Das Kartenset Choreographie & Urbane Praxis ist veröffentlicht und kann hier runtergeladen werden!

The card set Choreography & Urban Practice has been published and is available for download here!

Das Kartenset lädt ein, über Stadtgestaltung aus choreographischer Perspektive nachzudenken. Insgesamt 12 Spielkarten sind Destillate aus einem dreitägigen Denklabor im Dezember 2022, an dem zehn Künstler*innen und Kurator*innen mit langjähriger choreografischer Praxis mit Stadt- oder anderen “Draussen”räumen teilnahmen.

The card set  is an invitation to think about urban design from a choreographic perspective. A total of 12 playing cards are distillates from a three-day thinking lab in December 2022, in which ten artists* and curators with longstanding choreographic practice with urban or other “outdoor” spaces participated.

Ko-Autor*innen/Co-authors: Alice Chauchat, Dan Belasco Rogers, Eva-Maria Hoerster, Gabriele Reuter, Katja Münker, Paula Kramer, Sabine Zahn, Stephanie Hanna, Susanne Soldan, Sven Seeger, Yorgos Konstantinou.

Konzept Kartenset / concept card set: Eva-Maria Hoerster, Gabriele Reuter, Sabine Zahn, Yorgos Konstantinou

Visuelle Projektbegleitung, Illustration/ visual project support, illustration: Yorgos Konstantinou

Layout: Marcus Mazzoni
Übersetzung/translation: Daniel Belasco Rogers
Druck/Print: Schulz & Schulz

[5.-8.10.2023]

Beautiful, complex and intensive days in Ostia, near Rome. Among ruins, with trees, in water, with many people. “Beginning with where we are” is a personal commitment I take forward from here, as well as to time and plan simply, allowing for complexity to emerge, inviting diversity always. Many thanks to all who shared these days, especially Sharon Gimpel, Linda Lapina, Silvia Luraschi and Caroline Marim (aka house 636).

Curated & organized by: Thomas Kampe & Raffaele Rufo, partially funded by Intercultural Roots (UK)

More info on the event can be found here.

[4.-7.9.2023]

Four days of intensive peer research @ Floating University, curated & organized by Sabine Zahn, Alice Chauchat and Dan Belasco Rogers.

Strengthening a common awareness of the specificities and needs of what outdoor practitioners/choreographers do, without reducing it all to one simplifying model. What does the nature of a work require? What strategies are used/invented to make it happen and which obstacles are met?

How do we maneuver the objectives/core desires/content of a work and the ways we need to place it within different circumstances and their reasonings? And more : ).

[14. – 16.12.2022]

Denklabor Choreography, Dance and Urban Practice: Questions, Theses, Perspectives – three days with experienced peers exploring the particular contributions and potentials of embodied practices dealing with “the city”, “sites”, “environments” and everything else taking place outdoors …

Participants: Alice Chauchat, Dan Belasco Rogers, Eva-Maria Hoerster, Gabriele Reuter, Katja Münker, Paula Kramer, Sabine Zahn, Stephanie Hanna, Susanne Soldan, Sven Seeger

Organisiert von/organized by: Eva-Maria Hoerster, Gabriele Reuter, Sabine Zahn

Supported by: Senate Department for Urban Development, Building and Housing as part of the expansion of the Netzwerkstelle Urbane Praxis, supported by Urbane Praxis e.V.

Intensive Research Symposium at Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna, part of the PEEK project Contingent Agencies by Nikolaus Gansterer & Alex Arteaga.

An intense week of collective surrender – to place, atmosphere, agencies, time-space, world. All bound into each other, folded, intertwined; co-compositions of a whole.

With core group: Alex Arteaga, Arno Böhler, Emma Cocker, Mika Elo, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer and Andreas Spiegl. Plus many guests including Tim Ingold, Erin Manning (remote) and Karen Barad (remote).

[13.03.2022]

Sharing my work with the Somatics Working Group (Dance, Theatre & Performance Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies), invited by Dr. Bridget Cauthery.

Intensive conversation on ideosyncratic practices of documentation, working from site, material engagements, trust.

