Call for Contex
Beatrice Leanza
It came to life out of the consideration that there wasn’t really someone working on a structural level in the field of independent. Contemporary performing arts in Beijing, and out of the experience I had during the Dashanzi International Art festival of last year (DIAF, 2005 — www.diaf.org) when I was in charge of the international program, and also the coordination of the whole logistics. I realized there was little communication with the practitioners and players involved, with a lack of targeted audience and context. So I felt there was something that needed to be done to better bring it together.
BL: Lack of infrastructure is a very common issue to different context within the art fields in China. So is performing art is somehow related to your background?
ES: I used to work in a theatre back in Belgium, where I was responsible over two years for the young performing artists programme in this art centre/theatre in Loven called Stuk (www.stuk.be) which has been always presenting a rather cutting-edge dance scene. Before that when I was studying I used to write and review a lot about contemporary dance, considering that this scenario is very lively in Belgium. So we started to work on TIM in June 2005 right after the DIAF. I was the initiator and started to work within the kind of framework that arose after the festival. I than brought it under the umbrella of Platform China. They were very interested in it, especially in the residencies programme and offered their facilities and infrastructure, so I suggested to work there for a while as free lance Art Director. The main stake of the idea was that instead of "adding adding adding" content, we should have worked a bit more with the basis, to bring foreign experiences in collaboration with the local scene.
BL: So you are not directly working for just displaying international cultural products here, rather for enhancing the pre-existing local one.
ES: Definitely I would put the first aspect as a secondary one. What stroke me was that someone interested in contemporary performance couldn’t really get to know what was going on. So the very first proposition was that of creating a website, wherein uploading all sorts of information relevant to this artistic form, event, shows, and providing an overview or agenda about the official and non official circles.
BL: What do u mean by official?
ES: Well you have the very independent circle, such as Wang Yinan, Wu Wenguang and the Living Dance Studio, Paper Tiger Studio ecc, and on the other hand you have the more official ones, like the Beijing Dance Company, which have an infrastructure to start with, but have to stand by themselves too since they’ve have been recently privatized.
BL: So TIM is been constructed out of main principles like communication strategy together with curating and art residences.
ES: Yes, there are three main stakeholders behind this endeavour. Communication: by means of the website but also communication to young artists on how they can get funds, participate to international residencies, where they can apply ecc. It is more like an art institute that communicates not only to the audience but also to the professionals. Second thing is co-production, and third investment in the local scene by means of representation serving as an essential link between China and the rest of the world.
If you want to build up co-productions you need a context to create it in. So it is an enhancement in communication that provides this. This is the real start.
BL: So what is the context you are creating with the upcoming spring/summer planning?
ES: We are using in the first place the limited context that there is. Which is not totally absent, yet provided by the DIAF and it is really important to follow up on that. For the third edition it has already build a bit of a reputation about contemporary performance and dance, and the last edition proved that. We have to add to it but in a sensible way. Not big plays but projects that have collaborative vocations.
BL: What are the projects for DIAF?
ES: By working with a set framework of "Beijing /Background," I had the idea of doing a Bal Modern, a project in collaboration with Rosas (www.rosas.be), a very well known dance company founded in 1983 by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, which has been developed for years and has been very successful back in Europe. A collaboration between a Rosas choreographer and a Chinese choreographer will be entailed. They will teach a three minute dance to the audience and plan a direct intervention into the city to end with an evening ball in Dashanzi. Here we are going directly to the people, we are bringing dance to the corners of the city, to the loads of improvised "dancers" you can see around town and of any age. In order to mingle with them many volunteers will participate. We will have 40 dancers coming from all the different organizations and institutions teaming up for this project, such as Living Dance studio, the Beijing Modern Dance Company and Central Academy of Drama. This is the aim, to bridge communication among all these amazing people.
BL: How do you fund your activities?
ES: There are no funds to start, but we have a proficient network. And a context. The strategy when come to funding, is generally that everybody go to companies with just one single project, what we do on the contrary is to present a six months-comprehensive programme to have long term relationship with them. Now we are talking very intensively with a couple of private people and institutions. For example we’ve found partners also in the DIAF. There is a basic commitment from some Belgian institutions I worked with, for the rest we have to rise funds for everything. Most important is the commitment of local partners, that can aid with their spaces, logistics, human resources.
