A Decade of MA Solo Dance Authorship

SODA
A DECADE
OF MA SOLO DANCE AUTHORSHIP

2

SODA
A DECADE
OF MA SOLO DANCE AUTHORSHIP
Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT)
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After all, what is history if it is not an imagined past –
a collection of facts, which are viewed and interpreted in the light
of our own experiences?
Shirley Baker – Photographer, 1932–2014
The making of art is highly individual, possibly spontaneous and
to some extent always intuitive – sometimes even contradictory.
Is it possible to define the conditions in which the various art forms
can optimally develop? And if so, can we translate them into a
structured pedagogical system?
Georg Weinand – SODA Symposium, 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
5
21
35
55
Preface
Introduction
Beginnings (2005-2006)
Development (2006-2007)
SODA Draft Curriculum (2006)
Ethos & Poetics
Locations
Programme
Student Handbook Extracts (2010-2017)
Core Approaches
Course Structure
Workbooks & Framing Statements
Extracts I
Introduction
Céline Cartillier (2012–2014)
Felix Marchand (2007–2009)
Flavio Ribeiro (2012–2014)
Kat Válastur (2007–2009)
Jee-Ae Lim (2011–2013)
Maria Baroncea (2012–2014)
Mirko Winkel (2007–2009)
SODA Pilot Group Workbooks (2007–2009)
Networks
SODA Postgraduate Platform (2009)
Erasmus Intensive Project (2011–2013)
Erasmus IP Report (2012) – Litó Walkey
Capturing Dance: Berlin - Cologne (2015–2016)
Exchange Project: Berlin - Stockholm -
Montpellier (2015)

73
89
95
129
134
137
138
Extracts II
Sophia New – ‘Refreshing Experience’
Boyan Manchev – ‘Educational Micropolitics’
Litó Walkey – ‘Performance Directives’
Ric Allsopp – ‘Spaces of Appearance’
Sophia New – ‘Expanding Notions Through Experience’
Interview
Interview with Rhys Martin (July 2017)
Extracts III
Ana Monteiro (2010–2012)
Andrew Wass (2011–2013)
Willy Prager (2011–2013)
Daniel Kok (2010–2012)
Enrico D. Wey (2015–2017)
Yaron Maïm & GroupSolo (2016–2018)
Katrin Memmer (2012–2014)
Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez (2013–2015)
Elisabete Finger (2010–2012)
Helena Botto (2013–2015)
Kyla Avery Kegler (2013–2015)
Mădălina Dan (2014–2016)
Sheena McGrandles (2010–2012)
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz (2015–2017)
Addenda
MA SODA Students (2007–2017)
Exchange & Guest Students (2010–2016)
MA SODA Staff (2007–2017)
HZT Direction & Administration (2006–2017)
SODA WORKS (2009–2017)
Visiting Guests & Mentors (2007–2017)
External Examiners (2009–2017)
Erasmus Intensive Project Staff (2011–2013)
SODA Staff Biographies
References
Colophon

PREFACE
The aim of this book on a decade of SODA at the HZT Berlin is to
provide a retrospective insight into the imaginative, discursive
and educational spaces that the SODA programme has opened-up
since its beginnings in 2007. The book is not intended to be a definitive
history or a celebration of special achievements (of which
there have been many on both individual and institutional levels)
but as more of a glimpse, an aide memoire for those involved, a
partial insight for those at a distance. It offers a set of links and
connections to current and past work by students, staff and alumni;
a graphic play of extracts, texts and images, a vade mecum for
the curious or perplexed that tracks some of the choreographic,
poetic and performative spaces that SODA has explored. As the
second SODA group (2010–2012) outlined in ‘Anything but Solo’,
the introduction to their final SODA Works programme:
One of our first SODA lectures dealt with dance as an
open concept. Reading Eco and Barthes as a group not
only quickly led us to question our preconceived notions
regarding authorship, but also established a common language
for us to communicate with in the months to come.
What is ‘open’? Open to what? And for whom? These
were precisely the kinds of questions that we would busy
ourselves with in practical workshops as well a table
discussions.
One gift that a programme like SODA offers is time – the
time to sharpen and redefine our artistic methodologies,
the time to ponder over feedback about our work, and
perhaps more importantly, the time to reflect critically on
the very conditions of performance creation and production.
By challenging ourselves to reconsider the contextual
frameworks that surround art making, we have sought
to leave little taken for granted while asserting our independent
practices as critical research. [...]
