Guidelines for Participation as a Presenting Artist

Deadline for proposals Saturday, October 31st, 2015

11:59 p.m. (GMT-06)

Please read the following guidelines carefully.  By submitting an application to participate in Performática you are agreeing to the conditions set forth below. 

Presentation

This year's edition is co-directed by Carolina Tabares Mendoza, Karen Palafox, Diana Morales and César Aragón. The goal of Performática is the facilitation of engaged dialogue and collaboration between artists of all media with an interest in reflecting on the basic importance of their relationship to the movement arts.

Together we strive towards a space for shared community responsibility, and a platform for realizing personal agency. Hierarchies between students, teachers, history, styles, and economics are destabilized in order to invite alternative ways of being in our practice.

Defining the Forum

The operative languages for Performática are Spanish and English. If you are working in another language please have your written material translated into either English or Spanish before applying.

We are asking that all participants in Performática 2016 be willing to adapt and evolve initial proposals in order to generate actions that emerge from the collective tendencies and needs of the event itself. We would like to imagine that Performática can be a living breathing temporal organism rather than a collection of prefabricated presentations of already proven notions.

The 1st stage will consist of a selection committee reviewing the proposals and determining which projects lend themselves to participation within the model we are laying out. This year the selection committee will consist of a group of artists, external to the central organizing committee of Performática, who have attended the festival in previous years and understand its mission. This committee will evaluate proposals anonymously, i.e. without identification data of each artist. Considering this, we suggest you communicate your interests with the highest level of clarity in the spaces given in the application form. Criteria will include: viability, clarity of intent, contribution to diversity, and empathy with the mission of Performática.

After the 1st stage that will conclude November 22nd, 2015, with the notification of selected proposals, selected artists will have three weeks in which to email a signed commitment letter (provided by Performática) signalling your intention to participate. Participants who do not send this letter will be removed from consideration and their places offered to applicants on the waiting list. In January there will be deadline for any further publicity/program information or other administrative data that will aid the organizers in formulating the calendar for the forum. Students and participating artists will then register for participation in classes and workshops in late February or early March.

For this edition of Performatica we have revisited the origins, noticing how the context in which we develop our practice has changed. Taking into account the conditions found now, we propose the following themes to be considered as a guide in your application for the festival:

Guiding Questions for Performatica 2016

Borders

There are progressively more migrations, while at the same time spontaneous communities arise as unities to hold this situation.

As an alternative approach to an economic model in times of manifest crisis, ‘trueque’ (barter) is coming to the forefront of social practice. The economy of affection is reclaiming its original place.

The migratory phenomenon travels between boundaries and frontiers that establish how we inhabit them. Border is a place where time and space change.

How do geopolitical circumstances affect and transform the way we develop our creative processes?

Local shared boundaries

How do we understand the time and space we share?

Do we take agency in the inevitable transformations of our boundaries?

How and where does these boundaries transform?

At the moment of presenting a choreographic work, each person as an audience, dancer, artist, comes from a different background, a different experience. What does sharing a performative space implies?

In which way the roles of spectator and performer are dilated during this experience?

Time in your edges

Where do you come from?

When did your practice start today?

Do you remember what you did five minutes ago?

How do you make conscious the experience of every moment during your practice while it happens?

Classes

These morning practices will be followed by a second block of classes (1h 30min), which deepen the demands on the body and mind and take us into more alert and active physical challenges. Possible proposals for this block could investigate practices like contemporary dance, floor work, improvisation, Gaga, Contact Improvisation, modern dance, ballet, butoh, physical theater etc. Most importantly we are inviting proposals that embrace what it might mean to go deeper.

Laboratories

Labs are an opportunity to go engage deeply with a committed group. Instead of happening only once, laboratories will take place on two or three consecutive days, depending on the response of the call for proposals and the advice of the selection committee-each with a block of 3 hours in the afternoon. Past labs have included: Improvisational Study, Composition, Performance, Dance and Technology, Bodywork and Somatic Studies, Voice and Movement, Physical Theater, and the creation of original choreography among others. We encourage proposals that explore collaborative processes and refer to the guiding questions of the 2016 forum.

Performance

If you are interested in performing, we encourage you to consider bringing work that would be enriched within the frame of the forum. The technical capabilities we provide are simple but adequate. If what you need is a state of the art, super fancy theater, with all the latest fashions in gimmicks and gizmos, please note that Performática might not be the best forum for your performance goals. Work that focuses on the body, its humanity, and communicative possibilities within a simple theatrical framework is the kind of work that can be best supported with our resources.

Conditions for Participation

Depending on the number of applications we receive, we are envisioning a group of 40 artists who will come together to share* their work and presence (with one another and the population of participants who will inscribe in the spring) through teaching, studying, performing and other practices.

*We would like to encourage the idea that everyone who attends Performática comes in the spirit of generous community. It has been our experience that attending each other's classes, being available for spur of the moment creative action or performance proposals, or chipping in to offer an eye or an ear to someone's current questions is part of what makes something like Performática so special. Before applying, please consider whether this type of environment is in line with your sensibilities.

What We Can Offer

For participants who are selected we offer:

• Access to: Dance Studios, Lush Gardens, Classrooms equipped with Video Projection and Sound Reproduction, Live Musicians for collaboration, and aid in negotiating bureaucracy for the use of public spaces.
• Teaching and Performance Opportunities
• Publicity
• Access to all roundtables, classes, workshops, performances, and discussions
• A supportive environment for formal and informal exchange

What We Cannot Offer

Stipends (financial assistance) for transportation, housing, teaching or performing, etc.

Should you have any questions about funding, official invitations, or other matters relating to your participation - please get in touch with the Performática team though the contact page.