An Academy 1

sunday12.06.05 saturday25.06.05 at theHF.05

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... been to school together

‘It was like we’d been to school together,’ is how theatre maker Laura van Dolron felt whenshe bumped into a couple of her fellow participants. 1) What school was this then, that wasnot a school? Where was it? And most importantly: why?

The ‘school’ Laura was referring to was An Academy, a radical idea that she took part in –together with a group of other young, professional makers – throughout the two weeks ofthe Holland Festival 2005 in Amsterdam. The primary impulse behind An Academy was theurgent need to provide an opportunity for local practitioners to engage with the internatio-nal state of the art and to confront their own artistic discourse with the practice and visionof renowned colleagues.

The basic premise of the initiative, conceived by Mark Timmer at Theater Gasthuis andmyself as head of the research group for Art Practice and Development at the AmsterdamSchool of the Arts, was seductively simple: we proposed to treat the Holland Festival, oneof the highpoints of the cultural season in the Netherlands, as if it were an academy, and bydoing so take advantage of the wealth of an intense period in time.Rather than offering a formal structure, we wondered to what extent we, the participantsand organisers of An Academy, would be able to involve ourselves in the process of teach-ing and learning and behave like parasites on the body of our generous host.

Twelve participants from different artistic and cultural backgrounds, two peer facilitatorsand one line producer agreed to be largely accountable for the route this journey would takeand to explore crucial issues in art-making today. In our home base for the duration of theFestival at its very hub, the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, we had daily conversations inspired by:presentations of our own work; meetings with five guest artists; and the fourteen perfor-mances and two lectures we attended – not only at the Holland Festival itself, but also atthe parallel DasArts Daily event, a cross-section of the recent, past and current reality ofthis postgraduate studies programme.

This publication collects evidence from the personal notes of the individual participants,as well as five new articles that reflect on the Holland Festival 2005, the wider context ofinternational festivals, artistic production and the future of education. It is a stimulatingrecord of a somewhat unpredictable encounter. Or, as Rose de Wend Fenton states in hercontribution to this book, one that ‘became a catalyst to open up questions and thoughtswe did not know we had.’ 2)

An Academy was able to build on the artistic exchange that Theater Gasthuis has develop-ed with the Holland Festival over the past years. We are grateful for the enthusiasm withwhich Festival director Pierre Audi welcomed us, and for the efforts of Festival researcherAnnemieke Keurentjes, who supported our plans from the very beginning.Moreover, An Academy would not have been possible without the group of dedicated par-ticipants who were ready to make sense of the opportunity, to wholeheartedly invest theircuriosity and to ask honest and hard questions about their practice.It is to these young professional artists that we owe our gratitude and it is they who haveencouraged us not to turn An Academy into a regular event, but to insist upon the inherentuncertainty of the initiative and to maintain it as a series of experimental, non-institutionallearning situations that will continue to change location, time and context.

Marijke Hoogenboom / On behalf of the organisers of An Academyahk/L Art Practice and Development /Theater Gasthuis / Holland Festival

1) Laura van Dolron /email to the participants of An Academy / p. 70

2) Rose de Wend Fenton /The festival as learning zone / p. 79

Contents

notebook / p.12

Rose de Wend Fenton / p.78The festival as learning zoneDevelopment of An Academy: how does it nurture my ideas? Some random thoughts and reflections

Igor Dobricic / p.83Of course, we know what to expect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?

Andrea Bozic / p.83Audience vs. AudienceThe Sufi night experience

Marijke Hoogenboom / p.86Who’s afraid of (art) education?Some indecent proposals

Nicola Nord / p.92SPREAD! An Academy

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// In Your Pocket / programme book /Holland Festival 1–26 June 2005

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// Hester van Hasselt / from her report for theparticipants of An Academy

// final picnic in Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ /photo Hester van Hasselt

// Peter Brook / is the uncontested master ofpure theatre. For thirty years now the renowned80-year-old English director (of theatre, film andopera) has operated from his Paris base with hisinternational company, Bouffes du Nord. In hisconstant search for a deeper understanding of the ‘the essence of theatre’, he has become particularly fascinated by African theatre and spiritual practices.

sunday 12.06.05Tierno Bokar / Peter Brook >Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal

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// Carolien Hermans / notes

// Peter Brook /Tierno Bokar

monday 13.06.05first meeting > Muziekgebouw aan‘t IJintroduction by storiesmeeting Peter Brook > WestergasfabriekZuiveringshal

16 17// Quote from Arnon Grunberg’s VermeerLecture ‘De techniek van het lijden’(The technology of suffering), Kaneelbloesem 6 /NRC Handelsblad / 20.05.2005 / contributed byOlivier Provily

// Nicole Beutler / notes

tuesday 14.06.05introduction by storiesdiscussing Peter Brooklecture Ong Keng Senopening DasArts Daily > Brakke Grondlittle red (room) / Nicola Nord > Brakke GrondLes Larmes du Ciel / Joachim Schlömer >Stadsschouwburg

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// Ong Keng Sen / is the artistic director of theSingaporean theatre company Theatreworks and akey figure in the pan-Asian creative dialogue.Demonstrating his intense commitment to inter-cultural exchange, he also serves as a curator andwas a mentor at DasArts’ Block 20: ‘The Continuum: Ancient technologies, bordersand transcendence (featuring EXOTICA!)’.

// Hester van Hasselt / notebook


// Opening Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ by QueenBeatrix / photo Paul van Riel / Hollandse Hoogte/ NRC Handelsblad / June 24, 2005

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wednesday 15.06.05discussing Les Larmes du CielChips & Dips / DasArts Daily > FrascatiHamlet > Frascati

// Hester van Hasselt / excerpt from the article‘Parasites / An Academy at the HollandFestival 2005’/ Volume 5, 2006

thursday 16.06.05Tatyana / work presentation meeting Ong Keng SenNathan / work presentation Bach Cantatas / Peter Sellars >Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ

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// Igor Dobricic / ‘Of course, we know what toexpect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?’ / >> p.83

// Carolien Hermans / notes and notebook

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What is the use of art?

// Nicole Beutler / notebook

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Being a parasite

// Nicole Beutler / notebook

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// Bach Cantata BWV 82 / ‘Ich habe genug’

friday 17.06.05Laura / work presentation Olivier / work presentation lecture Marijke Hoogenboom / DasArts Daily > FrascatiSufi Night > Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ

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// Nicole Beutler / drawing from notebook, in response to Olivier Provily’s performance ‘The Washing Room’


// Marijke Hoogenboom / ‘Who’s afraid of (art) education? Some indecent proposals’ / >> p.86

// Andrea Bozic / ‘Audience vs. Audience’ / >> p.83

// Message by Marijke Hoogenboom’s daughterAnna at age six, presented as part of her lecture‘Who’s afraid of (art) education?Some indecent proposals’

saturday 18.06.05discussing Sufi Nightmeeting Peter Sellars

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// Regina Krahl in collaboration with Nurdun Erbahar / Chinese Ceramics in theTopkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul /edited by John Ayers

// The plum blossom / honoured by Chinese painters and poets for centuries, is the centralmetaphor for the mission of Peter Sellars’ festival: ‘This first flower, that already appears inFebruary – fearlessly, selflessly, tenaciously, surrounded by ice and snow – announces that winter will not last forever. The image Longing forSpring is known from Prague to Beijing; it symbolises the hope for political thaw. Against all evidence to the contrary, someone must carry the certainty of the miracle of spring in their heart,and place its promise of rebirth and renewal right up against the cold hard facts of the world.’ /Peter Sellars / www.newcrownedhope.org

// Peter Sellars / American theatre and operadirector, known for his radical updatings of theclassics. In the autumn of 2006, at the end of theMozart Year, he will present the New CrownedHope festival in Vienna where he has invited international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to ‘pick up where Mozart left off’ andcreate new works inspired by the luminous musicof his final year: The Magic Flute, La Clemenza diTito and the Requiem.

