One of the most influential political theorists today, Chantal Mouffe examines if her critique of the cosmopolitan approach in the field of politics is also valid in the cultural field or if it is possible to envisage a form of cosmopolitanism suited to artistic practices. 

“Prix Jardin d’Europe” European Dance Prize for Young Choreographers” is going to be awared on the night of the 31st of October to one of the most intriguing works by an emerging choreographer. A reception and a party will follow. 

In Cribles Live conceived by the world-renowned choreographer Emmannuelle Huynh we witness how 11 dancers struggle to form a community and how their relationships evolve over time. What emerges out of this dynamic is the irreducible singularity of each. Along with the live performance of Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa by the Rhizome Percussion group, we see that to be a community does not mean becoming the same.

A Mary Wigman Dance Evening is the staging of a dance recital as it could have taken place in the early 30’s. Its model is the program Wigman presented for her first tour through the United States, composed of nine solos from different dance cycles. Acknowledging the alterations a reconstruction work entails, the interest lies not on mourning a lost original or a gone past, but on turning the unavoidable modifications into the very expressive matter of the work. At the end, it will be up to every member of the audience to define their relation with this modern universe, a relation that will ultimately depend on the personal history of each spectator.

The iKEDI project, running under the slogan “We are Istanbulites”, is a creation of South African puppet creator Roger Titley and Austrian theater director Airan Berg. Titley and Berg have recently collaborated on other outdoor spectacles, including the 2009 Linz Cultural Capital celebration, and the opening and closing ceremonies of this summer’s FIFA World Cup. The public are  invited to attend large-scale puppetry workshops which will be held in public spaces throughout the city, in parallel to this year’s iDANS (Istanbul International Dance and Performance Festival), the theme of which is ‘Cosmopolitanism’.

With their performative project at the crossroads of visual arts, design and urban planning, the Denmark based artists Bosch & Fjord transform familiar signs that orchestrate the choreography of everyday life, such as traffic signs, and invite novel uses of urban public spaces. They expose the uneasy boundaries between the private and the public spaces, and explore the ways in which cultural codes are met with conformity or dissidence. Free Zone, which is realized under the specific circumstances of Istanbul after previous versions in Gothenburg and Budapest is at the same time a new method for applied and comparative sociological research.  

A durational performance/installation 

24 hours 

Beyond the Box is a performance/installation for a public space conceived and directed by the Spanish artist Javier Murugarren. A two meter square metal construction inspired by the houses of the ancient Anatolian civilization of Catalhoyuk designed and built by the Istanbul based artist Gülsün Orhon serves as the scenography and provisional home for four performers, over the course of a 24 hour performance. A practice of structured improvisation, based in a researched vocabulary of movement, aims to facilitate a performative, physical and relational sense of conversation, negotiation, and exchange, between those present in/at the space, performers and audience alike.

Straightforward, ironic and fearless, City expresses opinions about dictatorship, discrimination, prejudice, power, fear, ignorance, attraction and faith in the language of theatre and dance. The choreography of City is rooted in the observation of people in a metropolis: a bold new piece which interprets social dynamics through a vocabulary of movement and text.

De-centred play is a trio for four performers and an empty stage. It is an investigation into the making of place and re-place, featuring an invisible set and several other impossible obstacles.

Filiz Sızanlı’s new solo work explores the relationship between architecture and power. Site focuses on the hospitality or inhospitality of the various urban structures, habitats and objects.

In his new work iP, one of the most consistently interesting and witty contemporary choreographers of Turkey, Mustafa Kaplan, conceives the urban space as a playground and appropriates and “translocates” existing structures and spaces, as well as the multitude of senses they afford

There is something in the stranger that unsettles us. What exactly is it that makes us fear or admire the stranger? And most important: what is it that makes the stranger so strange? With great sensitivity for both the actual political situation and historical background, Sarah Vanhee reflects freely on the myriad notions of “the stranger” in her lecture-performance. Meandering between street interviews and philosophical thoughts, jumping from the arts to biology and science, she offers us a rich associative and personal view on the ever precarious relation of the self with the stranger/ the other. Me and My Stranger is a paradox, an impossible marriage between the stranger and myself.

