Tanz Im August, Berlin: the last two days

Days 4 and 5: Saturday and Sunday, 25 and 26 August 2012

Vikram (India), Venuri (Sri Lanka), Lubna (Bangladesh) and Amir (Iran) at Uferstudios

I am writing this on the morning of my departure from Berlin. I’ve only been here five days, but it seems like much more. The trip has been packed with experiences – good, bad and indifferent – and I have to thank wholeheartedly the Goethe-Institut for inviting me, and specifically our local guides Martin and Claudia who have given so generously of their time, knowledge and friendship. Days before we left from India, we were sent a survey from the Goethe-Institut headquarters. One of the sections – rather strangely, I thought – had to do with our perception of Germans. I ticked mostly ‘don’t know’ – having never really been in Germany or interacted with very many Germans. I wish they had sent the survey now – that particular section would be much easier to respond to!

Tanz Im August: Day 3

Day 3: Friday, 24 August 2012

Tanz at the School of Dramatic Arts, Berlin

Friday was a day for more meetings than performances – but each of our three meetings could not have been more different from each other. We began by meeting Professor Ingo Reulecke, Director of the Dance Department at the School of Dramatic Arts. Post lunch we met with Scott deLahunta of The Forsythe Company, and then rounded off the evening with a tour through Radial System V with Jochen Sandig.

Tanz Im August, Berlin. Day 2, Part 2

Day 2: Thursday, 23 August 2012: Part 2

Jacque Poulin Denis

Performance-wise, we saw two very different pieces on Thursday. One was a work in progress (very early stages of progress) by a young dancer-choreographer from Montreal, and the other was a full-length dance work from Norway.

Tanz Im August - Day 2, Part 1

Day 2: Thursday, 23 August 2012

The second day of our time in Berlin proved to be quite varied. Accompanied by our wonderful local Goethe-Institut hosts Martin and Claudia, our first encounter for the day was with dancer and choreographer, Livia Patrizi who initiated and continues to run TanzZeit - Zeit für Tanz in Schulen – a school outreach programme for contemporary dance. The idea came out of a simple logic that she experienced during her career as a dancer touring across several countries as part of a dance company. She realized that in Germany itself, an informed contemporary dance audience did not exist. Dance work was shared only within a small, connected community and did not go beyond: nor did it create new audiences or audiences for the future. In a word – there was no dance education / appreciation work happening, and that is never a good thing for the future of any art form.

Tanz Im August, Berlin: Day 1, 22 August 2012

Akram Khan's 'Gnosis'

Vikram Iyengar - Artistic Director of Ranan - has been invited to Berlin by the Goethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan as part of a dance-theatre delegation comprising members from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Iran. The visit coincides with the final week of the Tanz Im August festival in Berlin.

The Ranan blog will carry regular updates from Vikram over the next few days.

Day 1: Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Landed at 2pm local time after quite tiring flights from Delhi via Istanbul. But after checking into our hotel, we were ready to leave by 3.30pm for our first meeting with the Goethe Institut hosts here and the ten-member delegation from comprising members from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Iran.

A Letter from Julia: new work, 2012

Ranan has begun work on a new performance piece doubly inspired by the life and music of Beethoven and portions of Vikram Seth's novel, An Equal Music. The working title for this piece is A Letter from Julia, and has two letters as initial impulse points:

1. The first is from fiction: a letter written by Julia – a pianist coming to terms with her growing deafness – to her fellow musician and lover Michael, in Vikram Seth’s novel, An Equal Music.
2. The second is from life itself: the effusive and emotional letter – known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – written by composer Ludwig Van Beethoven to his brothers as he deals with his growing deafness.

This page will feature images, videos and notes on the creative process of making this production. Responses are welcome.

Julia's letter - 8 June 2012

an extract from An Equal Music. 

Ranan members were given separate sections of the text and asked to improvise a short piece consisting of both text and movement - watch related video. 

Call for interns at Pad.ma

At Pad.ma (http://pad.ma) this year, the expansion of the archive reflects its interests and intentions. Through 2012, we will be working on annotating and making public documentary footage from the Shared Footage Group (SFG). A self-organised group that came together in the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage in 2002, SFG spent close to a year extensively interviewing witnesses and documenting the destruction and relief efforts. 2013 marks a hundred years of Indian cinema, so there are some using Pad.ma to explore new dimensions in cinema studies.

Also, there is an effort to create a performing arts archive; Pad.ma's time-based annotation capability offers ways of investigating performance and its processes at various levels. Pad.ma aims to collaborate with various arts institutions and initiatives who share its interest in open access and the various possibilities that emerge at the crossroads of video and text. 

An Adda at Ranan

Towards this, Pad.ma is working with Ranan, a performance company based in Calcutta, India, working in three primary areas: Production work, Performance Training and Partnership programmes. The company grew out of an immediate felt need to demystify Indian classical dance and make it accessible and enjoyable for larger audiences.

Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not-finished films. We see Pad.ma as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, that conventions of video-making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress. The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing", and contextualisation: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of "writing" on top of the image material. 

We are looking for interns who are keen on engaging with video, technology and text in these ways and more. You are welcome to bring your own personal or research interests into the archive. A working knowledge of grammatical English is a must. Fluency in other Indian languages is also helpful. Please write to ranjana@pad.ma for details.