(SODA Works 2011: 3)
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
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This is an appropriate place to thank all those who have contributed
in a multitude of ways to making the SODA programme the
dynamic, contested, and at times infuriating or ecstatic focus for
postgraduate dance and body-based performance education
over the last decade; and an opportunity to thank all those who
have contributed to the making of this book in the hope that it
might provide a further stepping stone for the future directions of
SODA; especially Yaron Maïm and all the current (2016–2019)
SODA students for their collaborative ‘groupsolo’ contribution
and energies which carry SODA forward; Eva-Maria Hoerster,
Sabine Trautwein and the indomitable Rhys Martin, without whom
SODA would have remained but a sweet fizzy confection in a bottle;
and Pierre Becker at Ta-Trung for his generous collaborative
design work on this book.
Ric Allsopp, November 2017
A supplementary digital version of SODA: A Decade of Solo Dance Authorship is published on ISSUU –
www.issuu.com/hztberlin – and contains hyper-links to all aspects of the SODA programme and its histories
currently available online – www.hzt-berlin.de
MA SODA Events 2010–2017 – www.hzt-berlin.de/SODA-events – is an online digital file that contains all
SODA related materials that have been posted to the HZT website from 2010 to the present - and includes
descriptions and information of the SODA Lectures Series / Workshops / SODA Works / 301 Research
presentations and other events.
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HZT 10 th Anniversary Party (April 2017) Photo © Marion Borriss
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INTRODUCTION
Initiated as one of two postgraduate programmes of the Inter-
University Centre for Dance, Berlin (HZT) MA SODA was developed
alongside MA Choreography as a generative artistic and educational
framework under the auspices of the University of the
Arts (UdK) and the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts (HfS),
Berlin. 1
SODA: A Decade of MA Solo Dance Authorship traces the work of
the SODA programme over its first 10 years and marks its contribution
to the rethinking and expansion of dance and performance
discourses, practices and educational frameworks that continue
to reshape contemporary cultural and artistic environments. The
book, and its partner publication drawing from what falls next to
you (HZT, 2017) provides an insight into the diverse directions that
the work of SODA’s past and present students have taken, the international
networks that the programme has contributed to, and
the educational framework and approach that the artists, theorists
and academics involved with the programme have developed
with the students.
The SODA programme has enabled its students and staff, as
artists, thinkers and makers, to explore the unstable and contested
terms of ‘solo’, ‘dance’ and ‘authorship’, which provided the
acronym SODA, within the framework of a two-year postgraduate
focus on the individual, collaborative and body-based processes
of dance and performance making. SODA draws on performative,
philosophical and theoretical strategies informed by choreographic,
somatic, performance and fine arts practices, to situate
its educational and artistic practice in relation to the field of contemporary
performance and culture.
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
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BEGINNINGS (2005–2006)
The SODA programme emerged as a key feature of the HZT project
and in relation to an educational design zeitgeist that was perhaps
characteristic of the early years of the new century. It built
on the links and experiences of other European programmes and
initiatives that were concerned with experimental educational
models for dance and performance arts including the School for
New Dance Development (SNDO) and DAS Arts in Amsterdam,
ArtEZ in Arnhem, and Dartington College of Arts in England.
It set out to develop a transdisciplinary programme in ‘solo, dance /
choreographic authorship’ as can be seen in the initial proposal
outlined in November 2005 by Rhys Martin, then Professor of
Dance and Choreography within the Musical / Show programme
at the UdK, and in response to Tanzplan Deutschland, an initiative
of the German Federal Cultural Foundation which provided
infra-structural funding (2005–2010) to improve the basic conditions
for dance across Germany and to strengthen it as an art form
in public and cultural policy perception.
The Berlin application for funding from Tanzplan Deutschland
brought together the UdK and the HfS with TanzRaum, a network of
the Berlin professional dance scene, in a single project to integrate
higher education in dance in Berlin with the independent dance
sector under a ‘co-operative centre for dance’ which became the
HZT (Inter-University Centre for Dance, Berlin) in April 2006.
