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.

If I Can’t Dance
WG-Plein 881

1054 SM Amsterdam

Tickets: €7.50 & €5 (students)

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!

If I Can’t Dance
WG-Plein 881

1054 SM Amsterdam

Tickets: €7.50 & €5 (students)

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

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

(meeting point at Emmaplein at 16:30hr)

Tickets

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

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.

If I Can’t Dance & CBK Zuidoost,

location SHEBANG, Amsterdam

Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film at our production studio in Westerdok and online on the ificantdance.studio. Set against the backdrop of second-wave feminism and the larger struggle to escape the repressive authoritarian regime in 1970s Brazil, Sea of Roses proposes a set of women figures whose behaviours and violent acts deliver a raw critique of institutions and established beliefs regarding the family, education, religion, romantic love and the honouring of the father. Following a gruesome attempted murder at the start of the film, mother and daughter set off on a journey full of mischievous, surreal events, which leaves viewers situated in a complex negotiation of identification and alienation. We are happy to offer a new subtitled version of this important film after the copy with the English subtitles was burnt in a fire at the cinematheque of São Paulo.

Sea of Roses, 1h30 min, col. Brazilian/Portuguese with English Subtitles.

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam

Studio (streaming only once at 19hr)

ificantdance.studio

Free, the audience number is limited to 25 people, first come first served

Corona QR code is required to attend

Soup and drinks will be served from 18hr, the screening starts at 19hr

Before the screening the library display is open to visit

Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film online at the ificantdance.studio. Ulrike Ottinger’s world of ‘freaks’ or unusual characters with physical or mental oddities gradually seem much less odd than their physically ‘normal’ contemporaries. Over the course of five episodes the film traces different origin stories.

Freak Orlando, 126 min, col. German with English subtitles

ificantdance.studio

Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film at our production studio in Westerdok and online on the ificantdance.studio. Three women are accused of the murder of a shopkeeper. The film subtly layers the forms of microaggressions experienced by the women and carried out by male partners in their lives and work. The narrative poignantly intersperses silence and laughter, which comes to a culmination in the last scene of the film. In 1983 artist Barbara Kruger reviewed the film for Art Forum and described how at each screening she attended in New York the infectious laughter of the women spread from the screen to the theatre audience.

A Question of Silence, 92 min, col. Dutch with English Subtitles.

Soup and drinks will be served from 18hr the screening starts at 19hr.

Artist Pauline Curnier Jardin will be present.

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam

Studio (for 24 hours)
ificantdance.studio

Free, the audience number is limited to 35 people, first come first served

Corona QR code is required to attend

At the premises of the If I Can’t Dance production studio, both in Westerdok and online, archivist Anik Fournier and scholar Giulia Damiani create a research space and dramaturgy of activities inspired by Curnier Jardin’s feature film in the making. Departing from the artist’s somatic world of martyred saints, secreting beings and anatomic caves, a library display explores potentials of transforming bodies, human and more-than-human, in cinematic language. Furthermore, the ificantdance.studio accumulates other resources around the vocabularies, stories and feminist genealogies informing Curnier Jardin’s film production. The project runs in conjunction with the exhibition Waiting for Agatha, Sebastian and the Rest of the Holy Children — Unfolding A Filmic Research at Index in Stockholm.

Library display

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam
Exhibition Opening: 27 October, 17hr
Open daily Wednesday, 13–17hr

Studio display

ificantdance.studio

Please note that to compensate the period of closure due to the lock down, the library display will be extended until 9 February

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Explosion Ma Baby, 2016. HD video and sound, 7 minutes (excerpt) © Pauline Curnier Jardin

The artist’s research in Italy is shared through a video letter and trailer, alongside viewings of Explosion Ma Baby (2016), in which naked babies are lifted in front of alter pieces during Italy’s chaotic Saint Sebastian festival, and Qu’un sang impur (2019). In the latter, based on Jean Genet’s homo-erotic film Un chant d’amour, Qu’un sang impur (1950), the male bodies in the original are replaced with menopausal women celebrating their erotic powers.