After Still Difficult Duet which was the surprise performance of the past edition of iDANS in 2009 Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido continue their unique choreographic dialogue. In Still Standing the two dancers open up a boxful of dance passages and in their own mischievous way give us a glimpse of their kaleidoscopic view of masculine friendship.

After Still Difficult Duet which was the surprise performance of the past edition of iDANS in 2009 Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido continue their unique choreographic dialogue. In Still Standing the two dancers open up a boxful of dance passages and in their own mischievous way give us a glimpse of their kaleidoscopic view of masculine friendship.

“Do I see what I hear? Do I hear what I see?”. One of today’s most promising French choreographers, Maud Le Pladec, will play with our senses, overwhelm them and make our bodies vibrate like the chords on a guitar.

Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun, two living legends of dance coming from very different cultures and traditions of dancing are engaged in a dialogue of seemingly improvised questions and answers. Some problematic notions such as Euro-centrism, inter-culturalism, or cultural globalization, are issues defined all through the piece. As they expose the differences and the intricacies of their dance idioms, striking similarities emerge in the way both dance cultures deal with life, love and death.

In Dance for Nothing, Eszter Salamon performs John Cage’s music, "Lecture on Nothing” (1949) and simultaneously dances with the aim of creating a choreography of non-intented movements. The idea of using music done by words and performing a parallel action as another temporality follows the desire for interaction with non-interference. “The dance in ‘Dance for Nothing’ should be autonomous and never become an illustration or a commentary on the text.” (Eszter Salamon)

Vaslav Nijinsky, the dance maverick of the legendary Ballets Russes, performed Danse Siamoise in the Paris Opera. Exactly 100 years later, Pichet Klunchun, the celebrated Thai dancer, incarnates this forgotten solo dance. Through careful research, Pichet animates the poses and movement from archival documents on Nijinsky. He invites us to perceive the acts of “reconstruction”, “reinterpretation” and “reinvention” of cultures and comments on the appropriation of cultures from a personal point of view.

The Romanian/Serbian artistic collective investigates the creation of value and its distribution in the arts in their performance that is co-created each time by its potential audience. In their own words, “it is a utopian fiction of practical solutions.”

As the iDANS program was under way, Sanja Mitrović has won the pretigeous BNG Young Theater Makers Prize 2010, organized by the Theater Institute of Holland, with her production Will You Ever Be Happy Again?

The young Serbian woman looks at the recent History of her country and of Germany. With talent, humour and sensitivity she draws a parallel between the ideological mechanisms inherited from Tito and those of global capitalism, her education under Milosevic and sport/show. With no accommodating attitude, she paints a portrait of herself and of her generation who endured the end of a strong government and the Balkans war, between schizophrenia, medieval patriotism and modern dreams. A look at the past, the present and the future that questions our capacity to evolve.

Thomas Flagel, Poly magazine, May/June 2009

A Mary Wigman Dance Evening is the staging of a dance recital as it could have taken place in the early 30’s. Its model is the program Wigman presented for her first tour through the United States, composed of nine solos from different dance cycles. Acknowledging the alterations a reconstruction work entails, the interest lies not on mourning a lost original or a gone past, but on turning the unavoidable modifications into the very expressive matter of the work. At the end, it will be up to every member of the audience to define their relation with this modern universe, a relation that will ultimately depend on the personal history of each spectator.

Nicole Beutler’s new work 1:songs is a solo performance presented as a concert, a Liederkreis, an existential exercise for a singing body. Theater maker and performer Sanja Mitrović surrenders her voice to the intense words of tragic female figures from the history of theater. This piece is nominated for the prestigious VSCD Theater Award.

How do we fulfil our desires, replace them constantly and eventually do not achieve them? How do we perform striving?

What if a choreographer takes the place of an orchestra conductor? And, what if each member of the audience becomes an instrument comprising the orchestra? One of the most important choreographers of today, Xavier Le Roy, immersed himself in a totally unfamiliar universe of movement and gesture in this choreographic and musical research. Is the music directed by movement and gesture, or, is it the very music that produces both the movements and the musicians?

The usage of only the break dance movements (bboying) in Oh, no! marks Dalija Acin’s choreographic step out into the territory of a different dance language, in which the atmosphere is made by the accentuated accumulation of the dance material. Oh no! does not run away from the insisting on seduction and skill, while exposing the hidden and the unpredictable in the body.