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// Hester van Hasselt / report for the participants of An Academy

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// Andrea Bozic / notebook

sunday 19.06.05day off

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// Andrea Bozic / notebook

monday 20.06.05Nanine / work presentation Nicola / work presentation Rage d’Amour / De Nederlandse Opera >Stadsschouwburg

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What is your practice?How do you relate to the artistic practice of others?What are your doubts?What haunts you?Where do you need to go?How will your thinking evolve throughout an intense dialogue with peers at thisyear’s Holland Festival?What is the twilight zone between a visible performance and an audible one?How does invisibility sharpen the senses?How much can the audible shape one’s imagination?What is the position of the audience in the contemporary performance field?How does the audience get involved in the world of the performance? Where is the borderline between interaction and entertainment and what spacesdoes it open?What strategies of watching do different makers employ?What is happening to the form of live art and performance at present?What spaces open up in the gaps in interdisciplinary work?Who needs to be present in a live performance? A performer or a spectator?Anyone at all?What is the state of the vital and complex relationship between art and ‘otherness’?What are the possibilities and limitations of the dramaturgical contribution tothe production of non- or meta-verbal theatre?What am I looking for?In what way are festivals ‘learning zones’? What is their role, how do they provoke, make people (audiences, artists, producers, policy makers) break out of established patterns?What are the ideas that resonate and are taken up and forward into the nextgeneration of artists and their work? And why is it these ideas?Does the rhetoric of festivals match up to their reality? Or is it simply rhetoricdevised by marketers and producers to stimulate the appetites of the often well-fed arts consumer? Or does it fill the social agendas of politicians and civicleaders?How does it all fit in with our world today?Where is the space for intimacy?What is the relationship between movement and language?How does the body have its own semiotic and how do narrative structures emerge from language?What is theatre, what is it that we want from the experience of togetherness inplace and time?How will this theatre (dance, music) speak to me and to others?Is it possible to create autonomously organised structures for learning?Is it possible to share the responsibility for a mutual dialogue?What makes us human?What happens if you lose a utopia?What are the difficulties when dealing in an artistic way with so-called ‘politicalmaterial’ in theatre and performance?How can I determine the structures of thinking in my own work?In what way am I thinking right now, and how does it relate to my environment?How does language influence our thoughts?If every truth is subjective: what is the relationship between the language ofwords as used in science and philosophy and the visual/expressive/musical languages of art?Should art illustrate, stimulate or entertain?

// Collection of questions and issues from theconversations / drafted by Rose de Wend Fenton

// Collection of questions from conversations andnotes / Hester van Hasselt

What is the role of Internet/television/public space/democracy in the contemporary political environment and how do artists make sense of them?What is the present position of art?How can differences be reconciled? By transcending them with tolerant action?Can you see theatre as a place of meditation?What is the impact of presenting international work in a local context?What impact can a festival have on the making of a work?What is the responsibility of an artist in society?What is the role of art in Dutch society? What is theatre for you?If theatre did not exist, what would you be missing?How relevant is it?What happens once a show has been presented? What are the repercussions of a project?When the play finishes what begins?How do I become a successful artist?What do you gain/lose by working in a bigger institution?Do I choose for collaboration or independence?If this piece had been directed by somebody else, would we have viewed it differently?Who thought this performance was boring?Why?What can we do to affect the world?What can we do with an evolving Europe?What is the use of the work we make?How do you link conversations?What comes up?As a musician, how do you relate to such a performance?What do you hear when you listen to the music?Why do we want to feel emotions?What is tragedy?How can we begin to feel again?Why, and for whom, did he create this?What was the urgency?Why do you expect theatre people in the audience?Who finances artists and for what purpose?Where do you position yourself?Who is your audience?Can you relate this to your work?What is beautiful?How can space be used?How do you reach local knowledge?What do you think of the position of artists in Holland?Why is art needed?Why do you make theatre?What is the use of this?What is East? What is West?South-Asian art. How big is this?What is the potential for change through popular theatre, commercial theatre,musicals?Why do I have to think so hard? Can’t I just enjoy it?How is Asian and African theatre presented in Europe? What is freedom, what is a free society?How do we avoid colonising each other in interdisciplinary work?

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Trance: psychiatric/physical/spiritual hygiene. Would they call it that in Senegal?How can trance be translated from everyday/ritual life to stage life?How do you engage the public?What can you ask from actors?Why do you make theatre?What would the perfect audience member for your work be like?What is important for you to express on stage?Why is it pleasant to lose sense of time and space?Could you analyse this performance as baroque theatre?Spielberg: what does an exploding eye look like?Sellars: why would somebody explode someone’s eye?How can people be reintegrated into their reality?What do you give back/sacrifice?What does it mean that leaders of an older generation step aside?What are the ceremonies for those who died in mass graves? What makes it possible to move forward, for the living and the dead?How do you deal with power and hierarchy in theatre?Who needs it?What is it to touch infinity?Do you see yourself as a magician?What is possible evidence of our conversations? What does my heart have to do to make my body dance?Why should highly trained dancers go out in the dark?Why are lights used mysteriously in theatre?How should large pieces be staged?Do I need to stretch my foot?What am I doing here?Who am I? What am I expressing?Why dance?How do you find your own distinctive voice?How do you get rid of what is embedded in your system?How do I unlock my creativity?How do I get to work? What is the trigger?What do I express and why?Do you think it is important to know in words?Why do I go to Zierikzee?Isn’t that exactly what your mission is?Who are those people?Did it never challenge the way you work?Can you make a performance that could be done anywhere, for anybody?Why only now?Why is the TAT (Theater am Turm) closing now – now that the house is constantly full?How come theatre people only open up to people to create allies once something is close to dying?What kind of language do you use?How do you engage with reality?Do you bring real life into theatre?Is it better to meet the public outside/inside the theatre?Did you make a play that we can all understand in some way?How do you see your performers on stage?Who are they?Is everybody speaking?

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How do you work now?What about the context?What happens to your work when you move to Holland?Who makes choices?‘Somebody has got to be unfair in the end.’ (Quote Tim Etchells) How do youreconcile that?What is fair/unfair?Who are we? From which position can we speak about the refugees?Into what is your work embedded?Why did you come to Amsterdam?What if there is no artistic contextualisation of your work in Holland?From the perspective of a producer: where is your work presented?If 20% of the audience leaves, should we change the work?What kind of climate is this?Why is this sort of theatre made?Why is it loved so much?Where should it be presented?Where are the limits of my freedom?What is art if you use it as an instrument?How can all the reflections on art/theatre be materialised?What happens to theatre when there are no performers left on stage?How much is it about me? What am I telling you? How much is it about you?Is there a difference between the reactions of theatre friends and those of normal audience members?Who is your audience?You are many people through interaction with different people. What is realisedof your potential?How can we think of theatre in the perspective of push (TV) and pull(Internet) media?What does technology produce on a human level, beyond creatingpossibilities?What can you do to remain true to your own art?What does it to you?How do you look at things?What is this meeting going to change in your work?Is there a way to learn from people with experience, to learn a lot and to leaveout some things?Do you allow yourself to be affected?Do you need to be very humble in order to create?Honesty? Purity? Authenticity? Acting?Imagination rather than image?What can make a festival necessary?Where is the platform for the next generation?How many people can do this?Why is there no relationship with the theatre school?Why are you doing this academy at the Holland Festival?How do you go about finding unknown groups?Why do you give your pieces English titles?If you see yourself, how would you present yourself in movement andmonologue?Do you want to dance with me?Where does it take you now?What evidence might all of us collect from these two weeks?

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What does the Holland festival get from us?And what does it take from us?Is there communication between host and guest?What could such a group mean tothe Holland Festival?What kind of relationship does the Holland Festival create with the audience?What if An Academy was open to an audience?What can we give back from within An Academy to the public arena of the festival?Does An Academy have anything to offer to the festival?What do I think of these performances?Who am I?Who are these people?Who is inside/outside the community?What is An Academy?What could it be?What is the context?What is the place of theatre in the arts today?What is the difference between culture and agriculture?What does Great Britain look like from a boat?How do we use the international in London?Why must art always go around with a begging bowl?What if theatre was not there?Where do you begin those conversations with the new Laurie Andersons?How should one speak?How can one be dignified?What is the most important question right now?What does it mean to create a monument today?How can a living monument be created?What do we want?Who is West? Who is East?What is exoticism?What is an export product?Where does authenticity lie?What is ‘in’ in the West?What can you put on stage?What do we gain from the distinction between good and bad?Where was the mess, the roughness, in the Festival?Where is the body in this?Is that transformation?What is left of the theatre when the performers have left?How do you create an education for artistic contextualisation?How do you set up the discussion on theatricality/reality withinperformance?

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tuesday 21.06.05Basten / work presentation Andrea / work presentation discussing Peter Sellarsdiscussing Rage d’AmourElementarteilchen / Johan Simons >Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ50 51



// Theater am Turm –TAT – in Frankfurt am Main /was for many years one of the most importantvenues for the production and presentation ofinnovative international work. It was finally closeddown in 2004 with the performance programme for urbanities by andcompany&Co. (Nicola Nord)

52 53// Nicole Beutler / notebook

wednesday 22.06.05meeting Pierre AudiNicole / work presentation discussing Elementarteilchen


// Quote Pierre Audi / turn page >>

// Pierre Audi / born in Beirut, is the artisticdirector of both the Holland Festival (since 2005)and the Netherlands Opera (since 1988). As early as 1979 he launched the Almeida Theatre,an innovative and international performing arts centre in Islington, London, and as a director oftheatre and opera he has built up an extraordinaryrepertoire of contemporary and classical works.

