© Gert Jan Van Rooij

Riley Harmon A method for blue logic

18:00-23:00

In 2012, Riley Harmon received an email from a conspiracy theorist. He was confused with a homonym, an actress who would have been created by the government to mislead the media. As an uncertain exploration of this mail he created the film A method for blue logic: in which you lose grip on what is real and what isn’t.

Critical Practice — Made in YU A problematic book

18:00-18:45 The book A problematic book was released last month during the BITEF-Festival in Belgrade, by Critial Practice — Made in YU. The Critical Practice programme is oriented towards empowering discursive reflections on contemporary performing arts while enabling their breakthrough into the larger public. In contextual terms, it focuses on, but does not restrict to, the post-Yugoslav region, because of several reasons. On the one hand, it is a reaction to the lack of continual and publicly visible critical writing about contemporary performances and performing arts events in this region. On the other, the strong recent development in performing arts theory coming from this context. A Problematic book, among other themes, takes a look at the notions of the problematic, the cynic and the critique. It is composed of texts by Ida Daniel, Kristóf Farkas, Shir Hacham, Aisling Marks, Stina Nyberg, Livia Andrea Piazza, Ana Schnabl with contributions by Bojana Cvejic, and Mårten Spångberg in conversation with Ana Vujanovic.

© Dieter Hartwig

Felix Mathias Ott An Iliad

19:00–20:00 & 22:00–23:00

Felix Mathias Ott‘s An Iliad is more than just a recount of the original epos by Homer. Three men are controlling the plot with archaic force and energy, creating Trojan spaces. A choreography of constructing and destroying turns into suggestive imagery and an acoustic and visual landscape, that entices the spectators to face their own desires. Collage-like An Iliad is wandering from the current stage to the ancient polity and back to the present, which is unmasked due to its invisible games.
The work of Felix tends to create reflexive more than conceptual spaces where the spectator is invited to discover the and his/her unconscious world. While offering fragments, he calls upon the creativity of the audience to create their proper world. Within this, Felix wants to create a silent dive from reality into fiction and contrast our contemporary ways of receiving information with its screaming manipulative slogans.

21st Century Students Conservatorium Antwerpen & Michiel Vandevelde

20:00–22:00

Cannibalizing advertisement videos, pop video clips, the NO-manifesto from Yvonne Rainer and text fragments on thinking.
ALIENATION – ACCELERATION – SLOWING DOWN – DISTRACTION – ARTIFICIALITY – REPETITION – GLITCH – RETROGRADE – REMIX – ULTRA-EDITING – BLENDING – CANNIBALISM – REAPPROPRIATION – SUPERFICIALITY – DEPTH – TECHNIQUE – EFFECT – BIG – SMALL – HYPERTEXT
21st century is the result of a workshop with five students from the Conservatorium Antwerpen, a professional education for actors.

Anne Reijniers & Rob Jacobs – Échangeur

21:10-21:45

In the streets of the metropolis of Kinshasa, young Congolese imagine their version of the colonial past. While archival footage shows how the statue of explorer Stanley is being towed by a crane, a Lumumba imitator is looking for former president Mobutu. A man scrubs manhole covers until the word 'Leopoldville' becomes legible again. A boy with a whitewashed face, tropical helmet and whip, dances with ghosts on a roof. After the Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence, the Belgian colonial monuments were removed from Kinshasa's public squares. Today they stand side by side in the Congolese National Museum. In Échangeur emerges an imaginary city around an empty pedestal, where archival footage, performances and present-day Kinshasa interact.

Talk DOCUMENTS AND MEMORIES with Silke Huysmans, Hannes Dereere and Ogutu Muraya

20:10-21:10

To open up a new space for encounters and shared thinking within the festival programme, this year, Batard would like to introduce to you the invited artists in a series of public talks. Each night two artists/collectives will join Maria Rößler for a conversation about concepts and questions that they are concerned with in their artistic research. These talks are a unique opportunity to get to know the international festival artists outside and beyond their performances. They will take place each night of the festival, in the time between two performances. Admission is free.
Maria Rößler lives and works between Amsterdam and Berlin. She studied Theatre and Media Science in Berlin and Dublin. As a producer and dramaturge, she has worked for performing arts productions, festivals and conferences. From 2013 until 2016, she was part of the artistic programme team of Foreign Affairs festival at Berliner Festspiele. Besides, she pursues independent projects including an on-going collaboration with technologist Nathan Fain. Together they developed the performance “Right Is the Might of the Community. A lecture on future democracy“, commissioned by HAU Berlin, which was presented by Batard in 2015.

© Bryana Fritz

Bryana Fritz – Indispenible blue

19:00–20:00 & 22:–23:00

A blueness: How does (one), how does (zero), how does (one), how does (zero)…
If software exerts a choreographic force on the user, how can she employ dance as a means to escape its clutch? A blueness 2: the everyday user’s illiteracy - in the gap and lack of access to the structuring of technology, can she fabricate in its “superficial” use an imagined and profound depth… a dance of poetic excess that drips off the code… an inquisitive movement between use and misuse, domination and submission, form and feeling.
A blueness 3-49: By assuming the role of the everyday user –not a programmer- can she detach herself from co-opting with software’s choreographic demands in order to attain a depth, not through mastery, but rather through a way of moving (dancing!) which neither assimilates nor opposes.
A blueness 50: on poetry, on dance, on a bed of software, on surface depth, on submission 
to form and on the Poetics of Usership.

© Nestor Garcia Diaz

Nestor Garcia Diaz - Nice weather for operative systems

19:00–20:00 & 22:00–23:00

If we observe the demands that digital media has placed in our psyche, it seems that we have achieved Marinetti’s dream society. As if globalization has found the ideas of the early avant-garde's aesthetic model. International freelance labour increases and culture becomes global due to the influence of the Internet. More and more frequently we experience feelings of non-belonging and a sense of diminishing political agency. This feeling of displacement and the demands for flexibility has also deeply affected the art practice of Nestor Diaz Garcia.  A place where he tends to work within different, constantly shifting media and frames of representation. In an attempt to search for some fixed ground he is looking to areas where current discourses, art, popular and underground culture intersect. In this piece I attempt to counter the dominant a-historicism of digital media by re-inscribing its strategies in different artistic genealogies and traditions. In an effort to problematize Internet culture with its own tools, by borrowing digital strategies and devices and remixing them with traditional and outmoded frames of representation, I am working to adhere to contemporariness through disjunction and anachronism.

 PARTY

23:00 – 3:00