The Brooklyn based choreographer Reggie Wilson who has developed a movement language called “Post-African Neo-HooDoo”, derived from the experiences of Africans in the Americas, presents in his solo Introduction an auto-biographical tale that becomes a worshipful look at life’s journey.

What would the world be like if a definitive peace plan was established? What would the national anthem sound like, and what languages would be spoken? Would only a dance language as the one choreographed by the flamenco master Israel Galvan suffice? In this dance theater piece, the political humor ofGaspard Delanoë and the poetical flamenco of Yalda Younes merge to tell us an ironic utopian story.

Formula includes structured improvisation as dance method dealing with the research of different discourses of communication, formulas of establishing relation between different individuals in different conditions, as well as imposing and decomposing the codes of conveying. Formula is a way of open communication; it is a way of collaboration with different artists. Formula is the speed we create with and it is the speed we forget with. Formula is to be and not be on the stage. Formula is a sonnet, a square, and a diagonal. 

Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner transforms familiar locations within a given route in the city into architectural installations. The project is realized by dancers, climbers, and mountaineers from Istanbul.

Un-drum 2/The Chinese Connection and Un-drum 3/Semantic Scanning Electron Microscope

Tarek Atoui’s almost magical Un-drum performances are a series of complex interactions between music composition, movement, performance, and computer and electronic engineering.

One of the most important choreographers of Denmark to date, Kitt Johnson, displays in her soloRankefod a journey beyond the notions of beauty, ugliness, femininity and masculinity, evoking the possibility of a non-hierarchical co-existence of different ways of being.

In Ballroom, Begüm Erciyas, demonstrates how ping-pong balls, exactly the same in size and weight, behave unpredictably when they form a group. As though they have their own will power, they resist or subvert the forces upon them. It is an intelligent performance with humorous allusions to being a collectivity.

In this extremely powerful performance, young choreographer Daniel Linehan exemplifies brilliantly that it is still possible to create performances that combine virtuosity, profound intelligence, and sensitivity to what is beyond walls of the theater.

Daniel Linehan’s meticulous research about the relationship between the movement of images and those of gestures, disects a cinematographic experience of images-becoming-movement. It also shows the processes of memory.

Spaar Ze is an extremely powerful performance/installation created by the artist Lotte van den Berg for/with the Amsterdam Mime School students. It demonstrates the physical and psychological stakes of being and staying as a collectivity. 

Yes and No is a project conceived by the Vienna based Japanese artist Michikazu Matsune created in collaboration with various groups from Istanbul. It is a street demonstration that personalizes the political and politicizes the personal, embracing both poetical humor and serious engagement.

The Norway based Iranian choreographer Hooman Sharifi partakes in the iDANS Festival with two intriguing works. The first, God Exists, Mother is present, but they no longer care, is a meditation on the violence that divorces us from a world we crave to be a part of. The exploration continues with the second piece, Lingering of an Earlier Event that researches how it can be possible to start anew under the weight of a pressing history.

The Norway based Iranian choreographer Hooman Sharifi partakes in the iDANS Festival with two intriguing works. The first, God Exists, Mother is Present, but They no Longer Care, is a meditation on the violence that divorces us from a world we long to be a part of. The exploration continues with the second piece, Lingering of an Earlier Event that researches how it can be possible to start anew under the weight of a pressing history.

Kazuki Kunihiro, a Japanese composer; Saadet Türköz, a Kazakh Turkish vocalist; Japanese contrabassist, Jun Kawasaki; Turkish improvisational guitarist, Şevket Akıncı; and Japanese actress and performance artist, Micari come together in the contemporary music project Sound Migrations. The project is initiated by the Japan Foundation. These five persons, all soloists in their own right, provide an extremely intense sound as well physical performance and they use this intensity to construct a world that is something quite unique.

GIANT CITY is a physical exploration of the mobility, change and transformation that contemporary bodies are confronted with in today’s metropolises. Cities are never just made of immobile buildings. Rather they are created by a flux of immaterial flows: flows of information, flows of people, flows of air, flows of money, flows of desire. GIANT CITY is a speculation about the effects immaterial flows and virtual spaces have on our bodies today.