Qu’un sang impur, 16 min 5 sec, col, German with English Subtitles

Explosion Ma Baby, 9 min, col

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

A meditation on human violence and the possibility of transformation, Fire for Water is a solo performance by Los Angeles based artist MPA. The duality of fire as a force of both creation and destruction is a metaphor that burns throughout the piece, igniting the complicated entanglements between wounds and armaments, protection and oppression, spectacles and wars. Led by an original soundtrack, the piece enacts a dream-like space where different visions appear. Water vessels, armors, fires, and telepathic means are characters in a story that unfolds across different modes of being. Speaking to the wounds that inhabit us, self-armaments are undone, leaving space to the desire to be wet and to be with water.

After it premiered with If I Can’t Dance at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen in October last year, Fire for Water will be presented this month as a full theatre piece in the space of Gessnerallee in Zürich.

Gessnerallee

Gessnerallee 8

88001 Zürich

Switzerland

Tickets

Departing from the question ‘Can we stop bullets with our minds?’, the performance develops further the artist’s investigation of psychological and esoteric dynamics propelling human violence and systems of defense. The piece is conceived specifically for the spaces and gardens of the Kunstfort, a former military fort on the Amsterdam defence line. The fort’s bunker becomes a dream-like space where different visions appear. As if in a perverted fashion show, self-armaments are done and undone, igniting the complicated entanglements between protection and oppression, spectacles and wars. After the two evenings, remnants of the performance stay at the Kunstfort conjuring an afterlife of the dreams awakened.

18hr, shuttle departure at 17hr
20hr, shuttle departure at 19hr

€10/€12,50 with shuttle from Amsterdam

Purchase your tickets here

Exhibition:

Friday 22 October – Sunday 5 December 2021

Friday – Sunday, 13–17hr

€4 adults / €2 children 12–18 years / free children up to 12 years

Purchase your ticket here

Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen

Fortwachter 1

2141 EE Vijfhuizen (Haarlemmermeer)

The Netherlands

The artist shares a public address in the context of El Caldo/the Broth, a festival transmitted by Gessnerallee, Zürich. Thinking about oceanic and diasporic journeys, El Caldo focusses on the invisible ways in which people, in order to survive, communicate through waves, spores, winds and telepathies. Somewhere in between the lines of practical communiqué and channelled phantasms, MPA’s sonic meditation ruminates on the foreignness of coming together across cosmological distances. The radio transmission is one of the many manifestations of her performance commission Fire for Water.

You can listen to the piece here.

Gessnerallee
Gessnerallee 8
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

The audience is seated astride a sort of catwalk with a sword at one end. In angular sunglasses, black jeans and a dark hoodie, the artist offers concise statements: ‘These are dark times, but these are not the darkest times’; ‘Will we save each other from ourselves?’ She closes by kneeling, repeating the same phrase – a ritualistic moment in which ‘spectators’ might negotiate their position and possibly join her.

Introduction 
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

A database archiving the artist’s work, which is assembled through storytelling and reproductive labour methods developed with his collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping over the nearly three-years of their eponymous durational performance of archiving. The website catalogs nearly 2400 ‘studio objects’, tracing the web-like network of relations that characterize the artist’s practice and highlighting the multiplicity of ways in which objects and their stories can be entered.

giftsciencearchive.net

The exhibition brings together works exploring humour as a strategy for describing alternative representations of gay male sexuality and mental health; and which centre the influence of feminist figures, including the artist’s former teacher and long-time friend Carolee Schneemann. Through such strategies, the artist consciously and systematically links with the history of feminist art practice.

