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Communicating from no place: a CD mobility in four parts
Part 1 – Rotterdam ho!
Liv and I attended the Rotterdam Festival de Keuze, a multi-disciplinary festival, for our mobility. As a context for testing the concept of what ‘communicating dance’ means, it was full of potential.
Firstly, the entire festival was contained in the Rotterdamse Schouwberg theatre, a set-up that meant performers and audience members mingled in the foyer between performances.
Secondly, we had an all-access pass to every performance in the programme while we were there.
And finally, one of the festival’s producers, Ravian van den Hil, was on-hand to help us gain access to artists and festival insiders.
Part 2 – You want us to do what?
On the day we arrived, we met Ravian and Yira, the social media and output manager for the festival, in the foyer of the theatre. We came with the expectation of hearing about how we could best communicate dance while we were at de Keuze.
The message we received was a strange one. The festival did not have a dedicated blog of its own, so the organisers were happy for us to use whichever forum we chose to talk about the work we saw (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, a personal blog, etc.). They were eager to generate as much social media buzz about the festival as possible.
However, it was suggested that we only post positively about what we saw, and that if we had a negative reaction to something we might like to focus on another aspect of the performance (music, costume etc.) we felt more admiration for.
This approach makes very good sense for someone interested in promoting the festival and selling tickets. However, as participants of a programme interested in exploring what it means to communicate dance, it seemed at best unimaginative and at worst superficial.
Part 3 – Let’s not do that
Before coming to Rotterdam, Liv and I had launched an online pilot issue of a magazine called DRAFF. The crucial point about DRAFF is that it’s artist driven, with the material coming directly from the artists themselves. The first pilot issue had covered the Dublin Fringe festival the previous month.
After talking a bit, we decided to DRAFF the Festival de Keuze.
Instead of posting diluted comments about the work we’d seen on various social media outlets, we’d try to give both those who had attended the festival and those who hadn’t an insight into the work that goes on behind the scenes of a performance.
As a secondary motivation, we thought it would probably teach us a thing or two to put together an issue about artists we didn’t already know personally (as was the case with many of the artists in Dublin, whose work we were familiar with).
Part 4 - DRAFF de Keuze
We set to work emailing artists directly, or pouncing on them in the foyer of the theatre when they had already been rendered defenceless by wine. In general, we got a very positive reaction and artists happily sent us lots of images, audio files and text excerpts.
We chose from these and gradually put together our second issue, dedicated entirely to Festival de Keuze. It was a communication about dance (and theatre), but one from a position of curiosity, rather than opinion (whether sincere or not). It was communication from no one place, which, as a happy coincidence, allows you to look at things from many places.
Take a look at DRAFF de Keuze here: http://www.draff.net/issue-2.html