BL: What about the Borderline Video Art Festival project (June 22 -26, 2006, Beijing). Why video art? How is it necessary?
ES: Video art has hardly been shown here and in a professional way. It’s generally been represented through the same shortlist of names and people which are internationally renowned. It is a medium that has not been shown in its full value. With video you can do so much, u can go into installation, into documentary, animation, short film, performance, live art, public art. There is much more than what we see now.
BL: So Borderline is an exploration of the medium carried out through a call for entry of various video works and than selected for the final display.
ES: Definitely in all its identities and expressions, and a link between video and dance, video and installation, video and music. We just set the borders, literally through the use of boxes. We argue that a box functions as a powerful metaphor. Big ones, small once, put inside existing spaces, sometimes visible sometimes not. We will disperse these boxes all around the different venues involved: in Dashanzi, in the East End Art Zone, involving Platform China, Universal Studios, CAAW ecc. The form of selection we choose gives the same accountability to young and emergent video artists as well as to established ones. The international programme is set through residencies and collaboration with the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent (www.courtisane.be), Belgium, which is presenting a selection of international video art coming to China, but than we provide a one of Chinese video art that goes there. And we are planning to do an outside screening of short films too.
BL: What about the conference that comes with it?
ES: We want to present what is exploration with such a media pursuing interaction and exchange, and this is more interesting to do with an institution like CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing) in order to provide insights to the future video artists. There are a couple of things being planned: there will be two artists talking about their experiences, than zooming into one particular work. One is Ou Ning and the other is Anouk De Clercq (Belgium), while a third residency will be realized for Heine Adval (Norway — www.deepblue.be).
BL: This is a quite interesting endeavour, whereas lack of comprehension is here also due to a lack and incapacity of criticism.
ES: I think it important in fact to have a Chinese video artist too. This is the only change that can happen, being confronted with questions. The whole workshop programme stays with the idea of putting part of the festival into CAFA, in the campus, and have a screening, contemporary dance and installation there for one day so to build up sort of laboratories with artists and students. Also The Courtisane people will also talk about what it is for them to put up a festival, and also our main sponsor BARCO will introduce the new possibilities offered by the new technologies. We would like also to end with a round table discussion open to both professionals and the students so to give them all possible inputs for being more participative and active.
BL: If Borderline wants to give continuity to this context, will you re-propose it?
ES: I so think so and the idea is to do it every two years. But we wanna also see what is the response ecc. This has the same philosophy of TIM despite not being performing arts. We are not working with a thematic framework by one curator, we are rather working with an artistic platform, which are the partners and experts from the field, in order to create coherence and networking.
BL: Who are the people that are going to make the selection?
ES: offiCina (by Rosario Scarpato and Monica Piccioni cofounders of this Italian cultural agency), Nataline Sun from Platform China, Wu Wenguang, Pi Li is involved too from Universal Studios and Frank Uytterhaegen and Ai Weiwei from CAAW.
BL: How are these people participating?
Es: We have much space availability, but we will go first through a selection of the art works and than one of spaces, not the other way round. This is a whole very big experiment to try getting people work together with all their ideas and different perspectives.
. BL: And Beijing is one of the very left places for such experimentation. So how do you see 798 Factory developing?
ES: I am an optimist. We have an amazing infrastructure and people within. There is a sort of an ambiguous feeling, and I have big resent against all those people, from artists themselves to cultural players, saying its becoming just a big commercial plant. Than, I say, just do something. It is about what people want to do with it. So we must keep on inventing and developing it. Walking away from it is no use. Dashanzi is a big-China-flash thing bringing in delegations finding themselves bewildered by the ‘independent China of the arts, trying to look with the microscope at the next big thing.’ I think we just have to work at it with sense of responsibility and awareness.
BL: On the base of your experience what is the approach Chinese companies or potential sponsors have given to your approach and request for support?
ES: I believe it is all about investing into a network, your contacts, because it is still very difficult to get Chinese companies to be part of this even if not impossible. Being an art promoter and professional in China means to link and bridge the different cultural players together, because sometimes I have the feeling they do not find each other because cultural management is often left to artists who are not in fact professional of the kind. Since there are maybe people that do not know much about art it is still very difficult to have them see its value. It takes time definitely to find the right partner, but I did!