[09.02.2022]

A conversation on intermateriality (in dance), (in writing), (in research) – organised by Dr. Fiona Bannon for the Centre for Practice-Led Research in the Arts.

Moving, chatting, thinking, reading together – on practice, on theory. With depth and detail. Research staff and PhD students from the Performing Arts.

Embodied Research in a Digital Environment: the ‘Research Catalogue’ (RC) as an extended studio?!

[Initated by Dr. Joa Hug, participating artist-researchers: Andrea Keiz, Joshua Rutter and Paula Kramer]

In this collaborative research project we explored what lies beyond the (self-)understanding of the Research Catalogue (RC) as a tool for archiving, documentation and publishing, asking: can the RC be more than a medium for storage and publication and become an extended studio, i.e. a digital (working) space sui generis, in which the bodily practice of collaborative artistic artistic research is not only (re-)presented, but actively takes place itself? Funded by the Department of Culture, Berlin.

Joining Amaara Raheem in the early phase of her research residency with Critical Path (AUS), together with Shivanjani Lal, Preethi Athreya and Amy Voris. A series of conversations to which we brought objects, writing, dancing; opening up into conversations about objects, body, life, death, inheritance, scores. The River Thames, our feet, families, and songs.

[27.08.2021]

A multi-media book presentation / contemplation / reflection in the context of CARPA7 – Elastic Writing in Artistic Research.

> sharing > showing > opening my new book Suomenlinna | Gropius, produced in the context of my time as a postdoctoral researcher at CfAR/Uniarts (2016-2019), published in the spring of 2021.

How do I keep the body alive in my writing? What are the shortest routes possible: body into word? What did the two sites bring into movement, into words?

[12.04.2019]

We sit in (semi)darkness as sounds, objects, words and images begin to interlace and correspond. What happened once somewhere? What did it feel like? What was once present and what is now here? How can this body- and site-based artistic research be communicated and shared? Maybe like this?

Mixing words, sounds and materials on a tabletop with videos of site-based movement and performance practice. Meeting outdoor practice in an indoor situation, presenting and sharing artistic research inclusive of both past and present affects alongside a reflective perspective. An experiment in-situ that tests what carries over and what emerges anew.

At Per/Forming futures I worked with materials stemming form the nearly completed span of this postdoctoral research on intermateriality in outdoor movement practice and performance (autumn 2016 – early summer of 2019).

More info on Per/Forming Futures

[4. – 6.03.2019]

A salon and two site-workshops, one facilitated by Sandra Reeve and one by myself. Part of the larger practice-based research project Sensing the City, funded through the AHRC. Sensing the City explores how practice can be utilised to interrogate and represent the sensory life of a city. It further investigates forms of knowledge about the city that only practice – above all via the human body and its senses – can access.

During the phase I facilitate we explore a site through walking, leaning and landing, moving and witnessing.

How can I dance here in a way that allows everything that I might assume to be present to speak? 

More info on Sensing the City

[06.10.2018]

A multi-media experiment that exposes a particular part of my research on intermateriality and movement, based at Uniarts Helsinki. It interlaces documentary video clips of outdoor movement practice on the island Suomenlinna with live projections of drawings, materials and texts. The relationship between human, thing, (im)material context and bodily practice is dealt with in the context of this specific example.

Suomenlinna is part of the city of Helsinki and largely determined by its sea fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991, built in the 18th century, extending over all four parts of the island. I have work in this context a between November 2016 and May 2019, close to rocks and water. In September 2017 I found a buoy on the shore – big, round, heavy and pink. I pulled her onto the rock and she has been part of my working practice every since. An anchor by my side, a planetary globe, a trusted friend. I never know if she will still be there when I next return.

Meeting Buoy is the story of an unexpected romance between a dancer and a buoy, subject to tides and changing circumstances.

More info on gtf – Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung

[25.04.2018]

Part of Tutke Spring Research Days.

Mixing words, sounds and materials on a table top with pre-recorded videos of movement practice on Länsi-Mustasaari (Suomenlinna). Meeting outdoor practice in an indoor setting, testing what carries over and what emerges anew. The sailing of feather ships, the crushing of plastic rock.

Whether or not it matters that I am human, I don’t know.

