Amsterdam, 16 May 2023

Dear reader,

Spring has arrived. Time to give you our seasonal programme update. We do this with pleasure and excitement as in the past months all practitioners in our biennial programme, Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies (2022–23), have been further developing their work and now share with you – near and far – aspects of these trajectories in our online If I Can’t Dance Studio. With delight we’d like to take a moment here to remind you of the artists in the programme: Black Speaks Back, Jessika Khazrik and Constantina Zavitsanos; the researchers: Susanne Altmann, Samia Henni and Nuraini Juliastuti; and the fellow: Devika Chotoe. They all have, or will have, a presence in the studio, in dialogue with the curators Anik Fournier, Sara Giannini and Megan Hoetger.

With Edition IX we 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. These entanglements generate both possibilities for liberation and risks of further control. How do various technologies condition the performance and experience of one’s own body and of other bodies? And, in turn, how do different bodily experiences recondition, retune and perhaps even disrupt technologies? Bodies and Technologies lingers in this paradox, turning to the performance strategies and performance-based research methodologies of our artists and researchers to ask how technologies affect the experiences of bodies and vice versa.

To get a sense of how these strategies and methodologies unfold and materialise, this spring and summer we welcome you to visit – and encourage you to keep revisiting – the If I Can’t Dance Studio. Here you will find rooms in which you can get to know the individual productions more in depth, and where you can immerse yourself in the rhythms, structures, and textures of development. In tandem, we invite you to listen to the Studio Visits podcast series, in which the artists and researchers in the ninth edition give short introductions to their works-in-the-making.

The online studio is a space for our day-to-day work in regard to our biennial programme. Yet it also accommodates rooms for archive activations – Grant Watson’s How We Behave project – and works from local community members: Open Rehearsal participants Miyoung Chang, Dakota Guo, Benjamin Francis, and Clara Saito and guest artists Becket MWN and Aimée Zito Lema.

Right before the summer break we will get back to you with a sneak-peak into the final presentations of all productions, unfolding in a seasonal festival across venues in Amsterdam in the coming fall and winter. In tune with our vision of performance as a living methodology, the real preview is checking out what is happening in the studio – so be welcome and embark with us on these new productions and their sometimes unpredictable routes.

Frédérique Bergholtz,
with all of the If I Can’t Dance team