The Cross Pollination Sessions
The CP sessions create laboratory spaces for performers, theatre makers and researchers, in the tradition of theatre laboratory and shaped to fit contemporary realities and needs. The laboratory functions as a temporary pressure cooker, providing content and techniques that allow personal researches and practices to connect on the ground level of doing together. It creates a shared space of entangled research and creating a web of meaningful relationships between individuals.
In Cross Pollination sessions, performers and researchers work together to develop collaborative and dialogical practices of research and creation, that are built on the principles of mixing, exchanging and transforming personal and traditional knowledge en techniques. The CP members devise strategies and exercises for generating dialogues between different crafts, professions and skills. Examples are: What If, No-table, Interview Threads, Drifting, Human Juggling – see somewhere.
The laboratory space is built on the fertility of differences. The group finds each other in curiosity for other perspectives, looking for equivalences, translations, transformations and parallels, while the tension in-between opens up new spaces and works as a catalyst for emergent possibilities.
Each comes with their own research, with their own motivation, drive, questions, experience, background, techniques and practices. In the laboratory the participants create a shared research question and working structure, which enables the group to ‘get to work’. During the work, each participant can frame their own research in the context of this shared research and experience. The results of the shared research will then also be different and personal to each participant and lead to different conclusions, insights, results or performative material.
This slice of intense shared reality that is created inside the laboratory then becomes a touchstone for all involved, like an experiment in a science laboratory. It roots the dialogues and reflections that belong to it in a concrete experience that all have been part of. From there, the results can branch out into many directions, as each participant integrates their own conclusions and results into their research or performance practice.
The core group of cross pollination meets yearly for a few days to create new strategies of exchange we can develop throughout the year in our own work. These residency periods are introspective and vulnerable periods, where we exchange, transform and question our practices. We step into an empty room and start from there. For this reason, these sessions is on invitation. If you are interested to join and put your practice in the mix, please write to us!
Our residencies happened so far at the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Denmark, home of Odin Teatret, where we found a safe haven to challenge ourselves.