The software ‘video mixer’ has been programmed by Tuomo Rainio for this occasion, including conversations and input by Jaana Ristola, both visual artists working at KuvA. Thank you. I am also grateful to Sami Kustila, technician at KuvA, who helped assemble the hardware in a test-run. Thank you also to KIASMA for technical support and the possibility to rehearse and share the work and to CfAR and Tutke for hosting and supporting the research more generally.

More info about Tutke Research Days 2018

[29.08.2017]

“With Plants” – a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary event aimed at artists, researchers and scholars who are working with plants in various ways. Organised by Annette Arlander. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

I participated with:

Picking-cooking-eating edible plants as part of performative practices – a talking circle with food samples

[26.08.2017]

Shared day long event with Kirsi Heimonen and Jyrki Siukonen in the Exhibition Laborartory, Helsinki.

Taking stock of a year of post-doctoral artistic research. Meeting films with pens and pencils, moments of conversation, moments of recognising, moments of touching.

Photos © Petri Kaverma and Paula Kramer.

[7. – 9.7. 2017]

Collaboration with geographer and social theorist Prof. Nigel Clark and choreographer and doctoral researcher Simo Kellokumpu. Mini-residency during the 4th Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, co-creation of a gallery space and performance. How do we collaborate with materials that populate and transcend the human sphere? The mineral, the organic and inorganic, the geologic – fire wood, dance mats, aluminum – crust of the earth, vulcanic activity, the interplanetary.

Artistic research processs investigating and appreciating human-non-human co-creation. How do we do it? Photos © Christian Kipp

[14. – 17.06.2017]

Dance, Deviation & Public Spaces

Workshop at NOFOD 2017: “Dance and Democracy”. Playing and experimenting with the norms of acceptable behaviour in public spaces and the potential of dance to reconfigure them. Fluidity between normal-not-normal. Drag en miniature. Small dances of deviation. Attending to dance’s potential of mattering to the world, offering practices of deviation and participatory forces that mingle with social processes beyond dance.

More info about NOFOD 2017.

[16. + 17.05.2017]

One-to-one performative format on two days, collaboration with Sabine Zahn. In parallel: a walk with somatic interventions and Sabine, a pic-nic, conversation and site-based performance in three parts with Paula.

Sunny and rainy, strawberries, sloe jam and purslane, multiplicity and entanglements. Sensual stimulation and rational resonances. The burden of this site. The playfulness of petals, feathers, choices. Sloes and purslane foraged on site.

view flyer

[28.04.2017]

Body-based Research and Dissemination – A Collective Exploration & Participatory Methodology Lab (collaboration with dancer and doctoral researcher Joa Hug).

A participatory lab, exploring *body* practices in the field of artistic research. How does the body stay “in”? Engrained into all processes at work in a research setting?

Working with and through: our own questions, clay, water, paper, words and co-pilots.

A studio with prepared workplaces. Materials are offered as an invitation to play with and think alongside: what is a current threshold that is currently unresolved in my research?

Conference Programme here.

Co-teaching with Prof. Gabriele Schmid at HKS – University of applied sciences and arts in Ottersberg.

A very diverse group of students – theatre pedagogues, visual artists and art therapist.

Does artistic research ruin the art? Does it have to be verbal? Do we need a PhD to do it? Many questions discussed over the course of the term.

All photos © Gabriele Schmid.

This is how my research on Suomelinna began:

A new place, a new country, a new site. Everything is unknown.

I begin to work, here and there now. Here: Rocks, water, military.

On my first day (16.12.2016) I walk all around the islands and find two spots to work in. I huddle into the rock. I climb up a slope. I sound from the throat.

I hear the sea speak back to me and see the rocks arranged in their three-dimensionality.

Exploring a site in Berlin. A stranger in a known place. Behind buildings, on a nodal point. Here is everything at once – remnants of Nazi Germany, a long stretch of the wall, the city parliament, a refugee accomodation, a memorial stone from the American Air Force, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (behind a large fence), many security cameras, the place as such, returning street sweepers, people on lunch break, urban wilderness, tourists passing throuch, trees, artists doing their work. What is rock, what is body, what is history, what is now, what is movement – here?

