Jennifer Bonn

Dialogue and reciprocity in the exchange of knowledge about the body

« The 20th century has theoretically invented the body »*
This statement bears witness to the formidable field of research opened up during the previous century. The philosophical, anthropological, sociological and medical investigations from this period have profoundly altered the status, uses and representations of the body.
These investigations have been echoed in the field of art, and notably in that of choreography. A return movement is harder to distinguish, as choreographic practice (and artistic practices in a larger sense) generate knowledge that only rarely benefits other fields. The proposition of the Around the table project is to reconsider the links that exist between practice and theory, and to enhance the status of body experience and its capacity to help us understand the world we live in.
The project aims to create a space for the exchange of body knowledge and practice which is proposed as a public experience, extended beyond the limited circle of the field's "specialists". This exchange is necessary, as the questions related to the body, at the crossroads between the intimate and the public, the individual and the collective, concern us all.

Through an approach which places the question of knowedge at the heart of a democratic exchange, Around the table aspires to evaluate and reaffirm the place of body knowledge in today's society, bringing to light the role that a greater conscience of one's body can play in individual emancipation.

The heterogeneity of our knowledge and experience of the body, presented at a single event and shared by a large audience, offers the possibility of a variety of readings and interpretations, which go beyond established views, and allow for the creation of a new, emancipated outlook.

It is precisely this intellectual emancipation that is at work and that we will seek at the heart of this project, which is both participative and performance-based.

The objective is to renew the form of a traditional conference by proposing to ‘horizontalize’ the exchange. Far from smoothing-out the individuality of the speakers and participants, this approach does not prejudge their respective roles (those passing-on knowledge and those receiving it; those who know and those who do not; those who theorise the body and those who work with it), liberating them from the implicit hierarchy of knowledge and words.

* Jean-Jacques Courtine, « Histoire du corps », 3ème vol. dir. Alain Corbin, ed. du Seuil, 2006

Around the table : a score and a playground

Around the table takes the form of a performative event which invites people who have a particular body practice to share their knowledge with a small public gathered around an ensemble of tables (10-50 tables depending on the venue), creating the conditions for dialogue and reflection around the question of the body, within the scenographic frame of an evening throughout which the public moves from table to table. Each table is occupied by one invited guest (called a speaker) and 4 or 5 members of the public (called contributors), and each discussion lasts 23 minutes and is renewed following a musical score that indicates the different stages of the event. The evening is extended by clearing the tables to open up a space for dancing and for the continuation of discussions over a drink.

Who can be a speaker? Promoting local resources

The event is the culmination of an investigative process of a particular territory, in order to meet a wide range of speakers : artists, researchers, artisans, legal practitioners, religious actors, medical workers, athletes. Both institutional and vernacular practices are represented, and the list is open, undefined and unlimited.
The opportunity that a project such as Around the table presents is to effectively promote local resources. The choice of speakers stems from the territory itself, and not from predefined themes. Before the event, the environment of each edition, the specific context of each chosen city, is explored by the project team in collaboration with the venues hosting the project, in order to meet and to bring to the fore the different communities working on the question of the body.
This investigation is what distinguishes Around the table in its capacity to document and reveal a territory, a kind of sensitive and subjective map of body knowledge and practice which brings to light the singularities of a local context, while at the same time connecting them to a bigger picture, that which englobes all of the cities involved in the project.

A European event : Around the table in Nantes, Lisbon, Istanbul, Berlin... and beyond.

"What the body can."*

Since the publication of the founding text by Marcel Mauss, "The techniques of the body", the idea of the body as a "total social fact" is largely accepted. Shaped by cultural, social, and economical norms, the body is also the vector of the subjective experience which is our relation to the world.

* Marcel Mauss, « les techniques du corps » in  « Sociologie et anthropologie », ed. PUF quadrige, 2006

By moving the event around Europe through its editions in different European cities, the project creates the opportunity to grasp both the plurality and the commons generated by the representations and uses of the body within the different cultural contexts present throughout this vast territory, and to share this knowledge with a large audience.