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// Hester van Hasselt / excerpt from the article‘Parasites, An Academy at the Holland Festival2005’ / Volume 5, 2006

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// Four Holland Festival directors:Pierre Audi / Ad ‘s Gravesande / Ivo van Hoveand Frans de Ruiter / photo Corbino

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// Roland de Beer and Hein Janssen /‘Over de Grens’ (Over the border) / Volkskrant /June 23, 2005

// All that Dutch / Over internationaal cultuurbeleid (On international cultural policy) /NAI Publishers, 2005

thursday 23.06.05Before... Existential Makeover /Laura van Dolrondiscussing Pierre AudiCaroline / work presentation Hester / work presentation evaluation An AcademyParadise / MAU/Lemi Ponifasio >Westergasfabriek Zuiveringshal

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// Kasper Jansen and Wilfried Takken /‘De Wederopstanding’ (The Resurrection) /NRC Handelsblad / June 24, 2005

friday 24.06.05Rose / work presentation meeting Lemi Ponifasio > WestergasfabriekZuiveringshalThe End of the Moon / Laurie Anderson >Muziekgebouw aan’t IJDevendra Banhart & Band > BIMhuis

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// Photo from the programme booklet of Paradise,company MAU/Lemi Ponifasio

// Lemi Ponifasio / was born in the village ofLano, Samoa. He is one of New Zealand’s leadingtheatre artists and a pioneer in the evolution ofPacific contemporary dance and theatre. He isfounder and artistic director of MAU, which heestablished in 1995, naming it after the Samoanindependence movement Mau. While known for his radical approach to contemporary theatre,Ponifasio’s work is firmly rooted in the values ofthe Pacific.

// Rose de Wend Fenton /‘The festival as learning zone’ / >> p.78

// From the LIFT Enquiry brochure

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// photo Tatyana van Walsum

The third space

saturday 25.06.05discussing Lemi Ponifasio‘Top 5’ of An Academy in response to the ‘Top 5’ of HF director Pierre Audifinal picnicJosta / work presentation Igor / work presentation The Veil of the Temple / Sir John Tavener >De Oude Kerk

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// Hester van Hasselt / notebook

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‘the nocturnal self’

70 71// Laura van Dolron / email to the participants of An Academy

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// Reproduced by kind permission of Peter Sellarsand the Gulbenkian Foundation, publishers of The Turning World: Stories from the LondonInternational Festival of Theatre by Rose de WendFenton and Lucy Neal (draft preface) / London 2005

// Rose de Wend Fenton and Peter Sellarsat the Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ / video still by Andrea Bozic

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Participants

Nicole Beutler / choreographer, theatremaker, performer, co-founder of LISA, graduated at the School for New DanceDevelopment, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam

Andrea Bozic / choreographer, performer,graduated at the School for New DanceDevelopment and Dance Unlimited,Amsterdam School of the Arts /Amsterdam

Igor Dobricic / theatre and dance dramaturge, arts programmer at theEuropean Cultural Foundation, graduated atthe Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade /Amsterdam

Laura van Dolron / theatre maker, writer,performer, graduated at the Academy ofDramatic Arts in Maastricht / Amsterdam

Nathan Fuhr / conductor, performer, trance-researcher, graduated at theConservatory of Amsterdam / USA>Berlin

Carolien Hermans / choreographer, performer, dance-researcher, graduated atthe Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg andDance Unlimited, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam

Nanine Linning / choreographer, dancer,former house choreographer of ScapinoBallet, graduated at the Rotterdam DanceAcademy /Amsterdam

Nicola Nord / theatre maker, performer,student at DasArts, co-founder andcompany&Co., graduated at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University,Frankfurt / Germany>Amsterdam

Olivier Provily / theatre director, director atHet Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven, graduatedat the directing department of the TheaterSchool, Amsterdam School of the Arts / Amsterdam

Basten Stokhuyzen / musician, soundartist, student Image and Sound Interfacultyof the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague /The Hague

Tatyana van Walsum / scenographer, graduated at the Wimbledon School of Artand at the Motley Theatre Design Coursein London / Amsterdam

peer facilitatorsRose de Wend Fenton / founder and formerco-director of LIFT ( The LondonInternational Festival of Theatre) /London

Marijke Hoogenboom / professor ArtPractice and Development at theAmsterdam School of the Arts /Amsterdam

reportHester van Hasselt / performer and co-founder of LISA, graduated at theAcademy of Dramatic Arts in Brussels /Amsterdam

line producer Josta Obbink / production manager Theater Gasthuis / Amsterdam

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Rose de Wend Fenton / The festival as learning zoneDevelopment of An Academy: how does it nurture my ideas? Some random thoughts and reflections

I had just arrived from London and was cycling through a heavy summer downpour from theMuziekgebouw to the Westergasfabriek on the way to Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar, soaked to the skin, past the road works under the bridge doing my best to keep up withMarijke Hoogenboom. The last time I had cycled on the same pathway was in the summer of 1980 for the Theatreof Nations’ Festival of Fools, held on the derelict docklands – before the developers movedin. There I had participated in a gathering crammed with provocative performances,encounters, debate, feasting, protest and fun. A ‘learning zone’ that had profoundly influ-enced the spirit in which Lucy Neal and myself set up LIFT, the London InternationalFestival of Theatre, the following year. What was I doing here twenty-five years later? And on a bicycle I could hardly control? Iwas not used to the back-pedal brakes and kept forgetting how to stop. And when I didmanage to stop I usually lost my balance and fell off. Pretty terrifying.

A few months earlier I had received an intriguing email from a dear friend and colleagueRitsaert ten Cate, telling me about a project led by Marijke Hoogenboom in which a groupof young professional artists had been invited to engage with the Holland Festival as if itwas an academy. ‘She needs a specialist for peer discussions.’ He thought I might be inte-rested.I had two reactions. Firstly, I am no specialist. I always feel I invent things as I go along,make up rules, break rules and generally improvise my way though situations. Secondly, itwas only three weeks after I had stepped out of running LIFT and was full to overflowingwith festivals. Did I really want to get involved with another – just yet.Nonetheless, I was intrigued, so I agreed to speak to Marijke Hoogenboom. The phrase‘treat the festival as if it were an academy’ kept resonating in my mind.

Lucy Neal and I, together with the LIFT team, had spent the last years dismantling the bien-nial festival format of LIFT, creating in its place a five-year Enquiry, a year-round staging ofwhat we grandly declared would be ‘an exuberant and public exploration of theatre in thesetimes worldwide.’ The Enquiry posed a series of questions about theatre as a space forpublic dialogue. What is theatre? Where does theatre take place? Who is making it? Howand why? Over the years we would gather evidence in order to answer to these questions.In a correspondence about the Enquiry, the writer and theatre maker Rustom Bharuchawrote, ‘I am fascinated by the evidence of theatre. “When the play ends, what remains?”has been the standard response. But perhaps we need to ask: “When the play ends, whatbegins?”’The last few years had been a turbulent yet productive time for us. We were looking back,casting forward, going off the map; operating in a space a colleague had dubbed ‘institu-tionalised uncertainty’. The notion of learning in this experimental zone, and coming to anunderstanding of what develops as a result – in the artist, the audience or indeed the pro-ducer or organiser – was something of a preoccupation. So An Academy provided anopportunity to investigate further – at someone else’s festival and this time relieved of theresponsibility of organising the event.

So, back to that cycle path and our first evening. At the end of Tierno Bokar the main cha-racter declares: ‘There are three truths: my truth, your truth and the truth.’ In acknowled-ging the multiplicity of voices and realities in any situation – an idea picked up later byPeter Sellars – this opening performance set the tone for An Academy over the followingtwo weeks. It was with some nervousness that we gathered for the first time the followingday, to embark on a journey hardly knowing one another, to meet with Peter Brook. Sitting

