organized by Access Point Tanz
14.12.2023, 2 – 7 p.m., Alte Feuerwache seminar room
Documentation by Johanna Withelm
What is the status quo of access in the field of dance (mediation)? What are good practices that have made a difference in recent years? What are the biggest barriers and how can we overcome them together? Based on institutional and artistic mediation practices, these questions were discussed at the Network meeting dance mediation – #1 Access Check. The event marked the start of regular network meetings with dance mediation actors and interested parties. The event was moderated by musician, curator and theater maker Jamila Al-Yousef and recorded by means of real-time drawings by Nora Haakh. Most of the participants came from the field of dance education, with some also coming from the fields of choreography, dramaturgy, production, curation and cultural education. For most of the participants, these fields of activity were overlapping. All of them were nonetheless active in the independent dance scene in Berlin.
Part I: Impulses
Impulse by Bahar Meric – Making dance education accessible
Bahar Meric is a dancer, choreographer and project initiator who works on artistic-educational formats and programs. She is a founding member of Future Move e.V., an association that aims to use art, dance and movement to give visibility to people and their issues that have so far been insufficiently represented in cultural life. As she was unfortunately unable to attend the network meeting in person, she spoke to the participants in a video message. She talked about the pilot phase of Future Move e.V. and about the mentoring program Future Move – career prospects for young dance professionals. The program is aimed at young people aged 16 and over from Berlin and is designed to advise, support and empower its participants before, during and after their dance training. In various workshops over the course of six months, the participants learn about the careers of artists who themselves come from marginalized contexts – they also visit various dance institutions and dance training centers. They learn about training and funding opportunities and are advised individually. The program is free of charge and is shaped in relation to the realities of the participants’ lives. Future Move – Career prospects for young dance professionals aims to help make theater more diverse and break down barriers, fears and inhibitions. It seeks to empower participants to consider dance training as a career option and also to recognize the quality of knowledge and expertise of marginalized actors and bring that into institutions.
Impulse by Elisa Ricci – Equity as a guideline in mediation work
Elisa Ricci is a curator, dramaturge and dance scholar. She conceives and co-curates presentation and exchange formats, as well as learning and mediation spaces and understands curatorial practice and cultural work as critical and a radically collective practice. She advises institutional transformation and change processes with a focus on justice, working cultures and collective leadership, and since April 2022 has been a project manager specializing in equity processes at Offensive Tanz für junges Publikum. In her contribution, she spoke about the principle of equity and how the Offensive Tanz für Junges Publikum network is working to implement this principle as a guideline: Equity in this context can best be translated with the term Changengerechtigkeit, which Offensive Tanz uses as a concept for action and as a kind of compass in its mediation work. Their work of the last few months has shown that these transformation processes with a focus on equity, justice and access are challenging and imply a critical reflection on the power dynamics within our own structures. One of the findings in this process was the factor of temporality: the slowness of these processes clashed with the necessary urgency to get to the point quickly and bring about serious change. At the same time, there was pressure on the side of the public to deliver results and a high level of time pressure due to funding guidelines. The question that remains for the future is what joint, solidarity-based strategies can be implemented to sustain equity, justice and access processes that are critical of discrimination, despite the current cuts in funding.
Impulse by Lucia Matzke – Krump as a self-empowering practice
Lucia Matzke is a freelance Krump dancer, dance mediator and choreographer. She leads dance projects with a focus on working with girls* and is interested in cultural participation, equal opportunities, anti-discrimination strategies and empowerment. As part of the RECONNECT PARTICIPATIVE DANCE – CONNECTING COMMUNITIES project, she worked as an associated artist with Aktion Tanz e.V. in 2022. In her contribution, she reported on the discrepancy that she experiences time and again as a krump dancer: on the one hand, there is a feeling that the krump dance style is perceived positively in the artistic and cultural landscape and that krump dancers are “knocking down open doors” in certain contexts – for example, working as an associated artist with Aktion Tanz e.V. opened up an enormous number of opportunities for Lucia Matzke and paved the way for her to professionalize in dance. On the other hand, as a dancer without formal stage dance training, she has had the experience of having to justify her fees – and although she now works professionally as a dancer and choreographer, her application to the artists’ social security fund (Künstlersozialkasse) was rejected because Krump was not recognized as dance or as an art form, but was classified as education or sport. So how can dance mediation be recognized as an artistic practice – especially when it comes to dance styles that do not fall within the classic definition of art? Lucia Matzke fittingly concluded her contribution with a practical Krump exercise that she uses for herself and for her work with children and young people as a kind of tool for self-empowerment. And so, guided by Lucia Matzke, the participants stomped on the floor while using their voices and tested how it feels to use Krump movements to assert themselves in space through dance.
Impulse by Hannah Aldinger – Anti-ableist access work and the fight against cripping up
Hannah Aldinger is an access coordinator and art mediator in the cultural sector and works on inclusive access to art and culture. Her work is based on anti-ableist, critical thinking and the questioning of power structures and the current understanding of the norm. Since the summer of 2022 she has been responsible for coordinating the access and outreach program at Sophiensæle. In her contribution, Hannah Aldinger read the open letter to Das Da Theater in Aachen out loud. The author of the letter was the performer, choreographer, access dramaturge and disability rights activist Sophia Neises. The grounds for the letter was the production Die Goldfische, in which only non-disabled actors were cast for characters with disabilities. This reproduced the discriminatory practice of cripping-up, in which non-disabled people play disabled characters and portray them in a stereotypical way. Hannah Aldinger described the letter as a contemporary document representing the struggle in which disabled, chronically ill and deaf people currently find themselves. The letter also demonstrated possibilities for empowerment as artistic freedom is only an argument when everyone is entitled to it.
