Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2014, Side 42

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42 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2014DANCE
A Steady
Heartbeat
Reykjavík Dance Festival
is moving to a new,
faster beat
The Reykjavík Dance Festival is no stranger to flexibility and
experimentation. Founded in 2002, the festival has provided
Icelandic and international choreographers an unparalleled
platform to showcase their work to an audience that may not
have exposure to the world of contemporary dance. In 2012,
when the festival turned ten, the coordinating board decided
to shake things up and began inviting guest directors to cu-
rate the future iterations of the festival. With different cura-
tors asking different questions, the festival's flavour has been
distinct each year.
This year's curators and joint directors,
Ásgerður Gunnarsdóttir and Alexander
Roberts, have lofty, daring plans to keep
the festival fresh, exciting and vital during
their three-year tenure. Their first move?
Split one annual festival into four quarterly
mini-festivals to ensure a constant pulse
of dance and dance discourse throughout
the year. I met with Ása and Alex at Dan-
sverkstæðið (“the Reykjavík Dance Ate-
lier”) to talk about their vision for August's
festival, and beyond.
Collective engagement
How will the festival function un-
der your artistic direction? What
is your broad vision?
Ása: It didn't feel right to only have one
festival a year in a country that doesn’t re-
ally have a dance scene, so we decided to
split it up into four micro-festivals through
the year. One in August, then November,
February and May or June. We're experi-
menting with that format for the next three
years, because we feel that Reykjavík
doesn't need one big festival. We need
a constant heartbeat, a constant pulse.
Also, curatorially, it gives us an opportu-
nity to be more focused on each festival, to
bring more diverse pieces to the country
and to be more visible. You can attend an
art exhibition or a concert or the theatre
almost every weekend, but dance is lim-
ited to four or five weekends a year.
Alex: The festival is about creating a
space for collective activity. There are
dance premieres spread throughout the
year—the Icelandic Dance Company does
have a program that is supposed to run
continuously—but a festival carries with
it a specific state of encounter, where ev-
eryone suspends what they're doing and
comes together for a condensed period of
time to engage in something collectively.
So that's why we think it's so interesting
to have this pulse of four separate events.
Ása: It’s so easy to ignore if it's just once a
year. If you see it once, you might assume
it's one thing. But if it happens four times a
year and has a totally different programme
every time—like with music: you may like
classical music but hate heavy metal.
Dance is the same. We want to make
people aware that the art form is so totally
diverse.
The focus of August's festival is the Ice-
landic dance scene. Because the festival
started from a scene and comes from the
community here, we need to start with
that scene and community. By staging
more than one a year, we have the chance
to be more focused this time.
Kill yr. idols
What's the format of RDF?
Alex: The focus is always on performanc-
es, but we try to have satellite events that
generate other learning or discourse. For
instance, we're having this event called
"Secondhand T-shirtology," where we ex-
amine this idea that choreographers here
have absorbed all this knowledge from
abroad, like second-hand knowledge.
A lot of the inspirations or vocabularies
and principles have not been established
here in Iceland, they've been established
in other cities, where people have studied
or observe before bringing it back. So the
t-shirt dance is about idols. We're creat-
ing fan t-shirts of choreographers who
are probably unknown to most people in
Iceland. We're also collaborating with the
radio show 'Víðsjá': every day for the week
before the festival and the week of, they’ll
broadcast a ten-minute spoken-word
piece by a different choreographer, and
then on Saturday afternoon of the festi-
val, all those choreographers will come
together in a public forum.
It sounds like RDF is a learning
venue as much as it is a perfor-
mance format.
Alex: I'm not sure if it's learning, but it's
certainly exchange. Two years ago there
was an edition of the festival called "A
Series of Events"—that was the first time
it was curated. The curators removed the
programme from the festival. They in-
vited fifteen domestic
choreographers and
fifteen international
choreographers to
come together over
the course of ten days
to create the festival
together, starting with
a clean slate. There
were lectures, work-
shops, dance classes,
barbecues, all sorts
of things. That was a
real opening for the
festival; it polarized
people. Some people
were quite frustrated, because it wasn't
a format they knew how to engage with.
But it assumed a really strong position—
it shifted the emphasis away from con-
sumption towards learning, exchanging,
learning through doing and making, tak-
ing your own initiative. I think that's some-
thing we want to try to carry on.
No aesthetic, no vocabulary
Are the choreographers working
mostly within the modern dance
idiom?
Alex: I don't think you can talk about an
Icelandic aesthetic yet. You can't really talk
about a shared vocabulary either. That's
why we're also really interested in the ra-
dio series. When you give them a shared
format, I think you will really get to hear the
contradictions in the scene. They may use
shared terminology to talk about things
that are totally divergent.
Ása: There's been a lot of talk about Ice-
landic dance. I don't think it exists because
of how the scene was
formed: one goes to
Brussels, one goes to
America, and then they
come home at a similar
time, but what they're
doing and what they’ve
learned is totally differ-
ent.
Alex: It would be re-
ally exciting to find
ways of having those
divergent perspectives
encounter each other.
You want those ideas
to compete with each other, or negotiate
with each other.
Do you already have plans for the
next instalments?
Alex: Yes! The next festival is curated
around a specific theme: how are artists
taking pop strategies and bringing them
into the small spaces of the theatre, the
gallery, et cetera.
Ása: And February will be a solo festival.
“...you can like clas-
sical music but hate
heavy metal. Dance is
the same”
Photos
Hulda Sif Ásmundsdóttir
Words
Eli Petzold
With RDF happening four times per year, on top of all those other festivals, we
Reykjavikings sure are spoilt for choice. The only problem is finding time to at-
tend all of them. Are we on the road to festival fatigue? Is that a real condition?
INTER
VIEW
RDF www.reykjavikdancefestival.com