Pre-note Moving in November 2024
Program release September 12th
While thinking about the pre-note for this year’s edition of Moving in November, which will be published in early September, I find myself reflecting on last year’s pre-note. The diffuse and yet palpable sensation of ‘dancing on a volcano’ in the face of the currant state of the world – a world in crises, which I felt while writing last year’s text – remains unbroken.
That said, we cannot simply publish the same text each year again until world politics comes to its senses, discrimination and racism is overcome, equality is established at a societal level, and hope is created for the species with whom we co-exist. So, I try to find other words for a program I am especially enthusiastic about and for artists I admire, who explore movements, body language, images, words, and sounds to find a form to communicate about the world we are living in. Artists, whose performances I am thrilled to present in this year’s festival.
Moving in November continues to create a place to gather, to experience performing arts, to share conversations, discussions and laughter. We believe in social spaces to experience art collectively – we value the encounter between artists and spectators, and we think that those encounters, those spaces are more necessary than ever. This year’s program hopes to open up your imagination, to view the world from a different angle, to literally change the perspective and dream up possibilities of another world.
The curation of the upcoming edition of Moving in November started with seeing several performances that introduce text and spoken word, reference novels, and incorporate theatrical elements alongside their unique choreographic language. Their stories cannot be fully conveyed through movement alone anymore; the accompaniment of the spoken word has become essential, the choreographers told me afterwards in conversations.
These conversations brought me from the initial question of ‘who tells the stories’, to ‘how do these stories need to be told on stage’ nowadays. What are the artistic tools and forms used, to draw us into the universes of each artist?
As I continued to work on this year’s program, I became equally interested in artists from fields beyond choreography, who naturally use text in their performances but also incorporate their bodies as tools to deepen the way a story is conveyed.
I became increasingly intrigued by these two developments and the choreographic aspects, the different languages of these pieces, aside from the subjects they address.
In close connection, this year’s program highlights performances that explore themes such as the body at risk, the transmission of fear, the body in danger, the suppressed body, and the disappearing body, later also in relation to the ‘body’ of nature.
The program also addresses the human body in transformation and transition, and in relation to this, the fundamental right of existence, liberty and the freedom to choose one’s own way of living and making choices for one’s body.
Furthermore, we will look at the playful and transformative power of choreographic language, exploring the blurring of boundaries between different species, roles and taking on other bodily forms.
Last but not least, this year you will experience an international program alongside our Focus on the Local Landscape meandering through the ten days of the festival.
Focus on the Local Landscape is both an artistic program and the starting point of a discussion, addressing the local culture-political situation that is becoming increasingly complicated and hostile for the performing arts scene. There are insufficient resources to research, rehearse, produce and present performances, but also to curate a festival. Yet there is a university that highly educates dancers and choreographers and releases them into a world that seems to hold less and less space for them. This raises the profoundly troubling question: What would a society without a diversity of different art forms and a variety of diverse artists look like?
With Focus on the Local Landscape, we embrace artistic proposals from the local performing arts scene that came towards us by chance. Choreographers who, for example, received funding to produce but lacked venues, or a frame and visibility to present their works. We decided to include these proposals into this year’s program. Examining what happens when different resources are brought together to create a program.
Artists and companies, institutions and Moving in November joining forces and gathering resources (communication tools, funding, production skills, spaces, staff, technical equipment, time, visibility etc.), is a response and a political statement.
Can we together imagine a different future? By imagining it, maybe we are creating it already?
Yours,
Kerstin Schroth & the Moving in November team
24.7.2024
*(You can read the last year’s pre-note here.)