The initial SODA proposal suggested a ‘post-graduate two year,
full-time transdisciplinary MA degree in solo, dance / choreographic
authorship, at the Department of Performing Arts UdK,
Berlin; to be initially installed as a pilot project beginning Autumn
2006.’ (Martin, 2005)
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Its aims were to:
• pursue intellectual agility of purpose, process, artistic excellence
and maturity of performance
• establish a new state of the art, unique performative oriented
postgraduate degree designed to situate solo dance performance
into the transdisciplinary artistic contexts of the twentyfirst
century
• draw on the pre-war legacy of Germany as a leading innovator in
contemporary dance and Berlin’s unique role as a pioneer of solo
dance performance
•reposition Berlin as a dynamic international protagonist in this
rapidly developing innovative contemporary art form
• foster the self-driven development of qualified candidates and
independent authors of contemporary solo dance performance
and to equip them with postgraduate research techniques and
understanding of diverse artistic processes
• position those authors firmly at the centre of current trends of
artistic practice by exposure to a wide range of established contemporary
artists, innovative thinkers and practitioners of performance
related disciplines
• provide an understanding of the major contours of international
research and develop their capacity for critical evaluation of
relevant scholarly literature
• provide structural positioning for project-based higher degrees
(PhD, Research Fellowships) and to develop creative partnerships
with European and international educational institutions
and professional practitioners. (Martin, 2005)
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Uferstudios and the Panke from Badstrasse (2010) Photo © he.he
In the initial research phase (2005–2006) and in advance of the
SODA pilot project, Rhys Martin initiated several conversations
with choreographers and academics that give a sense of prevalent
educational concerns and provided some guidelines for the
conceptualisation of the programme. William Forsythe argued that
‘the learning process of a dance education is central, so the
question ‘how do we know something’ must be the focus’. Xavier
Le Roy also noted that ‘the most important question is not the
content of the lessons, but the form. The ‘how’ must stand clearly
before the ‘what’. He went on to ask whether art can be taught at
all: ‘an ideal education institute creates more a situation in which
questions about art can be asked.’ Johannes Odenthal considered
that any future-oriented dance education ‘must be able to
liberate itself from the aesthetic restrictions of style determination’.
(SODA Archives, 2005–06)
A SODA Working Group 2 was set up to convene a Symposium on
Solo Dance Authorship (25–27 August 2006). The three-day
Symposium was designed as a forum for solo dance performers /
choreographers, artists and theoreticians, representatives of
postgraduate courses in the field of contemporary dance / choreography
and partners from other disciplines who were interested
in solo dance authorship. The Symposium was hosted by Rhys
Martin in collaboration with the International Festival Tanz im
August and included of some of the key figures in contemporary
dance, choreography, performance and education in Europe who
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were invited on the strength of ‘their involvement with solo performance,
authorship questions or experience in postgraduate
study programmes.’ 3
The Symposium also exposed some of the fundamental ideas,
issues and areas of contention implicit in an educational programme
exploring ‘solo, dance, authorship’, ideas which would
directly and indirectly inform the direction of the programme and
form a substrate and a catalyst for its development, establishing
at least a problematic ground from which SODA could operate. The
idea of a ‘problematic’ as a basis for a postgraduate programme
drew on an educational idea of a common research project (equally
involving both staff and students) that addresses the terms of
its title – in this case solo, dance and authorship.
In September 2006 Franz-Anton Cramer drew up a summary report
of the Symposium based on notes and transcripts which amongst
other observations and remarks, noted a ‘growing discomfort with
the idea of working on solo dance authorship.’ (Cramer, 2006:25)
Regardless of the difficulties in defining what solo as a performance
format would be, whether it is relevant to contemporary
practice or transports too much of pre-contemporary concerns
and working methods; regardless also of the question whether
education should focus on solo or rather on artistic development
in a more general, and less determining sense, the following categories
of solo work were formulated:
• Being a soloist in a group
• Solo as part of a process
• Solo as a way of studying
• Solo making for others
• Solo for the self
• Solo as self-exploration. (Cramer, 2006:24–25)
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The Symposium also exposed the more general tensions and disagreements
that continue to exist in approaches to practice-led
education and artistic research particularly at postgraduate level:
whether art can be taught or not, and the relationships between
teaching and learning, perhaps exemplified in Rosemary Butcher’s
remarks which insisted that
... there should be no vision. Education should rather be understood
as a process, like a journey. It should be about submerging
oneself into what one wants to learn; not about the multiplicity of
possibilities but about insisting on your own process. If education
generally relies on the past and that which is known in order to
enable and direct that which is to come, it nevertheless seems
necessary to insist on ‘not doing what history made, but knowing
what history gave. (Rosemary Butcher in Cramer, 2006: 24)
If the programme title - solo, dance, authorship - and the issues
around the categories and potentials of solo work left the development
of the programme unresolved, the Symposium had at
least provided the ground work for a programme whose title could
form the basis for exploration. As Franz-Anton Cramer noted ‘the
notion of solo as an historic fact being beyond doubt, its transferability
to contemporary concerns need[ed] more clarification’.