The show is accompanied by commissioned and restaged performances from Cassie Augusta Jørgensen (DK) & Rory Pilgrim (UK / NL), Harilay Rabenjamina (FR) and Ebun Sodipo (UK). For more on the exhibition and public programme, visit: https://autoitaliasoutheast.org

Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday 12-17hr

Auto Italia, London

44 Bonner Rd, Bethnal Green

London E2 9JS

United Kingdom

In the final process event, the artist and collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping sit together with If I Can’t Dance archive and research curator Anik Fournier to discuss the structures of ‘collaboration’ within the group’s performance of archiving and the modes of feminist storytelling and knowledge production developed over the course of their eighteen months working together. They also share insights into their respective roles and shared tasks throughout the process.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Free, live-streamed

As a pendant piece to the artist’s exhibition for the Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021, the durational performance invites visitors inside the project’s studio-depot where the artist and collaborators Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping offer a peak into the group’s working processes and relational methods.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, studio (A14)
Sarphatistraat 470
1018GW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10, registration required

Conceived within the frame of the Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021, the exhibition presents a wide selection of never-before-seen works, which have been unearthed in the artist’s performance of archiving, including paintings on paper and fabric, photographs and video, and works by Senga Nengudi and Carolee Schneemann from his personal collection. The installation highlights the artist’s long-standing practices of writing, painting, posing, and feminist citationality.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, studio (A15)
Sarphatistraat 470
1018GW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10, registration required

The installation opens up the process of the ‘monumental’ 18-month collaborative performance Gift Science Archive (GSA) to the public for haptic engagements with the artist’s working and archiving processes. Visitors are invited to peruse the GSA database and to pull materials from the collection for a closer look and, over a cup, for a story. The ‘research experience’ is thus set into relational motion, by conversations – a central part of Murray-Wassink’s practice.

mistral

Groenhoedenveem 2
(entrance round the corner at Veemkade)
1019 BL Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Research Visits: Thursdays and Saturdays, 12–17hr
Book here

Virtual Tours: Fridays, 17–18hr
Book here

Free

Exhibition folder

The second of the Gift Science Archive process events unfolds over eight months, as the artist corresponds with Bilbao-based curator Aimar Arriola, reflecting on how ‘queer’ relationships – including the one in the making here – form, grow, shift and blossom. Across the letters, they share insights into their lives and perspectives on the primary materials (thoughts, feelings and relationships) and key thematics (sex, sexuality, gender, health and self-care) in Murray-Wassink’s art/life practice. The exchange (26 June 2020–6 February 2021) is available for the public as a quilt-like network of chapters at ificantdance.studio.

ificantdance.studio

In the opening of a three-part series, the artist takes stock of the role of ‘value’ in his 25-year oeuvre at the start of his collaboration with the Gift Science Archive group, including storyteller Amalia Calderón, programme curator Megan Hoetger, and independent curator Radna Rumping. In connection to the group’s year-long studio residency at the Rijksakademie, the conversation unfolds as a studio visit with Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University, Vivian van Saaze and members of the Amsterdam artist community.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Sarphatistraat 470

1018 GW Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

The artist’s textile paintings adorn the space throughout the weekend. Here, he shares on his multimedia practice, concentrating on its early beginnings in 1993, in a slide show that makes clear his reliance on feminist figures like Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke and Adrian Piper. He then dances before a dual projection – a Schneemann video and footage from his studio – in and out of step with ‘Starlight’ by The Supermen Lovers.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Part of the Arts Everywhere Festival, this Big Ideas in Art + Culture talk with Carter is a collective listening session masquerading as a lecture. Pairing musical selections from his Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show with close readings of Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack, Carter together with his audience explore what happens when we apply the painting to our social worlds.

Art Gallery of Guelph
358 Gordon St

Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1, USA

No RSVP required.

For more information, click here.

