Conference: “The Body in Public Space as Experience and Praxis”

13th Dance Days Chania & School of Architecture and Engineering of the Technical University of Crete

23 July – Chania / Center of Mediterranean Architecture
In the framework of the International Contemporary Dance Festival “Dance Days Chania”, in collaboration with the School of Architecture and Engineering of the Technical University of Crete (Greece)

Open Call

Dance and space share a common rhythm of experiential expression through corporeal mediation. The body is the horizon of our orientation in the world, the living carrier of our perceptual relationship with it that allows for the appropriation of the space we inhabit through the immediacy of its presence. Especially in its public version, space is the field of encounter of individual and collective intentions, claims, creative actions, ruptures and affects. Public space is a complex field of conflicting desires and symbolic exchanges; it is the specific field that constitutes our social bond, our individual and collective negotiation.

Today, the physical perception in public space crosses the boundaries between vision and tactility, thinking and feeling. Spatial experience is increasingly fragmented and mediated as the public space is threatened or even expanded by the digital and virtual space that is more and more becoming an integral part of our body-spatial relations and experiences. In recent years, the congregation of bodies in public space for claiming fundamental human rights, rooted in the acceptance of diversity and in social and economic equality, unfolded the potential of the body to re-claim the city both performatively but most importantly politically. How do performance and dance artists respond to the ever-shrinking and hybrid public space, giving us the opportunity for new experiences and shared spaces of gathering, confrontation or attunement?

The one-day conference under the title The Body in Public Space as Experience and Praxis will seek to contribute to the redefinition of public space and our relationship with it by promoting a dialogue between the various ways in which space is “practised” and experienced through the body. We invite scholars, researchers and artists (indicatively but not exclusively) from the fields of Architecture, Dance, Performance and Digital Arts, Phenomenology, Social Geography and Anthropology to submit their abstracts for papers.

How can dance and space mutually interact and offer a “chor(e)o-poiesis”? In what ways can such an approach lead to aesthetic and political acts and forms of experience that create new ways of inhabiting our collective space? How can it provide grounded responses to the massive replacement of public space by the digital – public sphere?