in a circle we introduced ourselves and talked with him – about theatre, our response toTierno Bokar, our practice, our questions. Then something happened that shifted the dyna-mics dramatically: Peter Brook asked us to stand up and imagine we were walking a tightrope. How would we move? How would we feel? Then the exercise became more demanding.Could we dance and play on this imaginary tightrope? We were all terrified. Talking was onething, but here we really felt we were entering into an arena of risk and vulnerability, expo-sing ourselves without the protection of intellect and words. There could have been no bet-ter way to start An Academy. Through play, and in a short time, Peter made us a group; aline had been crossed and we emerged with a new sense of openness. And perhaps thiswas the key.Over the next two weeks there was much talking: in response to shows we had seen, to thework we were making. ‘What is the use of the work we make?’ asked theatre director OngKeng Sen from Singapore. ‘We make work not to illustrate but to create something diffe-rent,’ insisted participant Basten Stokhuyzen, after experiencing a particularly literal andbanal performance. This brought to mind director Romeo Castelluccis’ dictum that thebusiness of theatre is ‘revelation not spectacle’. Provocative conversations were had andpreconceptions were challenged; Nicole Beutler pointed out that ‘ultimately, experimenta-tion is a relative concept’. The shows we attended and the opportunity to meet with the artists involved became acatalyst to open up questions and thoughts we did not know we had.For me, the simple, still moments were the most affecting: those in which space was leftopen for the imagination, in which less was more. The exquisitely pure voice of singerLorraine Hunt-Lieberson in Peter Sellars’ Bach Cantatas, in which body became spirit; thefragile strength of her supplications, and the single naked light bulb swinging with a violentand then caressing movement combined to pierce the heart. In the Sufi concert, time wassuspended and held, as in a meditation, allowing an almost mystical, transformative con-nection with the spiritual. The power of ritual was reasserted as time reclaimed its cyclicalaspect in the Hindi and Sufi rhythms, choral music, and chants of the Veil of the Temple inthe De Oude Kerk, as the audience – gradually becoming a community – went on a journeyfrom darkness into light; through the night into the dawn. Language became less necessa-ry. Johan Simon’s Elementarteilchen was filled with words. I vaguely remembered the story,but I do not speak a word of German. It did not matter. I simply had to follow the performers,their movements and gestures in the open, empty stage, communicating with each other insorrow, anger, and indifference. There was a purity and power there. You do not have tounderstand everything. I realised that over-staging and clever theatrical devices made me impatient: I was irrita-ted by the over-designed Rages d’Amour, annoyed by the self-conscious banality of LaurieAnderson with her box of tricks. Les Larmes du Ciel was stuffed with decorative dance thatcrowded out – but thankfully did not suffocate – the music, and this alone sufficed to openup space for our own imaginations; it was the visceral, felt, experience that I responded to.

Of course we did a lot of talking: after lunch, sitting around a huge table in the gleamingnew Muziekgebouw, Palace of Culture, looking over the waters as the ships came and went.We were privileged. It was inspirational to hear everyone talk about his or her work and askhonest, hard questions of their practice, knowing that we could continue and evolve theconversations daily: an accumulative discourse. A privilege it also was to meet so manyartists, so passionately articulate about their art. But at times it was almost too intense, toocerebral, sitting around for hours at a time – exhausting physically and mentally.During our final evaluation discussions we considered some elements we could incorpor-ate into our approach. Nicole Beutler reminded us of the need to enter into a state of dis-orientation when creating, and allow for intuition, instinct, play. Talking has its limitations.We needed to get up and do more things. Go into real danger zones. Break up the space,the form and mode of discourse. Perhaps split into smaller groups from time to time. Maybeoccasionally shift venue, escape from the central venue and all it represented. Nicola Nord

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suggested a silent walk through the city. Or a day cruise. To change our way of seeing andinteracting. Maybe we could have made something as the days went by, like create an evol-ving installation or cook a meal together. Take more personal risks. Allow our hearts towork, as much as our heads. Fall out of patterns.

And perhaps that is one of the things a festival can encourage us to do. At its best, shoulda festival not be a framework and a licence for the unexpected to take place? However, asIgor Dobricic pointed out: ‘Success is not just defined by content, but also by social con-text.’ Did the social context of festivals, characterised by a ritualistic consumption of cul-ture, limit the possibilities for engagement? So where to next? An Academy is a radical idea and its form should reflect this. What is therelationship between the Holland Festival, Theater Gasthuis and An Academy? Howshould it be nurtured? Not just during those two weeks, but during the rest of the year. Howshould it continue and develop a dynamic dialogue? Indeed, could An Academy in someway have an impact on the form and context of the Holland Festival?

I pose these questions from afar. Unlike many of the participants I do not live inAmsterdam. I am sure many encounters between members of the group have taken placesince last June. Sharing each other’s work and conversations, leading to new ideas andpossibilities. So, after the play ended what did begin in the other participants?

When I got home I was so accustomed to my Amsterdam bike, I had almost forgotten howto ride my London bike. Human beings are immensely adaptable. What is strange soonbecomes familiar – for better and for worse. Stay vigilant.

Igor Dobricic / Of course, we know what to expect from Peter Sellars, don’t we?

The audience is seated, waiting for the performance to start. The houselights are on andwhile waiting we can see a stage to the right – arranged for the orchestra. An inclined ele-vated platform on the left gives us a sense of where the action is going to take place. Andyet the space remains empty for a long time. Some people start to clap, then talk, and laugh.The parameters of the event are unclear, and a number of questions occupy me: am I in atheatre, is this a concert, and why is it not starting? My visual focus relaxes and my atten-tion shifts to the anticipation of Bach’s music. Forced to wait for it, I listen for what is goingto happen next.Abruptly, Peter Sellars himself steps out from the wings and onto the stage, stopping justaway from the centre of the proscenium, facing the audience. He starts talking, addressingus directly, without a microphone. Some audience members shout out that they cannot hearhim. The fact that the situation does not feel staged, that there is no microphone, that somepeople are complaining openly: all of this creates a sense of urgency that charges themoment.Although nobody should be surprised to see Sellars talking to his audience – it is some-thing he has often done in the past – I feel awkward about it this time; I wonder if this is partof the performative structure or if it is ‘for real’. As his voice is indeed not loud enough mycuriosity heightens to a level beyond pure aesthetic expectation. The intensity with which Ilisten increases further. It feels as if I am being taken out of theatre into an open, not fullyregulated, unstable place, like a street corner or a square where the rules of social engage-ment are volatile and confrontational, where alertness takes priority over the appetite forentertainment.

So, the performance actually starts with Sellars telling us a story about the performance.He speaks with an urgency befitting an announcement, but impeccably, in detail and withthe skill of genuine storyteller, enticing the audience to listen with careful attention. Afterthe initial turmoil, silence establishes itself in the auditorium. At first it is a consciouslyimposed silence triggered by the practical need to hear Sellars. Then it becomes the atten-tive silence of an audience enthralled by the story. We discover that the main performer,singer Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, is the reason for the delay: at this very moment she is inpain – suffering and weak – and will only be able to sing one of the two planned Cantatas.The external silence of the rapt audience is transformed into the internal silence of thestory itself. The shift is palpable. And into this quiet and solemn space at the intersectionof external and internal perception, the orchestra and singer walk on. Watching the musicians I have a strong sense that they are not just taking their designatedplaces on stage, but rather in the invisible and much more complex constellation of timeand space wired into my mind by Sellars’ verbal intervention. I have been prevented fromobserving external action as a formal artistic representation of something else and in thissense I am not even listening to it ‘from the outside’. The event has become observable ona completely different level – inside the knowledge sphere, beyond the senses and in myhead – while I am simultaneously well aware that through my physical presence in theMuziekgebouw I also fully implicated in it externally. Perhaps I should be perplexed by thisinterference of fiction (subjectivity) and reality (objectivity). But no, everything seems crys-tal clear. Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson emerges dressed only in a hospital gown. Dancer MichaelSchumacher follows her on stage. The lights are finally going down. She will sing, asSellars has already explained, about death, ‘but not as an enemy, not as panic, not as a fare-well and not as the end of something.’As her voice emerges from the darkness I am grateful for the simple clarity of PeterSellars’ preparatory words. While the musicians were slotting into the invisible diagram ofrelationships created by his storytelling skill (as if into a virtual set design), the voice of

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Andrea Bozic / Audience vs. AudienceThe Sufi night experience

We enter the grand concert hall of the brand new Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ. It seems to besold out: people pour in until the huge auditorium is filled with curious faces. The audienceis just like that of any other large theatre in the Netherlands, but for the larger-than-usualnumber of apparently oriental faces. At last, everyone is seated. Someone appears on stage and asks us not to applaud in thebreaks so as not to dispel the trance of the singers and musicians. We prepare to witnessthe trance. The first group enters. They are small men, shabbily dressed: the dervishes fromNorthern Afghanistan. They seat themselves on the stage floor and start singing. What fol-lows is a repetitive interplay of questions and answers which gradually brings them up totheir knees, their heads and upper bodies swaying along with the chanted rhythm, leaningever further forwards, into the centre of the circle. Some people in the audience start nod-ding their heads to the rhythm. Next to perform are the Sufis from Eastern Tadzhikistan whosing to the accompaniment of lutes. Images come to mind of medieval European trouba-dours. Both traditions take love as their subject matter, but the Sufis are lovers of God, weare told, who use music to achieve religious ecstasy and unity with the object of their love.More and more people in the audience respond to the music by shaking their heads andshoulders. I see a woman in the first row banging her head forwards ecstatically. We aresent off for a break.When we return, a group from Iranian Kurdistan takes to the stage. Several of them singand play huge frame drums, or dafs, while the other three stay seated on the floor remain-ing motionless for a long time. As the repetitive percussive loops, singing and chantingdevelop, they all get to their feet, the three quiet men remove their headwear, letting theirsurprisingly long hair drop down over their shoulders, over their backs, and even over theirbehinds. They are performing a Zikr ritual of divine remembrance, which builds to themoment when the ‘I’ is surrendered to a collective religious experience. Soon the wholebrotherhood is dancing and swaying, moving back and forth: old men’s bodies losing theirage in a wild dance. Watching them, I am reminded of a description of Sufi music: ‘A uni-que style of singing that transports listeners into spiritual ecstasy, it has acquired a stea-dy fan following much like the rock genre of the sixties.’

