UPDATE March 30: Dear colleagues, the Collegium featuring Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu in Bucharest, with a new focus, will take place ONLINE on the announced dates. Details below.
Collegium: Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu
May 12-15, 2020
Registration deadline: April 17. 2020
IP—The Institute of the Present announces the 2020 edition of COLLEGIUM—a layer of action within its educational programme centred on the artists’ engagement with pedagogy and other forms of reflection upon the process of working. With each edition conceived in the form of an intensive workshop for professionals from Romania and the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, COLLEGIUM puts forward a knowledge-resource space, advocating for a confrontational field featuring a variety of practices of performance and visual arts, which facilitates an unmediated contact with leading personalities and landmark moments of the international art scene. The Institute puts artists at the core of its endeavour, generating new formats for encountering, displaying and experiencing their work, while opening the artists’ laboratory to interested professionals in the fields of performing and visual culture.
Xavier le Roy with Scarlet Yu: Online Workshop in Times of Confinement
“We will use one of the main aspects of the work ‘Retrospective,’ which is: how to make an artwork involving the performance of someone for someone else through the specificities of time and space of that very situation, where and when that performance takes place (in the case of ‘Retrospective’, the time and space of an exhibition). Participants will be invited (on Zoom) to think together about the generic qualities of space and time, where and when the workshop would take place (online at the same time in different places), and how these specificities (of social network platforms), can be used to make a ‘live’ artwork. The aim is not to make and think about art for internet in general, but about the specificities of the live encounters that certain Internet applications (e.g., Zoom, Facetime, Skype, Whatsapp, Instagram or others) can produce. How can we think of possibilities to create encounters between an artwork and an audience, or more precisely, between performer(s) and spectator(s)/visitor(s)?
The exploration will be guided by a presentation of works to reflect on the specificities of the time and space of artworks for exhibition, for theatre, for public spaces and how they condition the artworks production and their experience in Public. We would discuss and think together about the conditions of the actual situation of this ‘online’ workshop and through some tasks we could explore how we can develop works for that situation.”—Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu
The piece “Retrospective” by Xavier Le Roy (2012) is based on works created by the artist between 1994 and 2010. “Retrospective” is an exhibition conceived as a choreography of actions that will be carried out by performers for the duration of the exhibition. These actions compose situations that investigate various experiences about how we use, consume or produce time. The exhibition employed retrospective as a mode of production rather than aiming to show the development of an artist’s work over a period of time. It sought to recast the material from the solo choreographies in situations with live actions where the apparatuses of the theatre performance and the museum exhibition intersect.
Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as artist since 1991. Since 2018 works as Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (Germany). He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers. Through his solo works such as “Self Unfinished” (1998) and “Product of Circumstances” (1999), he has opened new perspectives in the field of choreography. His works such as the soli “Le Sacre du Printemps” (2007), “Untitled” (2014), the group piece „low pieces” (2011), and works for exhibition spaces such as “production” (2011) created together with Mårten Spångberg, “Untitled” (2012) for the exhibition 12 Rooms, “Retrospective” first realised in 2012 at the Tapiès Foundation-Barcelona, “Temporary Title, 2015” created at Sydney in the frame of John Kaldor Public Art Project or “For The Unfaithful Replica” (2016) in collaboration with Scarlet Yu at CA2M Madrid, produce situations that explore the relationships between spectactors / visitors / performers and the production of subjectivities. In 2017, together with Ensemble Issho Ni they create for the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt: the exhibition “Haben Sie “Modern” gesagt?”, and he developed, together with Scarlet Yu, “Still Untitled,” a work for public spaces commissioned by Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017. In 2018 at the invitation of the Biennale di Venezia he creates a new version of the “Le Scare du Prinmtemps” for 3 performers and works on a new edition of “Retrospective” at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. In 2019 this exhibition sees its 13th edition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and, in collaboration with Scarlet Yu and the team of “Temporary Title, 2015” they choreograph the “Research Conversations” of the three days event: “Live Forms” at the Haus der Kultur der Welt, Berlin.
Scarlet Yu is a performer and choreographer. She has developed her projects Read Memory at WING Platform for Performance, “A Performance…” at Oil Street, both in Hong Kong and IsLand Bar at Taipei Arts Festival 2018. She collaborated with various artists and companies, including the theater director Haris Pašović, the Teatro de los Sentidos, and choreographer Xavier Le Roy—with whom she developed “Temporary Title, 2015” and “Still Untitled” at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017) and “The Rite of Spring” (2018). Her investigations focus on the transformative potential of autobiographical material in one-on-one choreographic situations.
Details and Registration
The workshop is open to artists and professionals from the fields of dance, performance and visual arts (performers, dancers, choreographers, visual artists, theoreticians) from Romania and the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Professionals interested are requested to fill in a short application form available at https://forms.gle/XbprUWCVxBsUYepe7 by April 17, 2020. A total of 10 applicants shall be invited to participate in the workshop, and all applicants shall be notified about their application status by April 24, 2020.
The registration fee for confirmed participants is 250 Ron or 50 Euro. The workshop will take place on May 12-15, 2020, each day between 11:00–13:00 and 15:00–17:00, Bucharest time. For more information, contact ip@institutulprezentului.ro.
The workshop is accompanied by an artist talk given by Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu, in the frame of Looking Forward, Looking Back lecture series of the Institute of the Present. Details shall be available in due course.
COLLEGIUM is organised in 2020 in the frame of the project On the Afterlife of Performance.
Partners: CEREFREA/ Villa Noël, Rezidența BRD Scena9.
Photograph: Xavier Le Roy, Taipei Biennale 2016, Taipei Fine Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Biennale 2016.
Event identity: Pren.
Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which the outcomes of the project may be used. These shall devolve entirely on the beneficiary of the financing.