See the PODCAST at CAST YOUR ART

As part of Impulstanz 2008 International Festival is in the process of making SWEAT - the future of dance movies.

Blake Edwards: [On the set of the Pink Panther] Mr. Sellers, welcome to Hollywood.
Peter Sellers: But this is Austria.
Blake Edwards: Hollywood's a state of mind.

SWEAT - THE MOVIE

The intention is to produce a film telling the story of a workshop for dancers and choreographers, filmmakers, set designers etc, taking place at ImPulsTanz 2008. Participants will function as the film team and as actors in the film and work with all the parameters of film making, thus also with marketing, product placement etc. The workshop will address dance and choreographic practices through a foreign interface as means to de-territorialise what dance can be today. Can film production teach us something about our understanding of dance?

Next to the production process, in which the participants will occupy different positions to learn as much as possible, a series of smaller events will be organized. A number of guests will visit the workshop and add their expertise to the process.

The portrait and the actions will be fictional in order to create an effective and immersive movie that is understood as a dance and thus it is not the narrative that should stand out but rather the mode of production. The script is not necessarily aiming at originality but towards scenes and material that we recognise. This is not a workshop in which we make film as choreographers, or make art of television, but on the contrary it is a matter of producing a film for the commercial market but though a vision of dance that is the one of the contemporary dance community.

In order not to end up with half a film, a format has been devised that lies in between a television series and a conventional movie. The film will be laid out as episodes that correspond to the four weeks of the festival. Each episode can thus highlight different characters and events.

The film will be edited simultaneously with the shooting and the aim is to premiere the film in the last days of the festival.

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

International Festival is a project initiated between architecture and performance presenting work in several cultural contexts. International Festival is all you could ever want it to be. More the real thing than Coke, a just done it in relation to Nike, it is free your mind and the rest will follow. It is music in your mouth and disturbingly healthy.

The work of International Festival issues questions surrounding distribution, accountability, and ownership in specific social and economical contexts. Initiated by an architect and a performance-related artist, International Festival occupies a terrain where opportunities to activate and change spatio-temporal coordination in a pro-active manner are central. This work is embedded in the specificity and singularity of the relations it produces in collaboration with the spectator.

International Festival performs the performance of the always already there. International Festival is currently involved in projects with van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, NAi Netherlands Institute of Architecture in Rotterdam, Fruit and Flower Deli in New York, Elaine Levy Project, Bruxelles, Brändström and Stene Gallery in Stockholm. International Festival was elected “Architects of the Year” in Sweden for 2007.

International Festival consists of architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer Mårten Spångberg.

Tor Lindstrand

Tor Lindstrand (Stockholm) is an architect active in his own office Larsson, Lindstrand and Palme. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology. He has been working on interdiciplinary and collaborative projects between architecture, visual art and performance in numerous cultural contexts. Tor Lindstrand is a founding member of Fame International. Tor Lindstrand is on the artistic board of the Modern Dance Theatre in Stockholm. He is since 1996 an editor at Merge Magazine, a cultural quarterly on sound, thought, image.

Mårten Spångberg

Mårten Spångberg works and lives in Brussels, Berlin and Stockholm. His work starts from choreography but branches out into different forms of expression. He initiated the Panacea Festivals in Stockholm (1996 - 2001) and co-curated the Body Currency, Wiener Festwochen (1998), Read My Lips, Oslo (1997), the Fourth International Summer Academy, Frankfurt (2002), and CAPITALS Acarte, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, (2002-2003). He is a frequent essayist and has worked as an opera and dance critic for daily newspapers, such as Aftonbladet (1991-93) and Dagens Nyheter (1993-97).

Mårten Spångberg is founding member of Fame International and has performed a.o. with BDC and Tom Plischke, Xavier Le Roy, Bak-truppen, and Alice Chauchat. He did dramaturgical work for Ina C. Johannessen, I. Bjornsgaard, Angela Guerreiro, Dennis O’Connor, Lilia Mestre/Mette Edvardsen, and Christine de Smedt/Les Ballets C. de la B. His own performance projects are internationally presented: "Avantgarde" (1999), "Recent Works" (2000). In 2001 he choreographed "Break, Intermission, Before and After", a commission for Ballett Frankfurt and Plosion. In 2002 "i.e. All All Over Over All All et.al." and "Artists' talk". In 2005 Tanz im August presented a number of interventions focussing on how choreography and architecture interface in shaping human relations. He has created several installation works for Marres, Maastricht; Kunstverein Baden Baden and Le Magasin, Grenoble, amongst others..

Mårten Spångberg is Guest Professor at the University of Giessen, Germany; project coordinator at the Art Academy Maastricht and Senior Tutor at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels.

Jessyka Watson-Galbraith

Jessyka lives in Sweden at present, she moved there for love. She studied dance at University in Australia. Most recently she was the personal assistant to three Directors at the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers in London. She thoroughly enjoys corporate employment, and has worked in the fields of film, finance and management consultancy. She began travelling to Europe to dance in 2000 and finally moved to London to work in 2005. The only performance work she ended up doing there was Let’s Talk About Love. In Berlin she has worked a fair amount with Australian Paul Gazzola and also re-mounted Let’s Talk About Love – a dance piece for 16 dancers made in two weeks for YouTube about love to the music of Celine Dion for the fabrik Potsdam Tanztage Festival. Her on-line projects include investigations into the film Dirty Dancing, the diva Mariah Carey, Lip-Synch’ing and with the Swedish International Performance Exchange (INPEX) the INPEX DIY Video Festival.

Siegmar Zacharias

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and teacher of rhetoric. Her works develop formats of theatre-, lecture-, and multimedia-performances and installations, dealing with questions of participation and being together. They are situated between philosophy and sensuality, humour and labour, do-it-yourself low tech and high tech, and have been described as “Visionary. Challenging. Witty”. They have been presented in theatres throughout Europe, in glasshouses, clubs, galleries, in the woods, and up in the sky. Newer works are The Pavilion of hot air and hopes, You & Me together. My first…, fear_lab, perforated paradise, zero, Dracula 89/03. She was co-curator of the Black-Market of useful knowledge and non-knowledge, and part of International Festival THE THEATRE. Error! Contact not defined. is the initiator of the project Super! Power! What is it to participate in Europe and in Art, and cofounder of SXS Enterprise. At the moment she is working on a YouTube-based rock opera: Democracy. Fuck Yeah! It’s not a social movement. It’s a dance. Siegmar also teaches rhetoric within business corporations.