In January tutor Ian White is present at the Dutch Art Institute for the practice-theatre project, together with guest tutor Jimmy Robert and Tanja Baudoin.

The area of investigation for this session is the one of performance and object hood: materialisation/dematerialisation, as well as the idea of interpretation and transformation and how the last two relate to the former. How to avoid fetishisation while incorporating objects within performance and relating them to the body? Can the production of objects ever bypass this relation? When is a performance itself not fetishising the body? Students will work from the poems of Yvonne Rainer as source material and attempt to materialize them, creating a movement between thought and body, text and body, text and object and back to body and object as a way to investigate these tensions.

In addition, on 22 and 23 January, the students of practice-theatre attend as audience members If I Can’t Dance’s Class of Masters with Matt Mullican, Nicole Beutler, Vanessa Desclaux, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Robbrecht, Johan Simons and others at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam. In an intensive two day programme, masterclass participants take up the challenge of acting out a series of scripts with Matt Mullican and three masters of dance, theatre and performance. The Class of Masters aims to practically think through questions of repetition and reproduction in performance and specifically examines how a person becomes a character.

Read more about practice-theatre here