Cross Pollination, a meeting platform for the dialogue between practices
Infrastructure for embodied research, knowledge and exchange between performers/researchers
Cross Pollination platform creates spaces in which we explore how we produce and share an ecology of knowledge, embody it, develop it and document it, as it passes through personal practices, disciplines and traditions, including the practices of those who have developed a highly personal mix of expertise, disciplines and skills. We are thinking how these bodies of knowledge can be documented, how they can write or be written, and become part of a living archive, in which they can be both personal and become-with others, as part of shared culture or history.
How do we keep the work (and the people who do it) alive?
Individual performers and researchers who work project-based or freelance are often confronted with professional loneliness and a fragmentation in their work and in their relationship with institutions, funds, groups and other artists. As more and more people are working this way, we think it is useful to look at the challenges and opportunities. Could a performer network work as an individual performer’s alternative to existing theatre networks ? The image is something like the bees that pollinate the flowers. This network would be accessible to individual performers who can cross-pollinate, visit, work, train.
Techniques and Documentation
What kinds of techniques and documentation can we use for the dialogue between practices/embodied research? Propositions so far have included: No Table, Chain Interviews, Drifting and What If sessions, handwritten/-drawn documents inspired by alchemical papers
Some questions that lie underneath the platform:
- How do you document and share performative training and knowledge through mediums that are an addition and alternative to using words? What happens to the content in these different mediums?
- How to organize the resulting material so it is accessible and useful for a wide variety of individuals with very different and personal specializations?
- What happens to knowledge when it is transferred from one highly specialised and personal practitioner to another with a different background, experience and knowledge?
- What does it mean to have a dialogue between existing practices and performance cultures and knowledge when every practitioner / performer is becoming a unique constellation of elements?
- How can freelance performers be empowered as carriers and shapers of theater culture, and create a healthy relationship with people who work in art institutions, researchers, programmers of stages, reviewers etc. What roles can the Third Theaters play in this? In a sense, this point speaks also about building some kind of connection or network between individuals.
- How can freelance performers form networks that are fluid and flexible, but hold relationships that have coherence, generosity, trust and (personal) history?
Values and modes
Here are some of the values and modes we see underlying the meeting:
DIALOGUE: using different forms of dialogue and exchanges, but also the value of dialogue in itself, as a symptom of life and aliveness.
TRANSFORMATIONS: knowledge changes shape and meaning when it is shared between bodies, minds, disciplines or documented through media like video, writing or drawing. These transformations can help a creation, knowledge or idea to unfold instead of in-fold (fold into itself and become hermetic, isolated and un-relatable to others).
SCORES: using, repeating and transforming scores can give a grip on the methodology and process, in dance, music and theater, but also in conversations and other interactions.
REPETITION: repetitions can reveal slow changes, and multiple aspects, mechanics and perspectives of an issue or process. Repeating scores in different forms and disciplines.
CONTINUITY: what does it mean, in your own practice, in relation to your colleagues, in relation to time passing on, also before and after your own life.