(Cramer, 2006:25) The dramaturg Myriam van Imshoot summarised
the symposium ‘impasse’ as follows: ‘If we cannot talk about the
essential scope and content of the education project, how can we
try to talk about the structural surroundings?’ Such a discussion
was to be the next phase of the development of SODA. Responding
to the Symposium summary, Rhys Martin commented:
Is there a divide here between academia and practice? In view of
these conflicting reactions to the general proposal it will be advisable
and necessary to look at the whole idea again in greater
detail. Certainly, there is a potential in the title to create a negative
perception of the programme. Does this lie in the name itself or
the substance of the course structure espoused, or with the central
idea itself? Without doubt, there is a need to examine this in
detail and redraft [the SODA proposal] where necessary. The
Symposium was designed to draw out these possible areas of
difference and disagreement as well as suggestions for innovation
and development. While I believe that upon further analysis,
the fundamental thrust of the programme reflects many of the
artistic concerns and practices present at the Symposium, there
is nevertheless a strong case to reappraise the current proposal
to incorporate those concerns addressed. (Cramer, 2006: 29)
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Uferhallen from the back of the Alte Kantine (2010) Photo © Ric Allsopp
DEVELOPMENT (2006–2007)
Following the Symposium two further steps of the SODA research
phase took place in 2006 and early 2007. In November 2006, an
experimental laboratory was conducted to test and evaluate the
learning structures for the proposed Artistic Reference Frame
(ARF) Choreographer Plus - a module envisioned for the SODA
pilot programme which ‘concentrat[ed] on the individual processes
of the artist / choreographer and the development of their
authorial concerns in a transdisciplinary context’. The first ARF
was a one-week research laboratory for which a leading choreographer
(Deborah Hay, USA) was invited to choose two peer artists
or partners (Margaret Cameron, AUS; and Rosa Casado, ES) to
form an artistic reference frame. This offered highly experienced,
artistic resources to eight SODA ‘test candidates’ (through an
open call for participation) to enhance, focus and facilitate their
research skills and artistic practice. A second ARF Choreographer
Plus laboratory was convened in January 2007 and lead by Ibrahim
Quarishi (USA/F) with Gabriel Smeets (NL).
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Uferstudios Chimney (2011) Photo © he.he
A revised SODA Working Group was extended to concentrate on
the SODA programme and curriculum development, and included
consultancy from Susan Melrose (Middlesex University), Pirkko
Huseman (HAU), Heike Roms (Aberystwyth University) and others.
At the same time an International Advisory Board (IAB) (2006–
2010) was convened to advise on the general development of the
HZT project as well as on the development of its educational
programmes and their curricula. 4 A Fachkommission (Expert Committee)
had been set up by the Berlin Senate right at the beginning
of the HZT pilot phase. Its function was to advise on the
structure of the HZT and on the development of the HZT curricula
on a regular basis, meeting at least once a month, sometimes
more often; whereas the function of the IAB was to provide an
outside, overview perspective. The members of the Fachkommission
also represented the institutions involved. 5
In its initial phase the HZT project was given the go-ahead to
research and develop two new study programmes commencing in
April 2007: the BA in Contemporary Dance & Choreography and in
October 2007, the MA SODA which (subject to accreditation) were
then incorporated into the HZT from 2010 alongside the MA in
Choreography (MAC) which developed from the existing HfS Ernst
Busch Diploma programme, and started in October 2008. The
SODA programme that emerged between 2006 and 2010 can be
seen as a slow process of working through the paradoxes and
entanglements that emerged from the first Symposium.
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SODA DRAFT CURRICULUM (2006)
An essential element of the curriculum proposal is the perceived
need to install a dynamic educational platform that will allow
students to access contemporary practice as it is found in the
profession. It is intended to do this through the high frequency of
guest teachers and mentors constantly replenished subject to
availability and suitability for the candidates currently in the programme.
Maximum flexibility is required to offer the broadest
range of artistic leadership. However, continuity will be provided
through ongoing mentor supervision. (Martin, 2006)
Semester 1: Embodied Thought - Block 1 (6 weeks)
A high impact concentration of diverse theoretical and practical
knowledge will be identified and coordinated in a varied programme
of lectures, seminars, tutorials, discussions and classes.
The body and its readings provide a metaphorical structure to
stimulate discovery of new knowledge bases and un-researched
themes. They are not courses in the traditional sense, but more
akin to a reference library through which the students acquire
useful tools and directions for their own work - new starting points
and impulses.
