With great pleasure we invite you to be our guest at the official launch of If I Can’t Dance’s new and fourth edition, on Friday 25 March at 18:00 hrs at our headquarters at Westerdok 606-608 in Amsterdam. The presentation will be followed by a performance of ‘Chicago Boys’ by artist Hiwa K. In addition, If I Can’t Dance’s new website will be released.

We want to take this opportunity to announce our programme for this and the coming year, and to introduce the artists whom we commissioned to make a new work. Artists Jeremiah Day, Sung Hwan Kim, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Hito Steyerl and Emily Wardill have all begun making new work that will be presented at the end of the year in collaboration with our current partner organisations M HKA in Antwerp, Site Gallery in Sheffield, Tate Modern in London, Straat van Sculpturen in Amsterdam, and Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk.

Parallel to the programme of new commissions, we’ve started a new series titled Performance in Residence which looks at performances from the recent past that articulate principles that we consider important in relation to current developments. Performance in Residence ‘hosts’ a performance for a substantial period of time, allowing the researcher to engage in an indebt inquiry, connecting archival research to practice. The artists and researchers we’ve invited so far are Guy de Cointet & Marie de Brugerolle, Isodoro Valcarcel Medina & Bulegoa, Flavio de Cavalho & Inti Guerrero, and Matt Mullican & Vanessa Desclaux.

The field of research of Edition IV is the notion of affect, a concept that builds on our previous research into a.o. feminism and performativity. If I Can’t Dance’s interest in affect can be understood as a ‘field of research’ that informs our current activities. It is the focus of attention within our discursive programme, which includes collaborations with educational institutions in the Netherlands and our monthly reading group. We like the concept to illuminate and intensify our different projects, and to allow connections to be made where relevant, rather than imposing it as a theme. We will look at different aspects of affect and its relation to a.o. performativity, immateriality, intimacy, bodies, labor and artistic practice. We would like to understand the different levels at which affect works in our daily lives and are specifically interested in how subjectivities are constituted in relation to the people around us; how emotions move between bodies; the relationship between the individual and the collective body; and the way personal, or intimate, feeling, is negotiated in the public sphere.