Cullberg Talks: Work

Critical reflection on their work has become an indispensable element of the practice of contemporary dancers. Issues include the function of dance as an art form, dance among the other art forms, dancers’ skills, authorship, the body as an archive, training. These questions are part of the ongoing discussion among dancers, inside and outside the studio, and question ultimately the role of the body, choreography as social organization, and life itself.

Cullberg Talks is a new series to discuss dance with the public, three times per year, organized in collaboration with Index. Dancers of Cullbergbaletten talk with scholars from the professional field and the audience. It’s a place for dancers’ talks.

The first talk will be about “work”, together with philosopher, dance and theater researcher, dramatist and teacher Bojana Kunst. The discussion will be hosted by Cullbergbaletten’s dancers Samuel Draper, Katie Jacobson and Daniel Sjökvist. Further events are planned for August and November 2016.

Biographies
Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturg and performance theoretician. She is a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she is leading an international master program Choreography and Performance. She is a member of the editorial board of Maska Magazine, Amfiteater and Performance Research. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications and she has taught and lectured extensively at the various universities in Europe. She published among others Impossible Body (Ljubljana, 1999) and Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial (Ljubljana, 2004), Performance and Labour (Performance Research 18.1., ed. with Gabriele Klein), and Artist at Work, Zero Books, London, 2015.

Samuel Draper is a Stockholm-based dancer and artist. Working for Cullbergbaletten since 2013, Samuel has co-created and performed works by Jefta van Dinther, Stina Nyberg, Trajal Harrell, Eszter Salamon, Cristian Duarte and Deborah Hay. He is also part of the collective Together Alone, initiated by collaborator Pavle Heidler, and has participated in the ongoing projects of Manon Santkin, The Atlas of Interpretation and Unexplained Dances. Ambivalent towards the archetypal figures of the ‘dancer’ and the ‘artist,’ Samuel is practicing performatism and study to see how these roles can take on other guises.

Born in 1992, Katie Jacobson comes from the small town of Placerville, California. Its rural settings offered few places to explore dance or other artistic outlets which led her to occupy most of her pre-teens with competitive jazz dance. From high school on she began training at Northern California Dance Conservatory and later the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company in Nahariya, Isael. In 2012 she entered Artez hoogeschool voor de kunsten in Arnhem, where she received her BFA in dance. In 2014 she began her apprenticeship with Cullbergbaletten which in 2015 turned into her current employment.

For more than a decade Daniel Sjökvist has been working as a dancer in Cullbergbaletten. Prior to this he worked in Netherlands Dance Theater, the Gothenburg Ballet and the Norwegian National Ballet. Daniel received his dance education at the (Royal) Swedish Ballet School. This lineage has translated into a journey of change that brought him from classical ballet to where he is today, as a dancer in a company that refuses to stagnate.

Free event, please make sure to come in time.