Convened by Dr. Saidiya Hartman, this event is part of the “black poesis/radical composition” series, which examines literary experiments in prose and poetics by contemporary writers, critics and artists whose work in sonic production, visual culture, critical thought, textual assemblage and auto-theory articulates possibilities of living and making inside the racialized enclosure. Carter is joined by Black Revelry contributor Samiya Bashir for a reading from the publication followed by a small academic seminar led by Carter, Bashir and Hartman.

Columbia University
Deutsches Haus
420 W. 116 Street
New York 10027, USA

No RSVP required, seating on a first come first serve basis.

For more information, click here.

Organized by Dr. Aleia Monae Brown and Carter, this event features a five-course meal with readings from Black Revelry, as well as sonic interludes from the Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show, between courses.

Coffee + Spice

1025 West Fifth Street

Greenville, North Carolina 97834, USA

The Berlin launch of Derrais Carter’s publication Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’ is hosted by the wonderful Hopscotch Reading Room, a bookshop centering non-western and diasporic perspectives. For the launch, the poet-scholar is joined in conversation by managing editor Megan Hoetger and publication designer Karoline Świeżyński to discuss key conceptual and material elements of the album-book, including notions of the detail and the sprawl in relation to the readerly experience. The dialogue closes with a DJ set from Carter, which draws together a selection of songs from his Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio shows, aired between December 2020 and February 2021.

Hopscotch Reading Room
Kurfürstenstraße 14/Haus B
10785 Berlin, Germany

Free

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs. Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

To accompany the release of Carter’s publication, a seven-hour live broadcasting marathon featuring all three of his radio shows, as well as a very special one-hour guest set from publication contributor DJ scholar Lynnée Denise. The live broadcast is hosted by the Sandberg Instituut where the space is transformed into a listening lounge replete with pillows, blankets, and cocktail selections. At the finale of the marathon, Carter hosts a conversation with artist and publication contributor S*an D. Henry Smith on ritual and revelry. The live session in Amsterdam is followed by radio broadcasts in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam
Fred. Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

Other broadcasts
Monday 29 November 2021, 12-19hr
dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 28 November 2021, 2-9hr
reboot.fm, Berlin

In conjunction with the end of his residency in the Sandberg Instituut’s Fine Arts department, Carter presents a display of elements from Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’, bringing attention to the incredible scope of haptic and sensorial experiences held together in the publication’s LP sleeve.

Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam
Fred. Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode three, FREQUENCY, shares songs and rhythms that just keep coming back, whether as remakes and remixes, or as embodied memories.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 21 February 2021, 2-4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode two, DISPERSAL, presents a playlist built around ‘the stretch’ of time, of energy – collective and personal – and, most basically, of song length.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 24 January 2021, 2–4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode one, GATHERING, anticipates the winter solstice, offering a rumination on ‘coming together’ from whatever distances are between us.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 20 December 2020, 2-4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Structured after a ‘late-night radio show’ – or ‘Quiet Storm’ hour – the artist sits before a projection of Ernie Barnes’ Sugar Shack (1976), a painting as rhizome for black intimacy. The project uses art history and popular music to create a Black written and performative mood, what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman calls the ‘black ecstatic’. Anecdotes on Gladys Knight and Marvin Gaye – and a circulating bottle of cognac – make for a connected vibe.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Upon the invitation of the newly established Carmelo Bene Archive in Lecce, Sara Giannini is joined by performance curator and educator Silvia Bottiroli to discuss the practices of contextualisation and de-centering that are at play in the book. In particular, they dwell upon Giannini’s approach to Bene’s controversial legacy in relation to performance genealogies in Italy, as well as to feminist and performance-based methodologies of history-writing.

Archivio Carmelo Bene
Piazza Carducci
Lecce, Italy, 73100

Free, no reservation required
More information: Facebook.com

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608

1013 BV Amsterdam

A few external spots are available. If you want to join, please send a short motivation (150 words) around your own personal ‘undead’ to ssg@ificantdance.org before October 26.

