What does it mean to be a professional body? What is expected from a professional body and how do these expectations shape bodies? What does dance education do to dancers and where does education fail to inspire? What does it mean, ideologically speaking, to create a relationship between professional body, stage and audience? How do we as professional bodies deal with power relationships? When does power turn into power abuse? What does abuse in art represent, what does it reproduce, and how does it related to the ambiguous notion of desire?

Together with dancer Ilse Ghekiere we delve into the work of writers such as Sara Ahmed (Living a feminist life), Maggie Nelson (The art of cruelty) and many others. We'll discuss how reading can influence a dance practice, or simply how it affects the relation to our bodies and its imagination. How can reading -and more specifically feminist reading- be your most intimate healer and ally in this patriarchal world? All participants are warmly invited to bring books that they found inspiring in relation to this topic.

Ilse Ghekiere is a dancer, artist and art historian who works as a dancer, performer, writer and educator. She has worked on OpenCanon, a project together with RoSa vzw. OpenCanon is an alternative literature canon that deals with the subject of gender, feminism & LGBTQ. Besides her artistic practice, she’s the author of several articles (a.o. What dancers talk about when they talk about sexism) and co-founder of Engagement, a call for engagement to end sexism in the arts.
http://engagementarts.be

Dinner included
EN SPOKEN

P.S. If you can't afford a ticket, feel free to send an email to an@beursschouwburg.be. Together we’ll find a solution.