Impulse by Diana Thielen – Dance practice as a place to reflect on social and embodied norms
As an activist dance maker, Diana Thielen positions herself at the intersection of choreography, performance and dance mediation. She engages in body-political issues and subjective, intimate and incorporated bodies of knowledge. At the network meeting, she spoke about her teaching practice in which she considers the body both from the practical perspective of movement analysis and from a theoretical-discursive perspective that combines somatic knowledge with approaches from critical social science. In her contribution, she talked about her work with Contact Improvisation, which she offers to FLINTA* and/or queer people, and with which she tries to create a space that encompasses intimate and biographical questions about the body, identity, gender and sexuality. She described this space as a Safer Braver Space, in which experiences that arise through discrimination or privilege can be named and participants are invited to acknowledge the different experiences of others. As the embodied gendering of individuals in relation to Contact Improvisation is an omnipresent and irrevocable part of the practice, it is particularly important that participants encounter each other with empathy and solidarity.
Part II: Open discussion
In the open discussion round with all those present, the first question that came up was the one Bahar Meric raised at the end of her video message: How can diversity processes at the level of decision-making be thought about together with the people concerned and not just for and about them? Two possible tracks emerged from the discussion: Firstly, the topic of temporality, for example in program planning, which usually requires a different temporality than the usual one if processes of this kind are to be tackled seriously. Secondly, the topic of power sharing came up, for example when project leaders allow someone else to curate, i.e. “hand over” their creative and decision-making power to other people for a while – which can also pose challenges in terms of time and resource planning. This led to the further question of what good practices actually are in order to avoid self-exploitation and exhaustion. This question occupied the group for quite some time and produced various attempts at answers. The simple and obvious answer was sufficient financial resources, as all those present agreed. However, as most budgets in the independent scene are based on the assumption that people will employ themselves, it is important to plan schedules and fees more generously at the time of application. Apart from this, it was recommended to for example talk about shared values at the beginning of a project phase and to discuss the sharing of resources among the participants early on. The importance of healthy working relationships, recognition and appreciation, empathy and solidarity was also mentioned. Check-ins and check-outs among colleagues at the beginning and end of each working session were named as a tried and tested working tool.
Part III: Exchange in working groups
Identity, Safer Braver Spaces and their limits
The working group with Diana Thielen primarily asked how our identity, and with it questions of identity politics, influence the mediation of dance and where the boundaries of identity lie. There was a lot of discussion about the point at which identity is linked to self-designation (e.g. in clearly defined spaces such as contact jams for queer people) and the point at which identity functions via attribution from outside (e.g. in the case of children from marginalized contexts who do not formulate these attributions of their own accord). The group came to the preliminary conclusion that identity issues can be an important analytical tool as well as a political tool, but it is important to understand identity as something that is mobile and requires self-designation.
The term Safer Braver Space and its limits were also discussed. The word safer initially makes it clear that there is no space that is equally safe for all people, but that we can try to approach it. The word braver refers to the courage to accept the mistakes we make and recognizes the social and cultural contexts in which we move. In the course of the conversation, the Safer Braver Space was defined as a place of learning, listening and being in solidarity.
Dealing with resources, space for exchange and solidarity
The working group with Hannah Aldinger, Lucia Matzke and Elisa Ricci discussed timelines, structures and the distribution of resources in projects as well as discrimination-sensitive work in dance education. On the subject of timelines, the main question was how to calculate actual needs and present them accordingly in funding applications. We also discussed what attitude we can adopt in the current funding situation – on the one hand, how can we take the space we need and on the other, how can we become “compact”, i.e. where can we save resources and where are we “doing too many rounds”? The group also discussed ideas and wishes for Access Point Dance, and an idea that came up more frequently was that there needs to be one contact point for all those involved in dance education to create a strong network that promotes knowledge sharing and exchange. Specifically, the need for support and further training in the areas of application writing, planning resources, lobbying and discrimination-sensitive teaching was mentioned. In particular, the need for a space for exchange was noted. One example could be groups that form in order to exchange on discrimination-sensitive forms of mediation and teaching. The group also discussed the possibilities of solidarity-based forms of work and social security for freelance practitioners and the need to recognize practitioners without academic qualifications. The Broodfond for the self-employed in the Netherlands, a community-based solidarity system in which a group of people support each other in the event of illness, was cited as an example of good practice.
Conclusion and outlook
The network meeting Tanzvermittlung – #1 Access Check proved to be a productive moment of mutual learning, exchange, networking and joint knowledge production. In the belief that reflecting on good practice serves to develop new (good) practices, Access Point Tanz would like to continue facilitating such moments. A great need that has emerged from this meeting is that of solidarity and the distribution of material and immaterial resources – especially in the current post-pandemic period in which the cultural landscape is experiencing radical cuts and is characterized by extreme polarization and exhaustion. In this spirit of solidarity, we want to think and plan for the future.