On the anniversary of the book Maquillage as Meditation, Sara Giannini is joined by performance curator and researcher Daniel Blanga Gubbay for a gathering that articulates the questions and the embodied research methodologies that are at the core of this work: What do we do with the “dirt of our past”? How does one reconcile—or even just face—those early influential figures? How do we understand the experiences they engender(ed), even if it might not be our desire to return to those experiences? But what can happen if we do return? Book contributor Arnisa Zeqo also joins the conversation.

San Serriffe
Sint Annenstraat 30
1012 HE Amsterdam

Free, no reservation required

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Palazzo della Malinconia

Sent via the If I Can’t Dance newsletter

An intimate and experimental text explores the researcher’s conflictual relationship with actor, author, director and public persona Carmelo Bene since she first saw him on Italian television at age 10. Following this entry into dis-identity, ecstasy and the feminine, Bene’s first cinematic experiment, the short-film Hermitage (1968), is shown.

25 min, col, Italian with English subtitles

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservation required

Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, Anemones centres on a new translation of Simone Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of.’ The text elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

After the publication was launched in Amsterdam in December 2021, we are thrilled to announce its upcoming presentation in Vancouver, adding another bead to the long and beautiful relationship of Lisa Robertson with Western Front. The event will begin with a conversation with Yoon Sook Cha, a Vancouver-based writer, photographer, and scholar of Simone Weil, and will be followed by a reading by Robertson of her translations of three troubadour poems and a Q&A period with the audience. For those not able to join onsite, the event can be followed online via livestreaming.

Reading by Lisa Robertson and conversation with Yoon Sook Cha

Tickets
Live stream

Workshop:

Saturday 4 February 2023, 13-16hr

Tickets

Western Front

303 E 8th Ave
Vancouver BC V5T 1S1
Canada

The author’s research on troubadour poetry yields this experiment in thinking ‘near and with’ philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, it centres on a new translation of Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of’ that elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

To accompany the release of Robertson’s publication, an afternoon with a Radio Emma Broadcast, live (poetry) reading by Lisa Robertson, and a floral action by Benny Nemer. During the radio show, curator archive and research Anik Fournier will be in conversation with Lisa Robertson, contributor Benny Nemer, designers of the book Rietlanden Womens Office’s Johanna Ehde and Elisabeth Rafstedt, and director Frédérique Bergholtz. Over the course of the day you are welcome to pass by and experience a floral action by Benny Nemer, browse through Robertson’s research materials and buy your copy of the book for a reduced launch price of 15 € (through 9 January, afterwards 22 €).

Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Singel 372, Amsterdam
Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

13–14hr

Anik Fournier a.o., Radio Emma

Tune in via Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

14–17hr, ongoing
Benny Nemer, Floral Action

15hr (fully booked)

Reading – Lisa Robertson
A poem by Bernart de Ventadorn

16hr (fully booked)

Reading – Lisa Robertson
A poem by William IX of Poitiers

Both readings are fully booked, but please pass by for your copy and for experiencing Benny Nemers floral action between 14-15hr; 15.30-16hr; and 16.30-17hr

Free

The researcher shifts registers between poetry and academic study in examining rhyme and voice among medieval troubadours – the first European poets to write in their spoken regional vernacular – in the Languedoc region. Her outline of voice and vernacular as a space where power is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured is punctuated by readings from her poetry.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

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

PAF, St. Erme

NIDA Art Colony, Vilnius

PAF, St. Erme

Essaouira, Marrakech

Vleeshal, Middelburg / If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam

Essaouira, Marrakech

This documentary follows the personal discussions, people and places related to four women originally from Lebanon and Syria: Waad, Hanin, Rogine and Zeina. In their new cities, they face questions about the meaning of their cultures, family and political visions. Is exile a choice or an accident? What is home? How do we behave in our new countries? Does the abuse of the word ‘refugee’ affect us?

