TOWARDS:2026 — cycle of intensive workshops

TOWARDS:2026 is a cycle of intensive workshops organised by Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts (Sweden) that includes physical praxis, evening lectures, video screenings, and live performances. It’s the metaphor of aiming at something – to expose and engage ourselves in physical investigations and conceptual challenges that can foster creativity and encourage discoveries. TOWARDS:2026 see pedagogy as a continuous intellectual provocation, an occasion for inspiration through paradoxes and awakenings and as a desire to overturn common sense and question what we have learned.

Over the years, TOWARDS: has welcomed an outstanding list of artists and choreographer, including Julyen Hamilton, German Jauregui Allu, Judith Sanchez Ruiz, Frey Faust, Laura Aris, David Zambrano, Francesco Scavetta, and Xavier le Roy & Scarlet Yu. This year TOWARDS: program starts with workshops led by two renowned voices of contemporary dance field: choreographer Meg Stuart (US/BE/DE) and dramaturg Guy Cools (CA/BE). The workshop cycle will continue in the Autumn with more workshops.

Image: Émelie Tournevache

Guy Cools | Workshop “Who needs a dance dramaturg: dance dramaturgy as a dialogical practice”

“The generosity and openness of Guy Cools made this workshop even more rich and informative: we were thinking together” (Evaluation of a participant)
The underlying idea of the workshop is that as a choreographer you don’t necessarily need a dramaturg but you should develop your own dramaturgical reflection on your artistic practice.
The workshop will offer participants practical tools and exercises to reflect upon, to evaluate and eventually to transform their creative process. Using the cross, circle and labyrinth as graphic symbols, the participants will discuss the essential polarities of the creative process: perception, formation, intuition, experience. Through practical and physical exercises the workshop will explore how dramaturgy/the dramaturg can contribute to this process as witness, dialogue partner and ‘editor’. The group will focus in particular on dramaturgy as a dialogical practice and ways to organise and support this dialogue. The final goal of the workshop is to gain a different, renewed perspective of one’s own creative and choreographic process and methodologies through discovering the diversity of practices of the other participants.

Guy Cools (BE/CA) is a Belgian dance dramaturg. He worked amongst others with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Christopher House (CAN), Akram Khan (UK), Andrea Nann (CAN) (www.guycools.com). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice Rewriting Distance (www.rewritingdistance.com). His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). From December 2022, he is full time professor in the dance department of UQAM, Montréal.

More about Guy Cools: https://www.guycools.com/

Image: Alastair Muir

Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion | Workshop “This then that”
Composer Matteo Fargion and choreographer Jonathan Burrows share a week long workshop looking at questions of how to balance the many and overlapping elements at play in the making of a performance, including concept, context, image, form, dramaturgy, materials and daily practice. The workshop will be a mixture of practical work and discussion, with the aim of allowing each person to re-examine how they approach their own work. The mornings will be facilitated by Fargion with a focus on composition, and Burrows will lead the afternoon concentrating more on dramaturgy and performance. The workshop is open to anybody interested in performance: no specific skills needed. — Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion

Image: Anja Hitzenberger

Deborah Hay | Workshop “into the hinterland w Deborah Hay”
What removes my limitations as a dancer, performer, and choreographer is when I perceive time and space as unknowable. The humor, awe, curiosity, and gratitude this invokes is my dance. I hope to support your dance, your performance, and your choreography from this perspective. — Deborah Hay