A Series of Event is a choreography in the format of a festival, facilitating a forum for discussion, knowledge production and exchange on a peer-to-peer level, a festival that focuses on contemporary dance as a strong and vivid art form in front of individual performances and celebrity culture.
Festivals have increasingly become venues for marketing artistic work. It is all too common that choreographers travel and present their work in festivals all over the world having neither time nor consideration to partake in the festival nor to engage in and affect the local context and the conditions for production. Therefore we have decided to approach this years Reykjavík Dance Festival through alternative and more community oriented strategies in order create a special edition of the festival called A Series of Event.
A Series of Event aims at inviting and bringing together a group of 30 artists, international and local, to actively attend and participate in all parts of the festival for the duration of ten days. This includes a range of activities, from presentations to social activity, from giving workshop to hands- on preparation and organization. A Series of Event is a choreography where the participants form the festival rather than the festival its participants. A ten day choreography that produces community building and discourse production in order to support continuity and renewal within the field of choreography. A festival that consider its audience as an active resource that can participate in the festival in many different ways, not only as someone who buys a ticket to a performance.
The selection of artists is based on artistic practices that in various forms address and transform codes of behavior, expectations and hierarchical structures in relation to the theatre and established expressions. These methods include ideas of open-source, where sharing, generosity and transparency play a central role. This choreography is made up of a series of events proposed by the invited artists that individually and collectively will take responsibility for how to propose the festival as choreography.
The curation of A Series of Event will include events that all aim to expand the notion of choreography through formats and expressions such as, sweaty seminars, dinners, workshops, speedy publications, cyberpunk dance sessions, and epic performances using methods actively engaging the audience as an essential part of the community.
Last but not least, it is essential to the curation that the festival is a shared environment where anyone who wants is welcome, regardless of prior experience with dance and choreography. A crucial element in making something accessible is to make sure that people are not excluded due to their financial situation. Therefore A Series of Event will insist on having free entry to all the events of the festival.