43 min, col, Arabic with English subtitles

Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10

5611 NH Eindhoven
The Netherlands

This documentary follows the personal discussions, people and places related to four women originally from Lebanon and Syria: Waad, Hanin, Rogine and Zeina. In their new cities, they face questions about the meaning of their cultures, family and political visions. Is exile a choice or an accident? What is home? How do we behave in our new countries? Does the abuse of the word ‘refugee’ affect us?

Avant-première with Syrian banquet by Aleppo Kitchen, and a music performance by Rogine Hassan.

43 min, col, Arabic with English subtitles

ZID Theatre
De Roos van Dekamaweg 1

1061 HR Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€12,50 adults / €10 students
(includes meal)

The film, whose title translates as ‘to the health of allies’, narrates layers of parallel events in Lebanon and Syria during the pan-Arab Nasserite movement of the 1950s and 60s. Made from 2003–16 and told from the different perspective of the artist’s relatives, opinions and recollections of the same incidents begin to contradict each other, mixing personal and political events to reveal time as three-dimensional rather than linear.

Eye Filmmuseum
IJpromenade 1

1031 KT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€5 

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Participants are asked to bring a text they consider feminist and an object or fabric with interesting tactile or sound properties.

Podium Mozaïek
Bos en Lommerweg 191, 1055 DT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

(includes meal)

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Centro Municipal de San Francisco
Plaza Corazón de María s/n, 48003 Bilbao
Spain

Free, reservations required

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Huiskamer van de Buurt de Tagerijn
Balboastraat 18, 1057 VW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

One of a series of public meetings putting into practice the research about attention, sensation and perception conducted during her three-month residency at La Ferme du Buisson. Through various immersive devices that provoke encounters between choreographic artists and spectators, Lefkowitz creates the conditions for an increased perceptual experience through the use of gaze, touch, walking and liminal states between sleep and waking.

La Ferme du Buisson
Allée de la Ferme, 77186 Noisiel
France

Free

At last the Amsterdam public can view the 2019 installation that concludes the eponymous video trilogy named after the last of several maned lionesses – a cipher for queer attachment and desire – documented in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The artist came to know about the lioness through conservationists’ camera-trap and behaviour footage. 

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Museumplein 10
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€20 adults / €10 students and CJP

The artist’s LHB (2017) and BRIDGIT (2016) are shown alongside the films that influenced their maker’s thinking around ‘queer wildernesses’: Dani Leventhal and Jared Buckhiester’s Hard As Opal (2015) and Jonathan Rattner’s The Interior (2016). These works enquire into queer life in the densely populated urban contexts that dominate popular LGBTQI+ narratives. A sunset walk through Bergen aan Zee’s dune landscape to the North Sea follows the screening.

6 min, col, English

Filmtheater Cinebergen
Eeuwigelaan 7, 1861 CL Bergen
The Netherlands

€15 adults / students
(includes free bus service, reservations required)

This new performance engages third-year SNDO – School for New Dance Development students in a two-week workshop towards a public presentation. The artist’s solo work this is a performance. / you are a community. / you are my material. / this is a prison. / leave when you want is opened up to other bodies who conceive something else to share.

A night of poetry, dance, performance and music lead by the artist and Derrais Carter and facilitated by sidony o’neal and Adee Roberson (Tropic Green) for the talent development project of the Bijlmer Parktheater whereby young talent from eighteen years old with experience in performance can further deepen their competencies in poetry, photography, theatre and dance.

In Amsterdam to further develop their commission, the artist presents a performance that, as Litia Perta writes, is ‘less about a whole picture – a total or totalizing knowledge – than it is about intimacy, failure to see, nearness that obstructs rather than clarifies … this work unsettles, undoes, asks what it means, looks like, feels like, to come undone, to see only fragments, to have little or no context.’

FLAM – Forum for Live Art Amsterdam at Arti et Amicitiae
Rokin 112

1012 LB Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€7,50 

Writer Jamie Hale has reflected on this work in The Oregonian: ‘… no matter how hard keyon gaskin tries to make the performance not a thing, its not a thing is somehow the most captivating thing in town.’