For example: External Embodiment: motion capture, life model
drawing, choreography techniques, martial arts; Visual / Eyes:
graphic 2D-3D, digital technology, prototyping; Acoustic / Ear: sound
studies composition; Tactile / Hand: dramaturgy, sign-language,
hermeneutics, critical writing and documentation; Cognitive / Brain:
theory of aesthetics performance, sociology, psychology, contextualization;
Internal Embodiment: anatomy, body- mind-centering,
Pilates, yoga, meditation.
Lectures are planned in cooperation with various departments of
the UdK and other Berlin universities, and with invited specialists.
During the Embodied Thought block a daily movement class will
be offered by guest teachers.
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Semester 1: Laboratory Series 1 (Fremdgehen [externalize]) –
Block 2 (8 weeks)
An intensive work-phase consisting of 8 x 1 week-long laboratories
with leading non-dance artists. In order to allow creative
space to develop an individual choreographic voice, it is proposed
that students first attempt to understand and participate in the
aesthetics and methods of practice of artists of other disciplines.
These think-tanks / workshops aim to generate a wide experience
base of creative thought processes and applications. The content
of the laboratory is determined by the leader in negotiation with
students. It’s fundamental premise is that knowledge is embedded
in the practitioner and is not separated into subject and teacher.
Semester 2: Laboratory Series 2 - Choreographer Plus (8 weeks)
A second intensive work-phase of 8 x 1 week-long laboratories
with leading choreographers. After students have had the opportunity
to familiarize with other approaches and research fields,
they will be encouraged to develop their own access to research
and develop their skills to critically discuss and if necessary
defend their own ideas and viewpoints with established professional
artists and mentors. The choreographers will lead the laboratory
with two other peer artists / creative collaborators. Creative
teams will be built with other students from appropriate courses
from affiliated programmes.
Semester 3: Independent Trajectory
Students will be required to articulate and formulate a chosen
path of artistic enquiry. The aim of the semester is to identify and
consolidate a personal research question that will lead to a final
project in Semester 4. Students may attend the laboratories of
Semester 2. However, a mentoring system will be developed that
will best serve the needs of the now independent researcher.
Semester 4: Final Project
The final project is the equivalent of a written thesis in conventional
postgraduate programmes. It can take the form of a full-length
performance or equivalent – for example an installation, film,
multi-media project etc. Following the first academic year and its
intensive study programme, the second academic year is targeted
at individual research and realization of individual projects.
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Alte Kantine Garden (2011) Photo © Ric Allsopp

Mime Centrum Entrance
(2008)
Photo © Ric Allsopp
The curriculum that was formulated for the pilot phase of SODA in
2006 perhaps predictably underwent some considerable rethinking
and remodelling in response to the realities, reactions and
critical feedback from the pilot SODA group between 2007–2009.
Ric Allsopp - a member of the International Advisory Board - was
co-opted to join Rhys Martin in the delivery of the pilot phase from
October 2007 and, between July 2009 and March 2010, to work on
the further development of a programme handbook and curriculum
for the first ‘incorporated’ MA SODA student intake (2010–
2012) in April 2010. The ‘scope and content of the education project’
that was to be developed over this period established the
terms ‘solo dance authorship’ as a generative problematic to be
understood, experienced and transformed at the level of the individual
within a flexible institutional framework. The ‘structural
surroundings’ of the HZT as Franz-Anton Cramer put it, the proximity
of, and interaction with the independent dance scene, students
and staff from other academic disciplines, faculties and institutions
and the wider cultural, artistic and social resources and
opportunities of Berlin also began to seed collaborative crosspollination
- for example in the SODA WORK flyer (July 2009), and
the student organised network / artist / student meetings and
performances (see Networks). The international artistic and educational
networks that both staff and students could draw on underpinned
the gradual shift from the initial ideas of ‘solo dance
authorship’ to ‘body-based practices’. The aims set out in the
2006 draft stated that:
The course shall be learner driven. The program has as its focus
the enabling of a highly skilled autonomous contemporary dance
performance / choreographer as both researcher and artist. It will
provide opportunities to extend knowledge, competence and understanding
in the theory and practice of dance as an art. It recognises
the creative and intellectual freedom of talented individuals
to seek out, develop and determine those areas of knowledge that
will best serve their own field of enquiry and which facilitate their
artistic development. It recognises the primary importance of
establishing and encouraging a unique artistic sensibility and
voice in new practitioners. (Cramer, 2006: 22)
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In the most recent (July 2017) SODA Admissions vimeo 6 Rhys Martin
and Sophia New affirm that the SODA programme is looking for
postgraduates ‘who are interested in being challenged, who want
to work within a community of artists, people who have a strong
sense of performance identity, who are fluent in English and international
in attitude’ and in terms of dance, for people ‘who have a
body-based practice - and we understand dance in a very expanded
sense’. The aims and curriculum in the current (2017–19) SODA
Handbook [see Programme] remain close in form and content to
the initial 2010–2012 version.
