EDN Carte Blanche Artist Exchange: "Dancing While Writing While Changing a Diaper"

Invitation

From 7 - 10 November 2024 Dansehallerne in collaboration with Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen and EDN will host the EDN Carte Blanche Artist Exchange: Dancing While Writing While Changing A Diaper: A practical reflection on how artistic practice and childcare could reorganise each other. 

This Carte Blanche Artist Exchange is a 4-day collective residency open to 20 national and international artists, choreographers and other dance professionals which aims to encourage collective reflection and action when performing (im)possibilities in the simultaneity of artistic practice and childcare.

Taking childcare responsibilities is easily referred to as an obvious and gendered impediment to artistic practice. How can institutions adapt to make this less so? How can childcare and artistic labour adapt? Who has access to artistic practice and childcare in the first place?

Bringing artistic practice and childcare into cohabitation, we propose to gather around these questions: How can artistic practice inspire doing childcare differently and how can childcare reorganise artistic labour? 

Our intention is to co-create a space where professionals and children can engage, think and move poly-rhythmically together. This artist exchange involves score writing, dancing, talking and cooking together. 

We, Andrea and Adriano, find it helpful to disentangle childcare needs from family and parenting idea(l)s. This is why we use the terms childcare and child carers instead of family and parents in this open call / proposal. Feel free to replace these terms. We are looking forward to having a conversation about them in Copenhagen!

We acknowledge that questioning childcare in a European context has historically been centered around straight, cis, able-bodied, white, middle-class demographic. And encourage applications by those who don´t fit into this narrow group. 

About the Artists

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three year old Penélope Cleo. Together they question how capitalist, sexist and colonial norms of economy, sexuality and gender arise as soon as a child enters the stage. In the process, they exercise different plots for international collaboration through dance.

Andrea Zavala Folache has a transdisciplinary approach to dance informed by her/their training in visual arts, painting, and choreography. She/they believes that experimenting with these disciplines un-hierarchically and ‘through each other’ can sustain relations and knowledge that move both within and beyond assumptions. Apart from engaging in long-term collaborative creations and experiments, such as Domestic Anarchism, Lands of Concert and Performing Arts Forum, Andy has a pedagogical practice teaching at SNDO (School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam and co-directing ISAC (Institute Supérieur des Arts et des Choréographies) in Brussels.

Adriano Wilfert Jensen uses dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions for relations. Currently they are interested in empathy beyond identification. And after some years of touring internationally way too fast, she is working with Andrea on developing a methodology for international collaboration in dance that is more artistically, environmentally and relationally sustainable–And which can provide a good enough environment for his toddler. Recent engagements include: feelings and mixed feelings, dance performances, Galerie, an immaterial gallery and publisher for immaterial artworks, Performing arts forum, co-coordination of a self-organised residency. Dog Days Discourse, a peer-to-peer publication on dance Kitchen 3, a risograph print workshop without an owner.

Programme

The daily schedule of the exchange will soon be available here.

How to participate with EDN travel support?

• You are invited to participate together with your children and fellow child carer(s).
• EDN can reimburse a fixed amount of travel contribution (calculated here), book and cover up to three nights of accommodation for a limited number of participants and their children.
• Priority will be given to EDN member organisations and their professional freelance communities.
• A participation fee of 150€ will be invoiced to the participant or their organisation. EDN members are invited to respond to the Travel Bursaries Open Call on behalf of their associated artists and other freelance professionals.
• Please book your travel upon confirmation from the EDN office.
• Cancellation policy: In the event that a paying participant cancels their registration, the EDN Office will try to find a replacement from the waiting list or other sources. If a replacement is secured, the participant will be eligible for a refund of their participation fee. However, if the cancellation occurs less than seven days prior to the activity and no replacement can be arranged, the participation fee will not be refunded.

How to participate without EDN travel support?

You can register to join the Exchange without requesting EDN travel support. In this case, you need to book and cover travel and accommodation individually.

Contact

For any questions regarding the registrations, you can reach out to EDN artistic project manager Christoph Bovermann at christoph@ednetwork.eu

About the Project

This exchange is brought to you by EDN—European Dance Development Network—as part of the knowledge-sharing activities of its EU-funded project 101053456 EDNext.