We imagine the mobility of the project according to the following modalities : cooperation with the local team to whom we transmit the project score which lists the rules of the game as they have been established at the previous editions, but which remains flexible and open so that the different partners can remain free to accommodate and modify the score according to their particular context. We bring the original idea and its translation into a score, but the local partners are co-authors of the event that they are welcome to readjust and reorganise to fit their environment.
The project extends to other cities through networks, opportunities, and encounters.

It is important for us that the project be put into place by members of the artistic and choreographic community present in the host city. Around the table represents a great occasion to extend and intensify the relationship between an artistic community and the environment in which it is active. This connection already exists of course, enriched by the wide variety of projects that artists produce (shows, workshops, exchanges with other fields..) but it often suffers from low visibility at the scale of a city. Through the prospecting and the decompartimentation that is at at work in the project, Around the table is a way of discovering and uncovering a territory.

Two main reasons guide the choice of cities that could potentially host the project. The first is based on the affinities that connect us to the local artistique milieu and community, essential to our desire to collaborate and imagine together the different ways in which the project can unfold in different contexts. The Association Oro has a history of collaboration with the choreographic scenes in Lisbon and Istanbul, and the kom.post collective, which joined the project at its first test-run in Istanbul, is active within the artistic community of Berlin where the collective was founded. Nantes is also a central choice, as the Association Oro has only recently invested the city and would like use the Around the table project as an opportunity to get to know and establish a relationship with the local communities. The second reason is based on the potential for open exchange that these cities represent, through their geographic location, their history, their relevance and activity in current events, cities in which diverse populations mix, emblematic of a circulation of cultures that the project defends, breaking down the barriers between practice and knowledge.

A collective work in progress

Istanbul, July 2010, March 2011, and October 2011
In July of 2010, the Nantes team joined artists, architects, and researchers from Istanbul in order to develop an edition of the project in the city. Gathered around the Turkish Association Cati, the local team was made up of a dozen members.
In March 2011, a structure for artistic development in Istanbul, Cuma, invited the local team and the team from Nantes to work on a test-run for the project on the occasion of the European program "Istanbul Europe Express". The team was invited to, in turn, invite artists from other potential host cities in Europe to participate in the test-run, and a three-day workshop was organised around the project with artists from Lisbon, Rotterdam, Zagreb and Berlin.
During these three days, we discussed, constructed and deconstructed the fixed and variable parametres of the score for Around the table, and we were able to test our choices at the test-run involving six speakers which took place in a local tea-room. We were able to validate or invalidate our intuitions, and were able to confirm that it was possible to transmit and share our questions : each person present at the workshop was able to take hold of the project and imagine the sense that it would have within their own city contexts.
The Istanbul team will create an edition of the project for October 22nd 2011, hosted by the Idans festival in Istanbul.

2011 team : Özlem Alkis, Selma Banich, Jennifer Bonn, Seçil Demircan, Gabrielle Jarrier, Kinga Kelemen, Bruno Listopad, Camille Louis, Mustafa Kaplan, Ayse Orhon, Kürsad Özdemir, Laureline Saintemarie, Francisca Santos, Filiz Sizlani, Loïc Touzé, Gökçe Yigitel

2011 speakers : Sema Temizkan, Ahmet Demir, Bayram Renklihava, Pınar Basoglu, Özgür Mert Yavru, Esra Yazıcı

Utrecht, April 2011
After the test-run in Istanbul, we continued our work during the second step of the European program lead by Cuma, at the Springdance festival in Utrecht. The team was not the same as in Istanbul, but the same cities, all sharing the desire to host the project, were represented. The team experimented the methods of establishing contact, of bringing to light body practices, of creating a discourse around the notion of the body, putting the score proposed by the project to the test.
The Dutch artists are in the process of assembling the necessary conditions for producing an edition of the Around the table.

team : Özlem Alkis, Sandra Banic Naumovski, Manon Besse, Jasmin Ihrac, Gabrielle Jarrier, Bruno Listopad, Alain Michard, Kürsad Özdemir, Francisa Santos, Jette Schneider

Nantes, June 2011, January 2012
The Association Oro, the Turkish Association Cati, and the international collective kom.post met in Nantes for a second test-run, joined by local artists and forming a group of ten people who worked with the 8 speakers invited to participate in the event, to share their body knowledge and practice with the Nantes audience. The test-run took place at the Théâtre Universitaire, where an official edition will take place on January 27th 2012, hosted by the Flashdance festival. This new edition will present 27 speakers.