The most surprising aspect of this four-hour concert, though, was the reaction of theaudience. As the number of audience members who openly and physically participated inthe enchanting rhythm of the concert increased with every hour, visible splits developed inseveral areas – open arguments arising in some. People let their bodies move to the soundof music, some even left their seats and went to the sides of the auditorium to dance.Others remained seated, moving their heads and upper bodies in the rhythm. An elderlylady near me took her little hat off and did an impressively organic dance with her hands.As for myself, I felt the music become increasingly three-dimensional, encompassing meand transporting me into a sort of a pool of sound. I did not feel the need to throw my handsup in the air but listening made me, simply, happy.However, a large number of audience members grew increasingly annoyed by theirneighbours moving around and shaking their seats, flapping their hair in their sight line oreven into their face. So they started complaining, asking their neighbours to be seated andnot move around so much, so they could also enjoy the concert. Still others started takingpictures; there were cameras flashing everywhere. I was hoping the host would reappear onstage to ask people not to flash their cameras into the faces of the musicians in trance. Awoman behind us tapped An Academy colleague Rose Fenton’s shoulder and asked her tomove to the side so she could take a better picture, almost blinding her with the flash. Aswe walked out at the end of the concert, we found Hester van Hasselt’s friend, his eyes wetwith tears. He was both deeply touched by the ritual and furiously angered by the reactionsof the audience. ‘Why do we have to be so stiff?’ he kept saying.

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Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson now traverses this virtual diagram, connecting visible appearan-ces with invisible circumstances, filling it in all directions to overflowing with emotionalintensity. By apparently being so transparent, Sellars has made me listen to the resonanceof his words within myself, in silence. And by assimilating the external action of the musi-cians into this resonance I internalise the emergence of music. Thus, I become implicatedin this narrative of death, out of which a work of art establishes itself as pure sound. I lookabout me, through the darkened hall. Some people are crying. As am I. And I cannot helpbut wonder, while letting my tears flow, if the implications of my new enthusiasm forSellars’ work should be considered in a positive or a negative light. Have I simply beenseduced into complicity by a passive voyeurism that neutralises political and personal rele-vance by refashioning both of these into public spectacle? Or is there a genuine performa-tive/transformative value to Sellars’ presentation that reclaims the emotional reactions ofthe audience from the domain of middle class sentimentality, placing it back into the realmof pure intensities? Should I consider Sellars a cheat and opportunist or rather a hero: ademolisher of illusion, the disappearance of which at last makes us cry, again – for real?

In the arena of high art, the overflow of emotion in theatre has not been considered accept-able for two hundred years. But during the staging of the Baroque operas in the eighteenthcentury it was not unusual for the weak-hearted to succumb to emotional fits of crying, oreven fainting. The internal mechanism of rapture prevalent at that time corresponded per-fectly with the external mechanisms of stage illusion used to create performances as spec-tacles. Paradoxically, to produce a similar effect of emotional catharsis in theatre today it wouldseem that we have to reverse the direction of this correspondence. Instead of constructingan external illusion in order to invoke its internalised emotional analogue, we should enga-ge in deconstructing the externality of the spectacle to a point where a new diagram of for-ces is established: one in which subjective inner experiences (illusions) are assembled inadvance, a blueprint for the ensuing external reality.There is no more efficient way of doing this in performance than through the re-inventionof ‘direct address’ (aparte, or ‘talking aside’, as it is coded in the dramaturgy of Baroqueopera). Storytelling is a form of directed daydreaming; through the intervention of the nar-rator, the stage can be set virtually, inside our heads. Only then can the externality of thespectacle appear, naked, stripped of all the visual complexities of style. The specific nature of this post-scientific brand of storytelling – essentially corrosivetoward externality of illusion – is that it does not construct a fiction, but rather elaboratesan ‘accurate’ narrative made of fragments of past circumstances, incidents and anecdotesrelated to the artistic process leading to the moment of the performance.The accuracy of this narrative practice is not dependent on any external criterion of histo-rical or biographical truth. It is instead defined as accurate because of its submission to anaudience’s perception of what they consider ‘real’, so that it can infiltrate and re-arrangepeople’s mind frames into an internal stage onto which external appearances can emerge.

Whenever I recall the Bach Cantatas at the Holland Festival, I cannot help but wonder ifSellars’ story about the sickness of the main protagonist, singer Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson,was really true. But in fact its accuracy is irrelevant for the dynamics of the emotional expe-rience. It is much more important that we believe it is. The ethical justification for this mani-pulation is contained in the experience we shared with her. Because it is far more ethical tobe with Ms Hunt-Lieberson (if she is truly ill) than to diagnostically scrutinise her state ofhealth from our audience seats. Even if, at the same time, we cannot but acknowledge thatshe is standing there, singing Bach – barefooted.

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same time. He did not specify which body in particular he had in mind but somehow it wasclear to us that he meant both the body of the performer and the body of any individualaudience member – with or without the fourth wall.

The confrontation between the audience and the audience during the Sufi concert revealedmany uncertainties of our individualist culture. However, I still go to the theatre and I stillexpect it to take me out of myself and into that hazy area in between.

Remember what it was like to be sung to sleep. If you are fortunate, the memory will be morerecent than childhood. The repeated lines of words and music are like paths. These paths arecircular and the rings they make are linked together like those of a chain. You walk along thesepaths and are led by them in circles which lead from one to the other, further and further away.The field upon which you walk and upon which the chain is laid is the song.(John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London 1997 )

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This concert came towards the end of the An Academy sessions but in the middle of ourtalks about the place of contemporary theatre. The audience reactions – the confusionabout expectations – mirrored some of our studio discussions. Is this what one expectsfrom theatre today? Theatre as we know it in the West has its roots in Ancient Greece,where it was a place of contemplation; myths would be retold from an individual perspecti-ve, making the stories relevant for that community at that time. A story contains an experience. This experience is re-examined by new generations of com-munities. In the theatre, as we have perfected it, we sit at a comfortable distance from theaction. The fourth wall is a clear demarcation line between those performing and thoseobserving. Each of us in this theatre is alone. Together, we create a community of individu-als watching and contemplating the action on their own, from a distance. We do not want tobe disturbed and we certainly do not want to be involved. Small wonder, then, that the Sufi concert caused such confusion at the Holland Festival.This music comes from a tradition in which everyone involved in the ritual participates. Buthere it was placed on the stage of a venue, with the majority of people placed in the posi-tion of observer. But music recognises no fourth wall. Suddenly, all these observers foundthemselves challenged to take part. Core to Sufi ritual is the concept of surrendering theindividual and participating in the communal. In order to participate in a ritual, one mustabandon aloofness and step in. Surrendering to trance does not imply the loss of self. Onthe contrary: one gains the world by participating in a collective emotion that becomessomething like a religious experience. This is what caused all the confusion in theMuziekgebouw aan’t IJ. The Holland Festival audience did not come to the theatre in orderto participate in a religious experience. The person who warned us not to dispel the trancedid not mention anything about us being affected by it. We were not prepared for a cultureshock. We were not prepared to become involved. As the audience was confronted with the situation, it was up to each individual how theydealt with it. Some embraced the foreign experience, while others protested against it.Many, as loyal representatives of our materialistic culture, translated the experience into atrophy: a photograph, an object to take home and add to a collection of objects.

