Matchpoint - Goethe-Institut TanzConnexions

Back home. Matchpoint.

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:46:09 +0200

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It’s such an enormous thing to listen, isn’t it? How often are we in sped-up, hyper-expectant dialogues post, pre, or even during performances? Artistic processes bent into production deadlines. Artistic ‘exchanges’ that sound more like a collection of rehearsed speeches. We know there can be more than that.

On the last night of the Matchpoint exchange, Cat Ruka proposed that we set up mattresses in one of the studios of HAU 3, and engage in a kind of artistic overnight Hui - or formal Maori assembly. Some of the reasons for doing this were wanting to give more time for questions that had come up, and the desire to go deeper - or somewhere special - in this particular artistic exchange.

At any moment in the night anyone of us could stand up, move to the microphone that had been set up to the side of the beds, and speak anything that was on our mind. The mattresses were pieced together like a puzzle forming one large shape in the center of the room. The lights were turned off. People spoke, slept, listened, dozed, and dreamt until the morning.

“I think in some way I've always been pissed off at Australia” - Noha Ramadan, around 3am.
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I’m back in Australia for the first time in 2 years. Shortly after Matchpoint, I traveled from my home in Amsterdam, to my home in Sydney, via Cairo where my family is from. Matchpoint was described as an artistic cultural exchange between artists from the Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions, so I guess we were somehow meant to be representatives of our respective cultures. We had the expected post/neo-post/retro-post identity-politics discussions; the impossibilities of and disinterest in cultural framing, the apparent impossibility of avoiding it.

I felt like a fake. What did I think I was doing there? If cultural exchange implies the promise of both excavating and sharing difference, what could I dig up and bring to the table/studio that was specific and in any way related to where… I … am… from? Um? Anyway, the real Australian representative is Jane McKernan, not me, right? (She’s true blue, and even wore a Kangaroo suit on stage). Being from Australia. Am I? I don’t really know what that means. Shit!

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I'm back in Sydney, catching up on the local news. After reading up on 2 court cases over ‘false’ claims to Aboriginal identity, I am red-eyed with the hum and drone of identity politics, anti-discriminatory legislation, political correctness, conservatism, bad journalism and the biggest problem of all: I can’t pretend I don’t understand!

I am in Australia in a way I never am in the Netherlands. Here I can practically smell the politics, the biases, and cultural complexities. To ignore them would be to choose a radical position as an ignorant aesthete, wear earplugs and jerk off. Being ‘back home’ means being unable to hide behind the experience of being a foreigner.

So now I am wondering – and I’ve been wondering about this for some time – how does proximity to cultural understanding affect my work? And what about the distance from it, the cultural confusion? Is there such a thing as culturally non-specific dance? If so, who can make it, or who (and where from) are the people who name it as such?

Maybe the kind of work I make is the work of someone engaged in cultural espionage. If I belong to the small group of artists in Matchpoint living somewhere different to where we grew up, is there something similar in our work that reflects the trans-national, Eurocentric homogenous bubble that is our geo-political identity?

I’ve become really interested in the degree to which people are in dialogue, or interdependency with their environments through their dance or performance making practices. I’m wondering what level of choice different people have about that. It seems that this is completely complicated by the necessary hyper-mobility of some artists. How much time do we spend circulating in dance-webs before we entirely abandon our locality? Sometimes I think it’s miraculous that our work is differentiated at all.

I want to know how to develop relationships with my environment(s) that are not cynical, antagonistic, or patriotic. I’m looking for something invested, something responsive, that can grow, something perhaps specific but not submissive to an idea of identity.

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we in the studio

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:55:12 +0200

https://picasaweb.google.com/106337606057843601931/28Septembre2011#5657493156798625282

https://picasaweb.google.com/106337606057843601931/28Septembre201102#5657495344415042450

https://picasaweb.google.com/106337606057843601931/28Septembre201103#5657505513712401778

Ayelen Parolin

What is "Matchpoint"?

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:18:36 +0200

You raise a question, I point out another. We avoid easy answers which would render our meeting pointless.

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Point1: the tapered sharp end of an object
Point2: a dot, a punctuation mark
Point3: a moment in time
Point4: a particular place
Point5: a mark on a surface
Point6: an item on a list
Point7: an idea or argument put forth by someone in a debate
Point8: the essential element of an intention
Point9: the purpose to be gained from doing something
Point10: the characteristics of a person
Point11: a unit of scoring, value, credit
Point12: to indicate direction
Point13: to take aim
Point14: to make a citation
Point15: to establish evidence
Point16: to indicate presence
Point17: to make something sharp
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Match1: contest... to be matched against
In what ways might we be involved in a competition with each other?
Most of us would like to think we are not.
But are there not factors external to our meeting - a marketplace of ideas perhaps - that require us to be pitted against each other despite our sincere desire to meet?
Or perhaps we are engaged in a collective fight against a structure that paradoxically sustains us?
Is this not a perennial struggle? That in a significant way our raison d'etre is hinged upon our abilities to raise questions, highlight doubts, resist being subsumed into an economy... while we operate at the same time, WITHIN this economy?
To contend against is to try and surmount a difficulty.
To contend for is to assert a position within a given space.
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Match2: equal... to meet one's match
You raise your arm from across the room, I respond my shaking my head.
You turn up the music, I try not to succumb to the demands of its rhythm.
How much should I allow you to push me?
How much will you push me?
Are we as strong as each other?
Is there surplus energy in our engagement and what do we do with it?
Or will I topple over... perhaps take you down together with me?
To equalise is to bring about the maximum transfer of power from one to the other.
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Match3: resemblance... to match up to
Yes, this sounds familiar. We recognise we might have heard this already before, even as we say the same things again... maybe this time in a different language... in a different order. A new turn of the same phrase might help us discover new territories, however small.
Something happens. Somebody speaks. Somebody moves.
Whatever does happen, somebody will speak and something will move.
It all adds up to an experience. Whatever happens, there will be an experience. But is this enough?
To correspond is to converse with the goal of achieving agreement, identification and/or congruity.
Can we challenge this?
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Match4: compatibility... to make a match
Is our coming together necessarily harmonious?
Like a shirt that goes well with a pair of shoes?
In our genuine desire to come together, in our ability to come together genuinely... what does it all look like from the outside? Whose and which agendas do we serve when we shake hands, share food, dance together and hug?
Don't get me wrong. I did want to shake your hands, I enjoyed sharing food, I felt less alone when we danced together, I also felt a tinge of regret when we hugged and said goodbye... there is so much we have yet to discover.
To marry is to fulfill a search.
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You raise a question, I point out another. We avoid easy answers which would render our meeting pointless.