2011 team : Özlem Alkis, Jennifer Bonn, Mathieu Bouvier, Céline Cartillier, Fabienne Compet, Anne de Sterk, Carole Douillard, François Grippeau, Jean-Michel Jagot, Camille Louis, Mustafa Kaplan, Alain Michard, Anne Reymann, Filiz Sizlani, Loïc Touzé

2011 speakers : Karine Bascougnano, Wilfried Lelou, Anne de Sterk, Carole Douillard, Karim Guillard, Jean-Louis Kerouanton, Aurélie Marchand, Olivier Moreau, Philippe Sébillet, Aziz Tahar

Berlin, August 2011, August 2012
The kom.post collective, invited to participate in the Tanz im August festival, was joined for this first official edition by artists from Berlin, as well as by four members of the Nantes team and two members of the Istanbul team. The group was able to explore a new form for the project, appropriate for the Berlin context, replacing the tables with picnic blankets and taking the event into the garden of the main venue of the festival. The number of speakers was increased, for a total of 13.
We are in discussion with the Tanz im August festival in order to renew the experience at the next edition of the festival in August 2012.

2011 team : Özlem Alkis, Laurie Bellanca, Jennifer Bonn, Céline Cartillier, Antoine Cegarra, Carole Douillard, Catalina Fernandez, Jasmin Ihrac, Anne Kerzerho, Tümay Kilinçel, Camille Louis, Johann Nohles, Ayse Orhon, Juliana Piquero, Anne de Sterk, Loïc Touzé

2011 speakers : Banana, Marion Bataillard, Joël Bartholomeo, Guerrit Confurius, Edit Cselovszki, Jorge Garcia Vasquez, Ulrich Kuhlman, Louka Leppard, Xavier Metz, Sasun Sayan, Sophie Winkler, Markus Virck

Istanbul, October 2011, and 2012
For this edition created for the Idans festival, the Istanbul team gathered an international team and 17 speakers at the Garajistanbul. We are in discussion with the festival for a second Idans edition in 2012.

2011 team : Özlem Alkis, Gülum Cemil, Anne Kerzerho, Sine Hayat, Isil Huysal, Anne de Sterk, Erdem Gunduz, Gabrielle Jarrier, Camille Louis, Mustafa Kaplan, Alain Michard, Ayse Orhon, Kürsad Özdemir, Filiz Sizlani, Sezen Tonguz, Omer Uysal,

2011 speakers : Murat Catba, Haluk Dinçer, Aslı Uysal, Begüm Özüekren, Selahattin Gelgeç a.k.a. Godzilla, Esat Ataç, Komet, Sema Temizkan, Yöntem Yurtsever, Yaprak Güleç, Meral Erten, Nese Baydar, Gerret Burak Arpaç, Fuat Onan, Ersin Altınok, Ebru Yetiskin, Gülçin Feray

An edition of Around the table is in preparation for the Move Me festival in Leuven (BE) in October 2012, and we are also working on a possible edition for the Temps d'Images festival in Cluj (Romania) and at the Alcantara festival in Lisbon (Portugal).
.

Each phase of the project enriches the next, as well as those that came before, notably through the collection of audio and visual material at each edition which is put into circulation for the participants of the collected events : the speakers and the public in Nantes can access the Berlin edition through photographs, videos, and sound recordings. For each edition, a local team is composed of members from the founding teams and members of the local artistic community, and whenever possible we try to include at least one person from each previous city involved in the project, as well as someone from each city in which a future project is organised, in order for them to integrate the process before working on their own edition. In this way we create the connections that build an evergrowing network, enriched by the collected material that we plan to make visible and accessible through an internet platform, a publication, a mobile exhibit... experimenting all the possibilities and following the paths opened up by Around the table.