IP Artist talk: Martin Nachbar

Looking Forward, Looking Back #14
Artist talk with

MARTIN NACHBAR

Friday, September 10, 2021, 19:00
Rezidența BRD Scena9, 32 I.L.Caragiale St., Bucharest
free access, event held in English

The Institute of the Present (IP) and Goethe-Institut Bucharest present an artist talk with German choreographer, Martin Nachbar, hosted outdoors by Rezidența BRD Scena9 on September 10, from 19:00. The event is organised in connection with COLLEGIUM—the annual educational programme organised by the Institute centred on the artists’ engagement with pedagogy and other forms of reflection upon the process of working. The artist talk is presented in the lecture series “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” dedicated to questions around artistic production, transfer, reception and circulation of contents, materials and ideas in a given cultural environment and geopolitical reality. The IP lecture series aims at opening a discussion about the afterlife of histories and the role played by artists in reshaping our understanding of a possible future.

The talk will focus on Martin Nachbar’s concepts and processes involved in working with history and reconstructions of historical works, the stability of remembering, of the material to recover, while digging for it, clues, triggers and proofs and how they transform or become something else in shaping a choreographic content.

Writing about the process of the 2005 piece “mnemonic nonstop” (a collaboration with Jochen Roller), Martin Nachbar states: “We proceed in a similar way to archaeologists who remove layer by layer in order to create history on the basis of found documents and objects. The experiences stored in the memory and in the body are able to appear as remembered images and feelings at the same time, superimposed on one another or pushed into one another. They are moving layers with oscillating edges. (…) In archeology, for example, a distinction is made between research, emergency and rescue excavations. The research ones are normal excavations of findings that are intact and can be dug up in peace. Emergency excavations are those in which an intact finding must be investigated under time pressure, as it was found, for example, during the construction of an underground car park that is to be continued soon. Finally, rescue excavations are excavations under time pressure on findings that have already been partially destroyed. If you consider the cities that we are investigating in ‘mnemonic nonstop’ as findings, we actually only do rescue excavations. Even if the urban architecture is intact and we get to work without great time pressure, we mainly investigate everyday actions and gestures. And due to their processes in time and space, at least for passers-by, as we are in the process of ‘mnemonic nonstop,’ these have always already passed and do not appear destroyed, but fragmented. What we then dig up are our memories of these gestures from the grave or the garbage dump of our memory.”
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MARTIN NACHBAR is a choreographer, researcher, teacher, curator and writer in the field of contemporary dance and performance. Since 2020 he holds a professorship for movement and creative senses for actors at the HfMDK—The University of Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt. From 2019 to 2020 he was coordinator of the MA dance at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. Since 2008 Martin has also taught for various institutions in Europe.

As dancer and performer he worked with companies and choreographers such as Les Ballets C. de las B., Vera Mantero, Thomas Lehmen, Jochen Roller, Nicole Beutler and Meg Stuart. Since 2004 he has choreographed more than 30 small and larger scale pieces, for different spaces, with different kinds of performers and for different audiences. Among these pieces are “Urheben  Aufheben” with a reconstruction of Dore Hoyer’s “Affectos Humanos,” and “Repeater,” with which Martin Nachbar brought family relations and archives with and through movement on to the stage. This duet with his 70-year old father toured worldwide. He has also organised several festivals and symposia such as “meeting on dance education 2005,” “Tierforme/l/n” and “FELDspiele.” From 2018 to 2019 he was founding member of FELD Theatre for Young Audiences. His work has been sponsored by the Berlin Senate, the HKF, the NPN, the Kunststiftung NRW, the Goethe-Institut and others.

In his work he mixes somatic approaches with movement and dance, and with choreographic thought. The outcomes are performances that invite an audience to co-think and -feel around the topic addressed. The artists tries to give his dancers and other co-workers as much agency in the process as possible. While he likes to give direction to the outcome, he is not interested in controlling it. His teaching is based on similar principles.
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The Institute of the Present’s COLLEGIUM is curated by Ștefania Ferchedău, who will also moderate Martin Nachbar’s talk in the series “Looking Forward, Looking Back.”

IP—The Institute of the Present is a research and an artist resource platform in the field of visual and performing culture conceived by Ștefania Ferchedău and Alina Șerban, established in Bucharest. Centred on artists and their personal accounts, on time-specific encounters and forms of (self) archiving, the Institute looks at various practices and situations from the recent past until today from a transnational and transcultural perspective.

“Looking Forward, Looking Back” #14 is part of the project “Digital Parkour of Visual and Performative Works.”

Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The artist talk is organised with support from Goethe-Institut Bucharest.
Partner: Rezidența BRD Scena9/ Fundația9
Image: Martin Nachbar and his father, Klaus Nachbar, in “Repeater—Dance Piece with Father” (2007). Photograph by Fabian Lehmann
Visual: Sebastian Pren

NOTE: The event is organised in observance of sanitary rules in force at the date of its holding, using sanitizer at the entrance of the space allocated, social distancing and any other needed protection measures.

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.

Contact: ip@institutulprezentului.ro, www.institutulprezentului.ro