Post-dance is the second performance event researched and developed by Sara Muthi. As opposed to publishing text as the result of her research Sara prefers to forefront the questions, shortcomings and potential surrounding live-art practices in the Ireland through performance and open dialogue. By way of commissioning live-art in collaboration with visual artists, dancers and musicians in conjunction with institutions and venues across Dublin, Sara aims to re-examine the often preconceived ontology surrounding performance practice. With one eye on the developments of performance practices internationally, particularly in Europe, it is through vigorous research, collaboration and an element of education that Sara develops her research based events.
Post-dance is a new and rather empty terminology. Initially a 2015 conference of the same name it took place at MDT in Stockholm. Created by Danjel Andersson, André Lepecki and Gabriel Smeets, it gathered artists, scholars, thinkers, producers, activists and those who care deeply for dance. Together they considered this new vocabulary as a container for contemporary dance practice/thought which may otherwise suffer from an attempt at capturing it in historically loaded language. Post-dance has no agenda to advance or project the future of movement. Rather, it gives licence to connect things that seem farfetched, make what was once evident, foreign again; consider and cross-pollinate work that does not easily slot into commercial or institutional contexts.
Post-dance is an “open-source concept.” “It is not a leader. It is a container. It needs to be filled.” While performance art practice is overrun with multi-/inter-/post- disciplinary artists, dance may have become a term so vague and unstable that it can envelop any-body. The Dublin context, however, does not often consider the cross section of these paralleling practices. Both approach similar concerns of embodiment, meaning and touch through varying methods, methods that are appropriately and productively transferable. This contribution to Post-dance aims to connect often disparate creative performing communities. It proposes a space to borrow and test each other’s methodologies in order to labour for new answers to worn out questions like; what is dance? What is performance? It also has the potential to prompt answers to questions we have not yet asked.
This performance/lecture hopes to introduce the container of Post-dance to the Irish context through subverting expectations of what we consider to be dance, live-art, musical composition and, perhaps, audience. Post-dance is a container that serves the needs of every national community differently. This is Dublin’s contribution, hopefully one of many.