Dansmakers Podium
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203

1021 KP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€7,50 adults / €5 students

Small groups of audience members are invited to walk through a dense forest of coloured transparent and opaque partition walls that hang from the ceiling, some of which rotating in place. Visitors are also allowed to come upstairs into the lighting box to have a view from above, crossing over conventional orientations within the theatre space. Performer Tanja Baudoin calmly manoeuvres through the labyrinth on a fast bike.

Frascati
Nes 63
1012 KD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10 / €7,50 discount, reservations required

With narration and film, Anastas introduces her study of artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76). In this piece, Piper appears as a disco dancer in modified Mythic Being guise, performing for the first time in formal terms for an art audience. Additionally, two other works by Piper are screened: It’s Just Art (1980) and Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978).

If I Can’t Dance
Westerdok 606–608, 1013 BV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free

In empathy with female subjectivities, several of Eszter Salamon’s works focus on feminist genealogies and transgenerational relations. M/OTHERS reconsiders the structures of generations by exploring the mother-daughter relation, aiming to move away from social norms and arrive at new modalities of action, feeling and perception.

If I Can’t Dance and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez commissioned Eszter Salomon to make a new performance in the frame of the research project on Delphine Seyrig’s unrealised black-and-white silent feature film Calamity based on the correspondence between American frontierswoman Calamity Jane and her daughter.

Splendor
Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116, 1011 LX Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Part of Amsterdam Art Weekend

€15 regular / €10 students

Tour

10-12 August 2019

Tanz im August

HAU (Hebbel am Ufer)

Hallesches Ufer 34, 10963

Berlin, Germany

19 and 20 November 2019

If I Can’t Dance (Splendor)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

(in the frame of the research project by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez on actress, feminist activist and video director Delphine Seyrig (b. 1932, Beirut. d. 1990, Paris)

22 and 23 November 2019

Ménagerie de Verre

12 Rue Lechevin, 75011

Paris, France

(in the frame of Les Inaccoutumés)

18 February 2019

Museo Reina Sofía

C. de Sta. Isabel, 52, 28012

Madrid, Spain

(in the frame of the exhibition Defiant Muses Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s)

A reactivation of actress, video-maker and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig’s unrealised black and white silent feature about the letters of US-American frontierswoman Calamity Jane to her daughter. At the heart of Seyrig’s interest in the story is the relationship between mother and daughter, which she explores as an actress in Chantal Akerman’s Letters Home (1986), screened here alongside camerawoman Babette Mangolte’s Calamity rushes and Seyrig’s videos S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1976), Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1976) and Inês (1974).

Eye Filmmuseum
IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€5 adults / students

In the frame of Centre Pompidou’s programme Mai 68 – Assemblée Générale, this film presentation of Our Future Network (2016) derives from a larger work that traces the genealogy of ‘feminist new materialist’ and ‘sexual difference’ theory. In addition, ten participants gather to reflect on the focus they each have on feminism today and their relationship to 1970s feminisms.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris
France

Free

Accompanied by a screening of the artist’s Their desire rang through the halls and into the tower (2014) highlighting five practices developed within the Gender Studies programme at Utrecht University: double-track approach to institutional politics, international networking, pluralism, affirmative critique and transdisciplinarity. Followed by a conversation between the artist, Casco curator Staci Bu Shea and If I Can’t Dance curator and book co-editor, Susan Gibb.

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
The Netherlands

Free

The six film installation traces the stories of as many connected feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. Through observation, interviews and archival research the artist proposes how to grapple with contemporary society through feminist methodologies. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty propositions for feminist collective political practices.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Exhibition Opening and Book Launch: Friday 27 April, 19–23.30hr

Archive Kabinett

Müllerstraße 133, 13349 Berlin

Germany

Free