Thomas Martius, May 23, 2011
Gastón A. Alzate, April 13, 2011
I see "interweaving performance cultures" as a flexible perspective to inquire into the cultural adjustments, ambiguities, and misalignments performative events produce and manifest. I consider it meaningful that performance is mentioned instead of art – although art is certainly included – which shows such inquiries are not circumscribed to an elitist definition of art nor to a field with the official approval stamp of the academies. Thus, "interweaving performance cultures" in my view refers to a rigorous inquiry into the cultural complexities of human actions – as creative forms that enter into a dialogical relationship with others – that does not start from a single prescribed ideological, philosophical, aesthetic, or theoretical model.
Friederike Felbeck, February 22, 2011
In 1963, the Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz sailed from South America to Europe. He was bound for Berlin, where he was to take up a Ford Foundation fellowship, the first of a series of artist residencies meant to initiate a cultural revival of the recently divided city. For Gombrowicz, it was his first journey to Europe in twenty-three years. In his journal, he describes an extraordinary encounter: at the break of dawn, northeast of the Canary Islands, he sees in a distance the ship of Chrobry, sailing on her maiden voyage from the Polish harbor Gdynia to Argentina. Gombrowicz was on board as a correspondent. Bound to spend a short period abroad and then return.
Kristin Flade, August 11, 2010
Kristin Flade, April 6, 2010
Stanca Scholz-Cionca, October 5, 2009
Are the terms "interweaving/entwining" acquiring the status of key concepts in contemporary performing arts? Both terms (and others related to them, such as Brecht’s "visible knots" or Michel Vinaver's "interlacs" are increasingly felt as powerful metaphors, especially in connection to postmodern and transcultural practice, as they point to the discontinuous, fragmented, heterogeneous and processual character of the arts rather than to an alleged unity of monolithic structure, as implied in the idea of "Gesamtkunstwerk" or Peter Brook's "yoghurt culture" (both of which stand suspected of hegemonic thinking). "Interweaving", however, alludes not only to intertextual and intermedial connections, but also to intercultural links inherent in every performative event.
Yu Wei Jie, September 21, 2009
Evelyn Schuler Zea, September 21, 2009
Which kind of relation is created through interweaving processes? What can interweaving tell us about the potentiality of a relation? These are crucial questions for my approach to the concept of interweaving of performance cultures. As image interweaving points to the irreducible diversity of connections, which bring into relatedness not essentialist identities, but further hybrid forms. By that, it is noticeable that interweaving exceeds its threads allowing them to reach a particular and actual configuration beyond themselves. It is also a matter of the circulation of threads, in such a manner that they constantly flow and that they relate precisely through its movement.