What kind of community is the audience of an international festival like this one? Whichsociety does it contemplate? With which culture does it identify with and which culturesdoes it question? People seated around me in the audience at the Sufi night could havecome from any continent. This audience was no community because it was given no cultu-ral framework to identify itself as such, not even by the Festival. As the confusion grew, ourexpectations apparently impeded exchange. When I asked a friend what she expected from theatre, she said that if no transformationoccurred, the performance was not worth it. But where does this transformation take place?On the stage? In the audience? In the expectations of the audience? In the community? Insociety?Peter Sellars describes his Mozart festival in Austria as a political message to the politi-cal and business leadership of the world – about what they have failed to provide. Ong KengSen asks ‘What is the use of our art?’, when elaborating on his attempts to link art to realcommunities: to give it a social function, to make it ‘useful’. And how about Lemi Ponifasiowho tells us that in the West Pacific there are no artists, but instead prophets and visiona-ries, who have a constant responsibility towards society? ‘If it doesn’t rain, they’ve got aproblem.’ A heavy responsibility in times of global warming.The Holland Festival 2005 opened with Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar in which Tierno repeat-edly uses the phrase ‘my truth, your truth, and the truth’. ‘The truth’, as Peter Brook laterexplained to us, refers to the space between you and me. Basten Stokhuyzen talked aboutthe repetitive loops played by the Sufis that roll like waves – and this is what takes both thesinger and the listener to an area in between. Further, in a monologue that left most of usquestionless, Peter Sellars talked about the point when a body becomes a ghost in theatre,when it is present and absent, when one is in between and at two different places at the

‘Wanting to do right in education’ means accepting the system of education and wanting tomake it work. But if this approach constantly justifies itself, then one may wonder how edu-cation can be critically examined.During Mode05, a recent expert meeting on choreography and education in Potsdam, I wasintroduced to a provocative book written by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière entit-led The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 1) Primarily it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiledFrench schoolteacher, who in 1818 devised an unconventional teaching method that causeduproar within the European academic community. Jacotot, who knew no Flemish, foundhimself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French. Knowledge,Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, neither was explication necessary to learn.The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all peoplewere equally intelligent, and to devise a philosophy and method for what he called ‘intellec-tual emancipation’.Rancière, commenting on his own book, emphasises the contemporary implications of thestory: ‘I would like (...) to show that what we are dealing with here is not merely an amusingjourney into the history of pedagogy, but a philosophical reflection, entirely up-to-date, onthe manner in which pedagogical reason and social reason hold together.’ 2) Rancière’s coreproposition is that the school does not wish to know. It fails in its intension of reducingsocial and intellectual inequality because it is ignorant of the functioning of its own logic,which propagates inequality by its very efforts to mitigate it.The enterprise of education always consists – however and wherever it is carried out – of aperson or group doing the educating, and a person or group being educated. Pedagogicalreason presents itself as the act that lifts the veil and reveals things. The usual mechanismis ‘explanation’, which is considered a social method for laying out the elements of a parti-cular area of knowledge that must be transmitted in a manner appropriate for the limitedcapacity of the minds under instruction. But this apparently simple concept is, on closerinspection, subject to infinite regression: explanation is generally accompanied by anexplanation of the explanation, for example by educators who explain the explanation thatpermits the student to comprehend. And so on.In Rancière’s view, school is a place where control and knowledge should come together inharmony and optimise the social function of the institution. His critique does not proscribethe construction of schools, programmes or pedagogies, but he attacks over-inflatedexpectations of a school charged with overcoming the actual inequality.

So what are the consequences of the ignorant schoolmaster’s work? He decides not toexplain, and sets out to activate the latent capability of the person seeking knowledge. Heobliges another intelligence to exercise itself – independent of any knowledge the educatorpossesses.The method Jacotot proposes is the oldest in the world, and it is verified daily in all cir-cumstances where an individual must learn something when no explanation is available.But here lies the paradox: ‘No one wants to recognise it, no one wants to cope with theintellectual revolution it signifies. The social circle, the order of things, prevents it frombeing recognised for what it is: the true method by which everyone learns and by whicheveryone can take the measure of his capacity. One must dare to recognise it and pursue anopen verification of its power – otherwise the method of powerlessness, the Old Master,will last as long as the order of things.’ 3)Seen in the light of Jacotot’s story, ‘wanting to do right in education’ is apparently a trap.But what would be the alternative to ‘doing right’, of serving the traditional logic of educa-tion and confirming the circle of power? Deliberately doing wrong? I do not think so. But Ido believe that if a school, as a producer within society, wants to propose or provide anopportunity for emancipation, it must reassess the functioning of the educational machineas a social machine. And it must reassess the relationship in which education takes place– the relationship between educator and student ‘Who, then, would want to begin?’ Jacotot asks. 4)

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Marijke Hoogenboom / Who’s afraid of (art) education?Some indecent proposals

The following is the edited version of a public lecture held on the occasion of DasArts’ 11thanniversary, Amsterdam 17 June 2005When I left DasArts in 2001 I was filled with doubts: doubts about art academies in gene-ral and doubts about our little school in particular. For a long time, I had felt stuck in my ownways of thinking, full of slogans and ideologies that did not want to leave me. I felt I wouldbe repeating the same story forevermore, mumbling about participants being the theatre ofthe future whenever the issue of education came up. Notions that had once functioned askeywords had come to sound more like slippery clichés. But let us face facts: we have heardthis sort of overused slogan too often. And anyway many of DasArts’ principles are beingpromoted by a growing number of initiatives.One of the core precepts of DasArts was, and is, that with every new learning period, or‘block’, the school would be questioned and reinvented. But having been involved in elevenstudy programmes I wondered if we had really kept our promise; what was really neededwas not merely to expand our system yet again, but to forcibly eject ourselves from our ownterritory, forever.Let me put it like this: I did not get into education because I was specifically interested inteaching and learning per se. I was excited by the uncertainty of the situation that Ritsaertten Cate offered to me. And I was interested in creating innovative work in the performingarts. The challenge remains: how can you think these objectives together? Returning to my departure from DasArts: I was under the strong impression that we werealmost incapable of taking critical distance from our own practice. We had been on a high-ly intuitive journey, during which we had had the courage to trust in the paths we were tra-velling without necessarily needing, or being able, to fully articulate what we were doing orwhy we were doing it. Now that I am searching for a more fundamental criticality towards the educational plat-forms I identify with, I keep asking myself these four crucial questions:

Why is it that we want to ‘do right’ in education?How do we know what knowledge is useful?What will succeed the concept of interdisciplinarity?What are the specific characteristics of the field of the performing arts?

The school I would like to discuss, then, is not the school I created with Ritsaert ten Cate,neither is it the Amsterdam School of the Arts with which I am affiliated at the moment, itis a school as a speculation, a series of thoughts that might – or might not – lead to newpotentials.

1 / When we celebrate the anniversary of a school, what is it exactly that we are celebra-ting? Is it the great effect this school has on the individuals and groups involved (as eviden-ced by the works presented), or are we specifically celebrating the practice of the schoolitself: the educational strategies that make DasArts a school?On a more general level one could argue that with DasArts’ anniversary, we are celebratingour faith in a very particular type of enterprise – the enterprise of education, the enterpriseof obtaining some knowledge or skill by a learning process.As educators we are – I am afraid – full of good intentions. We believe in progress: we makea conscious effort to bridge the gap between the informed and the uninformed; we want tofoster individual development and enable people to upgrade their abilities; we are interest-ed in good people and want to make them capable citizens or professionals. We are also,and I say this without cynicism, constantly thinking of how to change and improve the learn-ing environments we have created, in order to change and improve the effect they have onour students.

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For the Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan, an open approach to the concept of ‘usefuland non-useful knowledge’ (as performed by Hannah Hurtzig) is a prerequisite for artisticresearch even to take place. He claims: ‘The idea that art should be a research takes pro-file when the art itself is not stably inserted in a knowledge system, and when the know-ledge itself is not conceived as a closed and unitary system anymore. The art as researchdoes not start from the given values.’ 7)I feel that the opportunity – or even the need – for research processes has been fairly wellintegrated into educational settings. It might be that research has become a cheap andunfinished mode of production that offers few insights into its methodology, objectives ordegree of self-reflection that would make it different from any other product in the arts.It is far more difficult to incorporate the right to fail into the larger scheme of a school. How,for example, does failure become a form of knowledge? Is there any place for the term ‘fail-ure’ in the context of learning? And I do not mean a situation where we are merely not doingvery well, but the truly traumatic experience of incapability: when plans collapse and greathopes die.Failure is mostly viewed as an exit. But let us suppose, in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze, andin this school as a speculation, that failure is a beginning. Let us suppose from the very out-set that it is of a process intrinsic to its potentialities: failure and non-failure need eachother at any moment of their progress and development. Just as, while being developed,knowledge needs non-knowledge, art needs non-art, or philosophy needs non-philosophy.

