Ravel, an online publication for choreographic reviews, took part in this year’s Moving in November. In collaboration, three artists were invited to write alongside one or more works, or to trace relations across the festival – and so emerged the collection of four beautiful texts: Chen Amor Nadler’s reflections upon her festival experience, Kaarne Fredriksson’s review of Cherish Menzo’s FRANK, and Ella Skoikka’s reviews of MANUAL by Adam Kinner & Christopher Willes and Ordinary Matters by Heli Keskikallio. Find the reviews here.
Ravel is an online publication for choreographic reviews initiated by artist Amalia Kasakove.
Ravel has sprung from a wish to gather within the field of dance and choreography around writing next to and with works, as ways of accompanying them and their makers. The project reflects on the fixity offered by traditions of (e)valuation in review writing. And in turn considers it an artistic, or choreographic, format in itself. Ravel traces, tails and inches closer to the processes of languaging that occur alongside dance. It dives into thinking what the gesture of writing with dance might convey or make present, and how the act of writing can extend the thinking that the work is already doing.
The word ”ravel” is a contronym, meaning it always holds two opposing definitions: to knit together or to unknit, to entangle or untangle, to unravel, involve, puzzle out, confuse, complicate, cluster, and knot. This can be seen as a starting point for Ravel, a platform that accompanies, follows, thinks through, and engages with a work and/or its process. The publication is an ode to how we are alongside and with choreographic work.
The choreographic reviews, or reviews on choreography, could take the form of letters, poems, recipes, fan fiction, short stories, scores, fantasy, fables, footnotes, epilogues, essays, toasts, maps, voice memos and beyond!
For now, Ravel invites three people from the field of dance and choreography to respond to a specific work and/or its processes. The aim is that the curatorial process will take multitudes of shapes and forms, include others, mobilize questions, fluctuate and continuously position processes of co-thinking. This project hopes to continually attach and collaborate with various venues, sites, festivals and events!
Ravel is initiated by Amalia Kasakove, a Helsinki based artist working in the gutter between choreography, textual practices and curatorial projects.