[2.11.2016]

Lecture/investigation on/of Intricate Relationships – Art, Site-Specificty and Research in the series Reframing the Artwork, curated by Annette Arlander and Mika Ehlo. Lovely group and lovely work. Exploring material as a connective force in site work and artistic research. Approaching text as material (Life in a World Without Objects, Ingold 2014 & Strange Realism: On Behalf of Objects, Harman 2015)

[All rights to the images remain with the artists, please do not reproduce]

A research project in three phases – Berlin I + Helsinki I & II.

Framed and directed by Joa Hug as part of his doctoral research project at the University of the Arts Helsinki on the epistemic potential of Body Weather’s ‘Manipulations’.

Time together in a research collective – practising the manipulations, learning and testing details, experimenting with the research score, excercising collective criticism, expanding into thought, words, breath, movement. A wonderous and rare opportunity for collective thinking and creation. Thank you all.

In collaboration with Outi Condit, Riikka Theresa Innanen, Tashi Iwaoka and Joshua Rutter. More material on the project here.

[14. – 18.03.2016]

One week in Coventry with dance artist Sandra Reeve, exploring the Contexts of Time and Space in Ecological Movement. Organised as part of a wider research project by Emma Meehan.

Sandra Reeve facilitated a closed artist’s retreat, exploring the context of Coventry city as an urban environment with a final day sharing on the 18th of March.

Solo – group – trio. Accidental and intentional collaborations. Dreams of tall buildings, spirals, the liveliness of water. A lovely week in a familiar place. Photos © Lily Hayward-Smith.

The project was funded by Coventry University and partnered by Decoda and City Arcadia. Twitter feed for this project.

[8. – 26.05.2015]

Collaboration with Alys Longley (NZ) at HZT Berlin.

We brought to this research phase aspects of our main practises – experimental documentation (Alys) and materiality orientated movement (Paula) and offered these worlds to each other. Together we explored how our respective bodies of work inform processes of movement making, documenting and sense making.

Moving – writing – living.

We worked in the studio, on the HZT campus and its direct surroundings, Berlin’s neighbourhood ‘Wedding’. On five days we had external visitors and collaborators who co-informed this work. These were Jagna Anderson, Lina Kukulis, Hanna Nordqvist, Bettina Neuhaus, Yigit Daldikler and Simone Weber. To all these movement practitioners we are grateful for contributing to our working process.

This collaboration provided space to notice that both our respective areas of work are both intensely of material, materially bound and materially enabled. I noticed for example an immediate feedback from the materials I was working with. The amount of give, the quality of contact, frictions and resistances. Becomings of lines, fields or colours, forms and words in the moment of lowering tool to paper and beginning to make a mark.

I was also particularly intrigued by moments in which materiality orientated movement and documentation practices overlapped such that my dancing body could feel its becoming line on paper and the line speaking back to me and affected my movement.

To be continued and more to be discovered …

[30.05.2015]

Moving, Writing, Living – Experimental documentary practices in site-specific dance research.

A work-in-progress presentation in collaboration with Alys Longley (NZ).

A room filled with cards, cloth, an accordion book and a few items from Reykjavik’s beach. Collective explorations of experimental documentation and touching materials of different orders. Speaking, trying, presenting. A full hour during a wonderful conference.

[images coming soon!]

[29.10.2014] [body, thing, material – somatic encounters]

Der Oktober-Salon der Somatischen Akademie Berlin widmete sich im Gespräch mit Katja Münker und mir der Welt der Ding- und Stofflichkeiten. — Körper, Ding, Material. — Struktur, Gewicht, Temperatur. — Luftzug, Arm, Eisenbahn.

Wir luden ein, Material zu berühren und sich berühren zu lassen und über Bewegung als Begegnung mit Vielfalt nachzudenken. Wie entwickelt sich Bewegung in Verbindung mit Orten, Gegenständen und ihren Gegebenheiten? Was bedeutet das für unser Leben in Mitten von Organismen, Objekten und Witterungen? Welches Potential eröffnet sich dadurch in kreativen und choreographisch-performativen Prozessen?

[11. March 2014]

A sharing and collective exploration of “Dancing Materiality”.