I have avoided speaking about the apparent opposite of knowledge – not-knowing, or igno-rance – as a motor for producing sense. In an age of information overkill (whether cognitiveor sensory), it might seem something of an affectation to pretend not to know, or even touse ‘not-knowing’ as a playful strategy. In a workshop that my research group recentlyorganised with the Springdance festival and the postgraduate studies programme DanceUnlimited, the Belgian dance writer Jeroen Peeters critically examined our proposal totreat performance As if We Don’t Know What it Is (title). He asked: ‘How do we relate tothings we don’t know? How do we acknowledge not-knowing? How do we remain silent infront of things we don’t know? How do we represent not-knowing? How do we constructnot-knowing? How do we provoke not-knowing? How do we claim not-knowing? How do wedisclaim not-knowing? How do we make not-knowing productive?’ 8) In fact, Peeters was expressing his doubt that the blind spot of our action, perception andcommunication can ever be distinguished from our mental constructions and projections.The ‘not-knowing’ is in his view a discursive site that is always affected by knowledge –especially bodily knowledge – without us even being aware of it.The French choreographer Boris Charmatz (a guest artist in the workshop) responded tothis with an interesting artistic method, his Guessing Strategies, whereby an imagineddance is created rather than an executed one, or a story rather than an action: ‘There isalways a space behind oneself, a presence at the back that gnaws what manifests itself inthe body, in the lights, in the sound, in the space. Tribes of phantoms organise the work, aconstant game between the manifested and the non-manifested.’ 9)Can a school allow itself to guess about knowledge? I would hope so. Knowledge as desire,as performance, as ghosts, as research, as failure. Could Hannah Hurtzig’s Black Market bea school, a resource-based community of learning? Immediate, inclusive and performative?Does it matter that it only lasts for one night?

3 / Although I am much inspired by non-institutional learning environments, for the last twoyears I have been working as Professor at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and leading aresearch group for Art Practice & Development. Part of my job is to look at art practice inan interdisciplinary context and to stimulate the exchange with crossovers in the professi-onal arts world. I love my job, and I think it is very valuable to throw the doors of the initialtraining programmes wide open. But I must confess that it also bothers me that interdisci-plinarity is still introduced as a novel concept, or at least as an innovative practice that we

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One of the most radical critics of institutionalised education in modern economies is theAustrian historian Ivan Illich. Already in the early 1970s he called for ‘deschooling’: thedeconstruction of centralised control, nationalised curricula, and the increasing bureau-cratic accreditation of learning. Although his passionate advocacy of more convivial formsof education was never likely to make much headway – then or now – it is striking that longbefore one could speak of a common network culture, he suggested the use of advancedtechnology to support learning webs in which each participant both teaches and learns.With this early vision on education as a web of ‘informal connectedness’, Illich introducesa notion that I happily add to my list of speculative queries: how can a school embracediverse educational relationships, provide a variety of opportunities for involvement, andconsider equality not as a goal to be achieved, but as a point of departure?

2 / In addition to my doubts about the process of learning in educational systems, I amextremely uncertain as to how I should relate to the idea of knowledge itself. The situationwe set up during my time at DasArts was contradictory. On the one hand, we claimed thatour understanding of knowledge is exclusively linked to (the formation of) the individual.And this makes sense within the context of the arts: ‘Everyone agrees that there are tech-niques, skills and even tricks that can be learnt. But the construction of one’s own creativemethod is probably one of the most intimate, personal and almost indescribable humanoccupations, since it is rooted in the deepest inner being of man.’ 5) On the other hand, wewere still introducing huge amounts of information, study material and experience that weexpected people to learn from. From time to time there was confusion, and I still wonderhow the two domains relate to each other. Who knows?I think we are aware of the function of knowledge to gain certainty (or, if you prefer, to redu-ce uncertainty). In respect to art education, though, I am interested in how the complexityof knowledge can be explored in a creative way, and how a school can keep investigatingthe function of knowledge in a ‘state of risking’.An example: Hannah Hurtzig (mentor at DasArts in 1996) recently developed an excitingformat for researching knowledge as an economical, political and cultural resource. For onenight only, she turned Berlin’s HAU Theater into a showroom for the Black Market of UsefulKnowledge and Non-Knowledge. At 40 small tables, 100 experts in different fields offered 30minutes of their product to individual members of the audience. The audience could book anexpert and acquire this knowledge in a private dialogue.I was particularly struck by two aspects of my experiences at the Black Market. Firstly, thesubversion of the hierarchy of different qualities of knowledge: the Black Market allowedengagement with knowledge from the most sophisticated and the most trivial perspectives,and presented the experts from science, craft, philosophy, art or just daily life as comple-mentary to one another. Secondly, the event was based on the performative character ofknowledge as an encounter, and during this encounter the ‘state of knowing’ constantlychanges ownership. On this night, knowledge appeared as a living archive, as a collective,whispered story – growing and evolving as we participated.

So how can a school investigate the function of knowledge in a ‘state of risking’? What arethe risky moments for a school? Tim Etchells, the UK artist and leader of ForcedEntertainment, expands on this subject in his collection of writings on performance, InCertain Fragments: ‘Risk and investment in the strangest places, slipping and hiding. Riskis the thing we are striving for in performance but not a thing we can look for. We look forsomething else and hope (or pray to the gods we don’t believe in) that risk shows up. Weknow it when we see it, I’m sure of that. Risk surprises us, always fleeting – we’re slightlyout of control.’ 6) Slipping, hiding, fleeting, praying – these are not words usually applied ineducation. But I would like to propose at least two ‘states of risking’ that could be relevantfor both the individual student and the educational organisation: the notion of research andthe notion of failure.

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as an organised public space that cannot exist without an audience and cannot exist –because of its ephemeral nature – without topicality. All together more than desirableambitions that I happily take into account when I ‘make school’.But there is another example that I am almost too embarrassed to mention.In June of 2005, with peers from my temporary initiative An Academy at the HollandFestival, I was about to watch Peter Sellars’ Bach Cantatas, when, all of a sudden, Sellarsgot on stage and announced that the central character, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, was in agreat deal of pain and would only be able to perform the second part of the programme,Cantata No.82 ‘Ich habe genug’. Sellars took some time to inform the full house of how hisown encounter with Bach’s Cantatas and the rehearsal period had been affected by greatcrisis and how the music answered their need for comfort and hope, up to a point wheredeath appeared, not as an enemy, not as panic, not as a farewell, but as the beginning ofsomething. Before Sellars quit the stage, he left us with questions of uncomplicated clari-ty: ‘What is a good death? What do we see when these eyes close and the inner lightopens?’ 13)For god’s sake! I thought. How dare he use his seductive storytelling to trigger the emotion-al reactions of the audience? How dare he ask such questions on some ordinary Thursdaynight? How dare he expose me to suffering and loss while I sit here next to someone I havenever met? Is it just another trick or am I really involved?But from the moment the music started and the marvellous singer’s voice issued forth,there was no doubt that Sellars’ Bach Cantatas did indeed dare. And without delay I was cutinto my deepest fears and emotions.I cannot help it, it keeps happening to me, and although very rare, moments such as theseare the most satisfying that I know of in theatre: it is the sense of community that turns ‘me’into ‘we’, and reminds me that my being is full of a wanting, a wanting to ‘be with’ and to bepart of the shared sensations that make us human.The question remains: can a school recreate any of this?

1) Jaques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford1991. 2) Jaques Rancière, opening address at the 5th International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, August20, 2004. 3) Ibid. 4) Jaques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford 1991, p. 17. 5) Marianne VanKerkhoven On the (im)possibility of art education, her first, unpublished, text on DasArts, Brussels1998. 6) Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments, London 1999. 7) Giulio Carlo Argan, after: Matko Mestrovic,Computer and Visual Research – Ways of thinking and scope of acting, lecture at Stuttgart 1960,‘Computers in theory and art’, Schloss Solitude, 2004. 8) Jeroen Peeters, As if we don’t know what it is,proposals for performance in shifting contexts; reading the proposal, phrasing words, strands andquestions, written for the mini-conference organised by Dance Unlimited, Springdance and theresearch group for Art Practice and Development, April 8-10, 2005. 9) Ibid. 10) Irit Rogoff, Academy asPotentiality, address given at Mode05 on March 19, 2005, www.mode05.org. 11) Bojana Cvejic,Collectivity? You mean Collaboration, Brussels 2005. 12) Mårten Spångberg, quoted from my notes onMode05, Potsdam March 13-19, 2005. 13) Quote from the introduction to Bach Cantatas on June 16, 2005,Holland Festival.