Daniel Kok

Lonesome Potluck

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:03:11 +0200

Food is probably one of the earliest forms of cultural exchange. Matchpoint made a twist and asked the participating artists to reveal a bit of themselves through cooking. The task: food that you cook for yourself when you eat alone. More reflective than elaborate, the menu was a feast of lonesomeness, with boiled dumplings from supermarket, open face sandwich with salad, stir fried instant noodles, pan fried soya bean cake, rice with boiled vegetables and yoghurt, pumpkin soup and shakshuka. (Dick)

Matchpoint@HAU

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 04:53:03 +0200

filed by Andros Zins-Browne
17 September, 2011

Writing now from George Bush (The First!) Airport in Houston, Texas delayed on a trip to the States immediately from matchpoint feels like the cultural version of an ice dunk after being in a hot sauna. I guess culture shock would be the more common term for it. But it also feels like just one within some kind of jacob's ladder/ revolving door of culture shocks this week- in which the group and certainly myself went back and forth between assessing the essential differences of the various backgrounds within which we work as artists, and a deep questioning about whether those differences really existed anymore, and if they did how much we cared to still recognize and be recognized by them. At once, there were moments of attempting an understanding of various traditions, languages, references, taboos from our different backgrounds; and then there was the feeling of wanting to be beyond identity politics, to define our work without it being identified first by the country in which the work originates.

So was Matchpoint a cultural exchange or was it just an exchange of several artists with various backgrounds and practices? Did we confront the limits of each other's cultures or the areas where understanding could not be possible because of cultural rifts, or was this a space rather where we found that halfway around the world our artistic approaches varied only as much as to the artist who lives in our neighborhood? Can this fact alone be enough to justify such an experience of exchange of artists who are so geographically separated from one another?

Personally I'm still mulling these questions over and over. In the past two years or so I think I began to be able to get myself out of racial/cultural/ identity politics, maybe with less answers than I got interested in them with, but with a feeling that felt at least definitive which was that it was impossible for me to define. The false choice between over-simplified Big bad Western Capitalists versus Native Real Purists and over-complexified mobius strips of everyone is both exploiter and exploited, authentic and inauthentic, everyone is implicated and so what power do any of us have therefore to problematize cultural relations... left me with a lot of exhaustion around the issue.... (flight being called! tbc!)

How much context do we need?

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:51:46 +0200

Two first days of speed dating, one-to-one encounters and shared lonesome food where followed by days of public showings at HAU 2., one of the three venues of the theater Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. The Matchpoint-participants where invited to present short try outs, performances, studies, lecture performances etc. that they had prepared before the start of Matchpoint. We, the two Matchpoint hosts Jochen Roller, Dick Wong and me, the festival curator, decided not to hand the evening program before the performances. We wanted to come over the immediate labeling and focusing of the performance through the lens of a cultural or national assignment. Thus after a short introduction by Jochen and Dick on Matchpoint where they named the different states of the performances, the choreographers presented their performances. After a short closing speech we handed the programs. The reaction of the public was pretty controversial. Some of the spectators liked seeing just the studies, sketches and performances without knowing where they are from and who made them. Others felt left lonely and rejected by this curatorial decision. These reaction brought us back to one very important issue that is valent for encounters like Matchpoint but also for festivals presenting works coming from “other”, non-European cultures like the Asian-Pacific weeks. How much informations are needed? Do they help or are they counter productive. Do we watch a conceptional performance in another way when I know that it is from the Philippines?
Anna

Settling in the Studio

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:28:04 +0200

We decided to slow down our encounter. We settled down in the studio and took a lot of time for one to one-encounters.

08.09.2011

How to start?!?!

nospam@example.com (Matchpoint) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:13:49 +0200

It’s nearly one week ago that we meet for the first time in an old factory building in Berlin close to the river spree. 13 artists from all over the world plus four persons who try to facilitate a things needed are coming to Berlin for Matchpoint an Asian-Pacific-European exchange happening in the context of the festival „Leaving the Comfort Zone“/ Asian-Pacific weeks 2011. Since I am working on this project ( I started one year ago) I was thinking about how to start such an encounter, how to structure it? What are the expectations of the people travelling to Berlin from near and for far? For sure I was very nervous and felt like before going for the first time to high school. How structured and how preset does a meeting like this have to be? Finally I decided to do what I would do also in a private context - invite everybody for dinner. We eat what we are?! We dance what we are?

The first participants arrived.

On deck.

The city of Berlin send us a nice end of the long evening.