Moving from and with materiality, in collaboration, in confederation. Combining this with what needs to be done right now. Email included. Witnessing each other in a partner score.

Playful immersions, hesitant integrations. The symbolic strength of objects! Seeing a whole body move, occasionally. Conscious touch. Appreciation of composition. Appreciation of bread. Thoughts on atoms. Shifting the human …

Thanks for joining!

[12. July 2013]

At the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference 2013 (Coventry University) I presented my research installation The Walk-In PhD. It offered the possibility to step into my research process and engage with its current form, move with objects, make sounds, view films and photographies, read texts and leave comments.

Musician Michaël Lacoult was part of the installation, playing several instruments including his double bass.

[08. June 2013]

SHIFTING THE HUMAN : TOUCHING MATTER

With writer/philosopher Wallace Heim (UK) I offered a collaborative artistic research labs during the dance congress 2013 in Düsseldorf. We moved indoors and outdoors, witnessed and watched, touched and talked, washed our hands and ate strawberries. We experimented with and discussed how both mover and context might be considered as agentive and lively, as having something to say. We notived that a shift of the human positioniality might change our sense of temporality, time can expand as we enter the zone of things and materials – the radiator, the train tracks, the tree, the bare feet.

The tandem series of artistic research labs was initated by Joa Hug and carried out by Katja Münker & Ralph Fischer, Joa Hug & Monica Alarcón, Paula Kramer & Wallace Heim.

Read a review by Helmut Ploebst (in German).

I have co-edited the issue entitled ‘On Ecology’ of Performance Research together with Stephen Bottoms and Aaron Franks. It was published in August 2012, including my article “Bodies, Rivers, Rocks and Trees: Meeting agentic materiality in contemporary outdoor dance practice.”

How do we live on earth?

In recent years, a broad and growing range of performance events and processes have sought to re-imagine the question of our relationship, as humans, with the non-human environment. Where the traditional Western view has been to see ourselves as the central players on a static stage with a green backdrop, current thinking and experimentation often emphasise the diverse ways in which we are implicated in, responsible for, and responsive to the systems and processes that constitute life on earth. Who are the other actors – animal, vegetable, mineral, structural  – whose existence impacts on ours, and is impacted on by us? How is ecological consciousness and connectivity currently manifesting in performance studies and its related contexts?

More information about Performance Research.

[28. May 2012]

artistic research lab and open studio @ Uferstudios Berlin

research installation and discussion

films, items, postcards, string, photographs, comments, leather, cloth, pins, costume

a morning of quiet attentiveness, entering the installation through different pathways, playfully improvising with it’s materiality or reading / viewing a specific item.

in the evening an unexpectedly crowded space, yet attention and playfulness continue, are possible, available.

[10. May 2012]

body, trees and things: final performance in the PhD-framework.

From village church through fields and under trees, an afternoon near Stoneleigh village, close to Coventry. A site of ancient trees and airplanes, of criss-crossing and settling, of traversing and trespassing, of sound and silence, of sun, clouds and rain.

A collective journey, sequenced by individual timing and interests.

Welcome to body, trees and things – the final performance in the framework of my PhD.

We’ll spend an afternoon at a tree site near Stoneleigh village, close to Coventry. There will be images, trees, performance, food and conversation.

I’ve worked on the site since February 2011, in the beginning very informally, mostly with musician Michaël Lacoult. Over several months a more focused way of working has emerged, with a performative inauguration in October 2011 and an intensive work period of six weeks leading up to this final performance.

We will meet shortly before 3 pm at St. Mary’s church in Stoneleigh and begin with a brief walk to the site. If you have been to the inauguration, please note that this is a different meeting point.

To receive a map and thus ‘register’ your participation, please send an email: paula[at]paulakramer.de.

If you arrive by public transport: Take BUS Nr. 539 from “Coventry Station Bridge” at 14:13. You need to get off at the station “Stoneleigh Birmingham Road” at 14:42 and walk 5 min to the church. There will be enough cars to bring you back to the train station after the event.

The event will take place in any kind of weather, please dress accordingly.

[15. Feb 2012]

Moving on the outer edges of what has becomes visible as a triangle. These trees were planted in lines that meet each other – three corners, three trees, three little performances.

