“Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies” spring symposium

“Fox Trot, Crab Step, Lame Duck, Roger Rabbit, Do the Pony: Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies” spring symposium as part of the symposium series “Gender and Equality in the Arts”.

With contributions by Fahim Amir, Claire Filmon for Simone Forti / Projet DICI, Kate Foley, Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey / Performances for Pets, Edith Karlson, Lisa Moravec, Alejandra Pombo Su, Filipa Ramos and Carlos Casas, and Feifei Zhou  

Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
Research: Marion Ritzmann

On-site: Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW, and livestream

May 16, 2024, 4:30pm
Performance: Simone Forti’s Striding Crawling (1977) performed by Claire Filmon / Projet DICI
der TANK, Basel 

The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Admission free. More information and program: dertank.ch. 

“When dance will come to robots naturally, they will free themselves from being just tools at the service of humans,” an MIT researcher recently said (we paraphrase). In 1998, E.O. Wilson, an American biologist and authority on ants, published Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in which he advocated for the interrelatedness and evolutionary origins of all human thought. He used a notion, consilience, to name the magical “jumping together” of all knowledges. That is, what we might call today all existing forms of intelligence. The spring symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW is dedicated to such movement—jumping, robotic, animal or otherwise—and the various knowledges and forms of life it brings together. Entitled “Fox Trot, Crab Step, Lame Duck, Roger Rabbit, Do the Pony: Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies”, the symposium will be devoted to histories, choreographies, and ideas of animal movement and their evolution and appropriation in dance and performance across eras, cultures, and geographies. A closing performance of Simone Forti’s Striding Crawling (1977) by Claire Filmon / Projet DICI will take place in der TANK, on the afternoon of May 16, 2024.

Over the course of two days, May 15 and 16, 2024, the spring symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW will bring together artists, choreographers, dancers, theorists, filmmakers, and hybrid practitioners, all of whom will consider animal dancing as both an ancient and nascent technology oriented toward understanding the co-evolution of bodies. That is, animal bodies, human bodies, machine bodies, and organisms (and organs) without a body. Why so, and why now? If our contemporary vision of the world is often reduced to envisioning rigid and independent units that interact at some distance with one another, there is yet a more complex reality. The relationships between subjects and objects, human and more-than-human beings, bodies and technologies, is always fluid and necessarily constructed at the startling moment of mutual encounter. Such an understanding might affect the way that we understand intelligence—often interpreted as consciousness unitarily located in the brain—and its myriad forms, diverse bodies, and various manifestations and movements.

To be able to imagine decentralized forms of intelligence transforms how we view the movements we make and the technologies that we build, but it also offers a new way of understanding the agency of citizenship in our impoverished systems of democracy. Can a new political thinking and a new view of seeing social relation emerge from dance? Just as scholar and nanotechnology expert Laura Tripaldi has noted, we believe that our technologies do not belong to us, and we therefore cannot use them to change what seems unjust in nature. Instead, we simply borrow these technologies—like divine forces—and therefore we must handle them with sacred reverie. To borrow our movements, whether from animals or algorithms, might encourage different forms of assembly, varied ways of co-existing in which hierarchies are broken down, step by step by step, body by body. To do so, we need art and performance, and to trust in artists as those capable of enhancing a non-instrumental relationship with the cosmos.

“Fox Trot, Crab Step, Lame Duck, Roger Rabbit, Do the Pony: Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies” is part of Institute Art Gender Nature’s biannual symposia series “Gender and Equality in the Arts” that considers artistic practice within its entanglements with gender, coloniality, language, and ecology. 

The symposium is dedicated to the memory Ida Applebroog.