20 and 21 October, 3 pm – 6 pm., “Toplocentrala” Regional Centre for Contemporary Arts

Dancing the End of the World: Workshop for performing arts practitioners and theoreticians

with Thomas F. DeFrantz, theoretician, artist, choreographer

Working language will be English. Participants need to register in advance before October 18th here https://forms.gle/1n1oDHv8nDniBNfbA. The workshop is free of charge.

The workshop is part of the project “Socio-Political Agency of Contemporary Dance. USA-Balkan Exchange: Practice and Discourse Sharing Laboratory” which is organized by The Chocolate Factory Theatеr (New York) , New Dramaturgies Platform (Sofia), Lokomotiva – Centre for new initiatives in arts and culture (Skopje), Stanica/Station Service for contemporary dance (Belgrade), Movement Research Inc. (New York). The workshop is also part of the program of ACT Independent Theatre Festival.

“In this workshop, we will be exploring the inevitabilities of pandemics, aging, racisms, tribal in-fighting, capitalisms, colorisms, theoretical presumptions, white supremacies, ableisms, hetero-normativities. How do we dance in the ruins? What do we need? Who do we think we are? Come with a crazed sense of misgiving, and a willingness to open your body toward rageful reorientation…“

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a group that focuses on live-processing interfaces deployed in the interests of theatrical storytelling. DeFrantz assembles artists into formations to explore themes of social possibility in theater performances, symposia, workshops, and publication projects. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association, and contributed concept and voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. DeFrantz thinks alongside other artists continually, in formations at the American Dance Festival, Movement Research, ImPulsTanz, Ponderosa, and the New Waves Dance Institute, as well as at MIT, Stanford, Yale, NYU, Hampshire College, the University of the Arts, Duke, Northwestern University and the University of Nice. DeFrantz composes music, designs soundscapes, writes interface code, dances, creates texts, and wonders how we could gather through art as a register of possibility and expertise. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.

The workshop is part of the international project “Socio-Political Agency of Contemporary Dance. USA-Balkan Exchange: Practice and Discourse Sharing Laboratory“ which is implemented with the financial support of Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU) и National Culture Fund of Bulgaria, in partnership with “Toplocentrala” Regional Centre for Contemporary Arts и ACT Independent Theatre Festival.