In time you will find your way – foot!

Collaboration with Michaël Lacoult. One photographer as witness.

[23. Nov. 2011]

Me and a tree became me and two elderberry bushes, a ball of string, a white flag, an old dead oak in the background. A small audience arrangement.

Three people watching from tree trunks and camping mat chairs and moving about. A dlsr camera on auto timer and a video camera filming continuously (silent, slightly scientific witnesses).

Entangled in small branches I move simply. From lying, to upside down, to rolling over, arriving at the other bush, going through and out. And there I am. And there you are.

Magic is the moment of three women coming over the hill in the midst as I have already begun to move. Later we talk, drinking hot elderberry juice and tea.

Next edition February 15, 2012, 4 pm. Write an email if you would like to come.

[08. Oct. 2011]

Inviting known strangers to be among trees with a performer and a musician. It is early evening, quiet autumn. Not much movement in the atmosphere, but a shift into light and then it gets dark.

Collective procession into the trees, opening the camp.

Walking, starting. Many circles. Lostness, anger, pleasure. Quiet. Moving-singing-dancing.

Oh what? Oh what? Oh what? Oh what?                                     So what? So what? So what? So what?

There is attention and distraction, some concentration and a lot that remains unknown. As audience members join in, the net breaks open even further, yet little universes form here and there. Families in trees. A man tries to walk in circles. A woman sits under a tree. The double bass and his son walk into the field.

“Tonight this little copse is magical. And the elderberries, wow. They look delicious.” [Noël Warr]

Night falls. We eat chestnut soup and sourdough bread and drink hot elderberry punch.

Next edition November 23, 2011, 2:30 pm: trees, – absolute soloist.

Throughout the year I have been working with musician Michaël Lacoult (double bass/objects) at a tree-site near Stoneleigh Abbey (Warwickshire). I am now considering this site as a possibility for one part of my practical PhD-examination in 2012. To ‘plough the field’ in preparation I would like to invite you to an informal sharing of our working there, which will include some showing, some collective improvising for those who would like to join us and some food and drink and a bit of chatting/feedback for those who are up for that.

You need to arrive in time for the beginning and can leave any time you wish.

Weather will be taken as it is! Please dress accordingly.

Getting there: Parking lots are few. Get in touch for directions, carsharing and train station pick-up.

There will be hot elderberry punch and sweet-chestnut stew (veggie) made from the autumn harvest of the site.

Study day on Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman

TaPRA interim event at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, May 27th, 2011

skin, touch, collective, resistance, chicken, anchor, skill

I offered a performative response to The Craftsman, improvising with words, materials and movement. I was particularly inspired by the poetic recipie that started with “Your dead child, fill him with the earth” and the notion of material reality offering an anchor, thus understanding the body as something we can always return to. Reading and dancing The Craftsman makes me hopeful about the possibilities of expressive, metaphor infused language, collective agency, and patience.

Find more information on the study day

In the context of the Nordic Forum for Dance Research 2011 (NOFOD), I presented a research installation – a material as well as metaphorical communication tool of my research. Both static and ‘there’, yet also processual and continuously changing through the intervention of its visitors.

For me this is one attempt of developing modes of research dissemination which are able to transmit core themes and experiences of research in a dense frequency and in a way that is, I hope, both reflective and generative – of thought, experience and insight.

Second international meeting @ dansBURG in the Catalan Pyrenees: Obreros Espaciales: Laboratori transversal de arquitectura i dansa – Space Workers: transversal laboratory of architecture and dance.

In collaboration with architects Pepe Ramos and Marta Serra I started the research network obreros espaciales, in English space workers, in German raumarbeiter. We invite architects, dancers and others who have dealings with space into moments of collective investigations.

The first meeting took place in July 2010 in the village Burg in the Pyrenees and was hosted by dansBURG.

With dance and movement therapist Montse Martí I embarked on a photographic and movement based investigation of what arises when we listen to space. What we found was an intense inscription of individual and collective memory into a location. The final exhibition was shown at galerie magenta in Berlin and Alliançe Francaise in Granollers (CAT). The catalogue was produced by the Ajuntament de Granollers.