s artistic production and is meant for any reader engaged at the intersections of feminist and (post-)socialist art histories.

Author: Susanne Altmann
Graphic design: Experimental Jetset
Managing editor: Megan Hoetger
Series editor: Frédérique Bergholtz
Copy editor: Janet Grau
Page count: 320
ISBN: 978-94-92139-22-1

Acknowledgements

When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989 is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger who also serves as managing editor for the publication.

Special thanks to all who allowed for image reproductions, including: A.Lupas, P420, Bologna, and the Pejkoski Collection, London; The Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, New York/ Scala Florence; the Deutsche Fotothek; Dóra Maurer and the Vintage Galéria, Budapest; Else Gabriel; the Estate of Běla Kolářová; the Estate of Zorka Ságlová and Hunt Kastner Gallery, Prague; the Evelyn Richter Archiv der Ostdeutschen Sparkassenstiftung im Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; Jan Krumbach and the Ester Krumbachová Archive; the Kunstsammlung Jena; Lindenau-Museum Altenburg; the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; MOMus – Museum of Modern Art – Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki; Monika Andres; the Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Florence; the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Ostkreuz – Agentur der Fotografen GmbH; the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; Tina Bara; Verena Kyselka; and Zofia Kulik and the KwieKulik Foundation.

When Technology Was Female

Film programme

Saturday 20 January 2024, 14–18hr

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Taking over all three floors of the Goethe’s canal house on Herengracht, the installation features a selection of works from across different geographic, temporal and aesthetic constellations, including greater- and lesser-known works like Aelita (1924, dir. Yakov Protazanov); Zemlya (1929, dir. Oleksandr Dovzhenko); Fraülein Schmetterling (1965, dir. Kurt Barthel); Daisies (1966, dir. Věra Chytilová); Wäscherinnen (1972, dir. Jürgen Böttcher); Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1979, dir. Kira Muratova); and Signale (1989, Erfurt Women Artists’ Group).

Accessibility information

– Seated event
– First floor, no elevator
– No wheelchair accessible WC; gender neutral WC
– Language: English

Acknowledgements

When Technology Was Female is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is led by programme curator Megan Hoetger.

Technical preparation of the programme was supported by Julia Sokolnicka with installation assistance from Viola Karsten and the team of Goethe-Institut Amsterdam.

Goethe-Institut Amsterdam
Herengracht 470

1017 CA Amsterdam

€7,50 regular / €5 students
Purchase your ticket here

When Technology Was Female

Book Launch

Saturday 20 January 2024, 18.30-20hr

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Following an afternoon film programme is a lively conversation between the art historian and design collective Experimental Jetset with whom she worked to realise her book’s experimental form. Moderated by Megan Hoetger (managing editor), they discuss performativity, strategies of enactment, and the intersections with political histories of design that link the early Soviet avant-garde, the (post-)punk era and today. They also touch on works by artists including Alexandra Exter, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Sibylle Bergemann, Kira Muratova, Věra Chytilová, Tina Bara, Evelyn Richter and the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group.

Accessibility information

– Seated event

– First floor, no elevator

– No wheelchair accessible WC; gender neutral WC

– Language: English

Acknowledgements

When Technology Was Female is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance. The commission is