DANCETELLING

DANCETELLING - NINEL ÇAM van CHAPULL . danceteller
ICH TAUFE MICH EUROPA – JE M'APPELLE EUROPE – I DO BAPTISE MYSELF TO EUROPE

How long are dance pieces to live? What to do so that choreographies have a longer life span? That dance is an ephemeral art discipline is a fact. As soon as the performance is over, the access to the art piece is quite difficult. Does the end of the performance mean its death? Even though the technologies, mostly the possibilities in recording moved images, caused rigorous changes in capturing dance into a media, so that to different times and different places people have access to at least to some visual traces of the performances; and even that the act of capturing dance in moved images is getting more and more treated as an art-making process, it is still an important theme how to 'conserve' a dance piece.

When I decided in 2013 to declare the copyright of the choreography ICH TAUFE MICH EUROPA free, of which I am the choreographer, I just had this very question to answer: under which conditions am I ready to give a free copyright, so that the piece can be reproduced by other dancers with a necessary empathy and alive enough. With alive, I mean that the performance can be reproduced adjusted to the character, worldview and abilities of the dancer. The qualities of alive would be out of my might, but that the dancer have the access to my thought processes and ways of solutions, to the scores I worked with and the tasks with which I build the choreography, I thought, was my responsibility. Should I meet them and have time with them while I am telling them about all these? A more realistic answer convinced me, I decided to make a video.

Since the dances I am interested in, and which I am producing are highly intertwined with the reflecting and researching processes, I decided to develop a helping tool for the dancer with which they can find easy enough the access to this piece: a video, where I am talking about the choreography. Far from the very dominant character of images, I decided to speak about the choreography in a storyteller manner.

I do thank my colleague, artistic researcher Rania Khalil, for the idea which she proposed, while I was speaking about the dance performance she was not able to see, about which I was such keen to make her somehow know more about it. She interrupted my speaking and told to me that I should perform it in a storytelling attitude. So did it happen, that DANCETELLING found a birth.

[ICH TAUFE MICH EUROPA had premiere on 20^th September 2013 at State Art Gallery Stuttgart/ Germany.]