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should strive for. I am convinced that this mission has already been accomplished and thatthe term is no longer useful when considering the artistic developments of our time.We have reached a point where the very existence of interdisciplinary work is no longer anissue, and it can finally be taken for granted that an approach across unusual dividesbelongs to the reality of contemporary art practice. That interdisciplinarity is still spoken ofas a practice separate, or excluded from, other practices in the arts, might then be a mis-understanding, or at best a political strategy in a time when interdisciplinarity is insuffi-ciently acknowledged in institutional settings.In her paper Academy as Potentiality, Irit Rogoff dispels some of the illusions that most ofus held on to throughout the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Interdisciplinarity is really nothing more thana play with boundaries. (...) No, what we have to do is to juxtapose to this logic another logicand ask how would it look if we operated differently?’ 10) Rogoff reminds us that the storyof interdisciplinarity is the story of thinking in terms of similarity and difference, one thatencourages homogeneity; the defining of the one in the light of the other.In that sense, the focus on, or the belief in, interdisciplinarity, has probably distracted usfrom acknowledging the artistic developments that have taken place within certain genresand that have destabilised traditional disciplines and changed the perception of currenttheatre, dance, music, film, architecture or visual arts. It is unhelpful to continue claiminga separate place for the use of ‘inter-’, ‘mixed-’, ‘multi-’ or ‘trans-’ strategies as long as itconfuses the challenge to be more specific about distinctive attachments and desires ofcultural formats: ‘The law of touching in this context is not fusion, but separation. It is theheterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Heterogeneity that stimulates furtherheterogenesis.’ 11)In relation to dance, the Swedish dramaturg Mårten Spångberg proposed replacing theterm ‘multimedia’, with ‘media-multi’: ‘It’s not a question of mixing and collaboratingacross media and disciplines,’ he said, ‘but specifically doing choreography by way of othermedia and disciplines.’ 12) In accordance with this view, then, innovative dance makers arenot intent on leaving the field of dance, but seek to penetrate the edge of the discipline aspart of a constant negotiation, creating a situation whereby – from the point of view of themoving body – a variety of dissimilar domains (such as media, speech, music and social orcultural contexts) are set into motion.In a recent project with opera director Pierre Audi on the adaptation of opera for film andother media, I observed that young artists in interdisciplinary collaborations often tend tosynchronize their behaviour, and only slowly discover the method of co-existence wherebythere is not a unified single entity, but abandonment and exposure to one another.Probably it would be only a slight shift, but I believe that if we were to stop calling for therecognition of interdisciplinarity as a new zone, a hybrid practice would have to be taken forwhat it is: not as a play with boundaries, but as a desire to exhaustively explore a discipli-ne – a real struggle for meaning within a particular field of the arts. For a school however,this operation is almost an ethical issue, because if we do not want to limit the aestheticframe, we find ourselves operating within an infinite network of structures. And then what?How do we ensure that we do not provoke indifference and lose ourselves in the unrestric-ted production of cultural events? How do we make sure that we care, and insist on thenecessity of a point of view?

4 / A final consideration: I have set myself the task of addressing the question of whetherthere is anything specific about the performing arts that could apply to educational princi-ples. Or in slightly more simple terms: does it matter that a school is concerned particular-ly with theatre?To illuminate this facet of the subject I collected some beautiful quotes – from JanRitsema, Tim Etchells, Hans-Thies Lehmann, even Paolo Virno – that are all passionateabout the uniqueness of theatre as one of the last places in our cultural landscape wherewe gather life and where we are invited to be here and to be now: to feel exactly what it isto be in this place and in this time. These are thoughts about the political nature of theatre

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What is An Academy? An Academy as a temporary learning zone, a little parasite in the big universe of an inter-national festival, something to take away and turn into something else? Give it wheels andit will turn into a mobile academy, a mobile think-tank for makers and art-workers. What canit teach? Practice and theory? Art and action? The question is: is there really a desire tospread the word? Let us look more closely at the methods of making in order to make themtransparent. In these times of multiplicity, the spider’s web no longer suffices as a meta-phor for artistic networks; the gossamer threads disappear into a diversity that represen-tation cannot capture. So, how does one identify the way in which artistic networks work,travel, appear and disappear? If they continue to expand and multiply themselves at the pre-sent rate, is it not natural that the ‘big houses’, the established art institutions, withdrawand create even higher walls around their temples? During the present explosive growth inthe diversity of performance practice, connections, collaborations and artistic interaction,are theatres closing themselves off? In Germany and Switzerland some of the great thea-tre empires, including the Stadt- and Staatstheater, have opened their doors. When a bio-logist (Xavier Le Roy) can become a dancer who does not dance; when a former student of‘applied theatre science’ (Gießen) tells stories by putting ‘experts of everyday life’ on stage(Rimini Protokoll and others); when a master in economics becomes the director of a muni-cipal theatre, only to curate political conferences (Matthias von Hartz): it looks like post-dramatic forms of theatre finally taken their place on the main stage. But is this a successstory, or a symptom of something else?Even when ‘outsiders’ enter established venues, even when the audiences of good old dra-matic theatre become interested in reality shows on stage or audio tours in the city, thatdoes not mean that new theatre has taken over. As Brecht said: ‘Das Theater theatert allesein’, or ‘the theatre turns everything into theatre’, meaning: the apparatus swallows – anddigests. The makers – workers – are more concerned with producing than presenting products. RenéPollesch, although used to large-scale productions, also insists on an independent stageassociated with a bigger institution, such as Prater at Volksbühne in Berlin. His first pie-ces were produced at the famous ‘Daimlerstraße’, or OFF-TAT (Theatre am Turm) inFrankfurt am Main. But the tradition of off-stages, or Probebühnen (tryout stages), is decli-ning. Avant-garde theatres like TAT, or the Mickery in Amsterdam, have disappeared. Evenif other places survive, their future is truly precarious in these times of economic crisis –as precarious as the future of the artists who work there. Is that why producers and artiststend to have rather loose relationships nowadays?While the fringe is fighting harder and harder to create a sustainable environment, it isdisappointing if major festivals resist acknowledging innovative artistic developments. Butwhy would they acknowledge us, as long as we continue creating our own comfort zones for‘The Young’ and ‘The Experimental’? Why don’t we turn it around for once: let the little fisheat the big fish; put small festivals in the venues of the big festivals (and vice versa)? In What are you looking at? (1998), the American ensemble Gob Squad invites the audienceto look into the performance space through a perspex two-way mirror. But sometimes thelight changes so that the audience can no longer see inside and only see themselves reflec-ted. If a festival could function like this, then Peter Sellars’ wish, as expressed at the LAFestival in 1991, might come true: ‘We hope that this festival marks an occasion (...) to lookoutward as well as inward, and for the world to look back. We hope that after looking, therewill be talk, and after talk, listening and then action.’

As for our own experiences: what was the Holland Festival? Inside, the impressiveMuziekgebouw building is a beautiful idea given form in glass and wood – a true temple ofart – where people come to meditate for a while to beautiful music from Iran, cry and bitetheir nails in anguish while listening to Peter Sellars’ breathtaking Bach Cantatas, andopen their ears not to miss a single word of Johan Simons’ Elementarteilchen.

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Nicola Nord / SPREAD! An Academy

Be there. Breathe in. Breathe out in silence.

Break it. Open oh open the door not, but never close it.

Lift your foot as if about to walk, but stay. Stay moving.

Say a word for the first time, but know it well.Forget it. Remember.

Remember a gesture very dear to you. Execute the gesture slowly.

Repeat, but make a comment about it.Be there. Breathe in.

Breathe out in great laughter.Open oh open your mouth not, but release.

Close your eyes. Turn around.Turn around.

Look. Think of an image.

Raise your hand as if about to touch.And touch.

Touch.This is an epic.

Now you may dance.

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Credits

editors / Marijke Hoogenboom and Hester van Hasseltnotebook / Hester van Hasseltphotography / Tatyana van Walsum, Hester van Hasselt, Andrea Bozictranslation and text editing / Steve Green graphic design / Esther Noyonsprinting / SSP

An Academy 2005 took place from June 12–26. It was generously supported by the researchgroup for Art Practice and Development(Amsterdam School of the Arts), Theater Gasthuisand the Holland Festival. The initiative was a follow-up to the Young Makers Tour, conceived by Nicole Beutler/LISA and Maaike van Geijn for the Holland Festival 2004. Under the title An Academy, the research groupfor Art Practice and Development and TheaterGasthuis co-produce a series of experimental,non-institutional learning situations, that keepchanging location, time and context.

© 2006 An Academy and the authors

published by / An Academyc/o Art Practice and DevelopmentAmsterdam School of the ArtsP.O. Box 15079NL – 1001 MB AmsterdamT +31(0)20 527 78 04

www.anacademy.org

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Such moments can open the roof of any temple, revealing the starry sky, turning theMuziekgebouw into a giant ship. And there it is: the mobile theatre, it is floating! Let usmake appropriation an art: investigate a festival, do performance research on theatre ormake roving art academies.It is not about establishment versus avant-garde, mainstream versus fringe, high versuslow; it is about what we are looking for. Perhaps newer forms of theatre are yet to come.Perhaps everything is still to come. Perhaps this is the only possible attitude to have inorder to make something possible: simply, to look forward to seeing theatre!

(And after looking there will be talk, and after talk, listening and then action...)

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Documents

An Academy 1