MA SODA aims to provide a distinctive, practice-led postgraduate
level education for practitioners and graduates who wish to make
dance and body-based performance work in relation to embodied
and conceptual practice, and engage with and reflect on the physical,
compositional, intellectual and cultural processes involved.
MA SODA is aimed at dancers, performers, artists and makers who
have already established a motivated (but not necessarily professional)
practice in dance and performance, who wish to extend
and develop the forms, contexts and intellectual range of their
work, and who wish to engage with the contexts, challenges and
environments of contemporary practice.
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ETHOS AND POETICS
If SODA has established itself over the last decade not so much as
a singular vision but as a flexible structure, then like any postgraduate
programme that builds a certain reputation for experimentation
and risk-taking within the constraints of an institution, it has
also established an ethos over time. Perhaps it is a ‘choreographic
unconscious’ 7 that we inherit from the collaborative, collective
and individual experiences that have formed and shaped the diversity
of the SODA histories so far, but perhaps it is also an ethos
which, as Nicolas Ridout puts it, is concerned with the realisation
of individual and social potential, of an orientation towards the
‘other’; as a concern with process and form rather than content,
characterised by ‘an openness to the future and the unpredictable
rather than a closure around a specific ethical position’ and
the ‘production of ethical relations and situations’ rather than a
concern with aesthetics. (Ridout, 2009: 49). It might also, from a programme
point of view point towards a poetics: ‘an approach to
acts of dance- and performance-making that proposes the possibilities
of a radical coherence – how things might hold together
without falling into conventional forms and flows. It considers thinking,
dancing bodies [...] as forms of such radical coherence – that
is, as a means of proposing conditions for the emergence of the
unforeseen, the unimagined, and the remarkable.’ (Allsopp, 2015: 24)
The work of SODA thought of as a sense of potential ‘coherence’
based not in argument but in imaginative possibility.
LOCATIONS
Mime Centrum Library
(2008)
Photo © Ric Allsopp
The character of the SODA programme - like any intensive, practice-based
course - takes in part its direction and dynamic from
the physical environments that it interacts with. The pilot phase
starting in October 2007 was based around a large table at the
Mime Centre in Schoenhauser Allee and had to make use of
studio-space in various locations including the HfS studios in Immanuelkirchstrasse,
and the Malersaal of the Komische Oper at
Zehdenicker Strasse. Whilst the Mime Centre possessed a comprehensive
video documentation of contemporary performance
and dance in Berlin which provided an appropriate research
resource for the programme, the dispersed feel of the pilot phase
underlined the educational need for a more permanent location
from which to develop the SODA programme.
18

The move to the Alte Kantine at Uferhallen (2010) whilst the 1920s
buildings of the old central workshops of the BVG (Berlin Public
Transport system) that were to become Uferstudios were being
refurbished, provided a more focussed location for the programme
with a dividable studio space, an office / kitchen and a small garden
that enabled a sense of a ‘home-ground’ for the new SODA
(2010–2012) group starting in April 2010. The official move to the
newly refurbished Uferstudios housing the three HZT programmes,
as well as Tanzfabrik Berlin, ada Studio, Tanzbüro and the independent
sector, was in October 2010 with the SODA programme
moving into shared studio space from April 2011 with the start of
the new SODA (2011–2013) group.
1. Since its initial pilot phase which ran between
October 2007 and July 2009, MA SODA has been regulated
by the UdK, and the MA Choreography (MAC)
which started in October 2008, regulated by the HfS.
2. The SODA Working Group consisted of Rhys Martin,
Eva-Maria Hoerster (Managing Director, HZT, 2006–
2013), André Thériault (Artistic Director, Tanz im August)
and Sabine Trautwein, HZT Administrator, 2006– present)
with the choreographer Thomas Lehmen as consultant.
3. The Symposium included live and video contributions
from: Gabriele Brandstetter, Carol Brown, Rosemary
Butcher, Alice Chauchat, Franz-Anton Cramer (reportage),
Scott deLahunta, Jeroen Fabius, Joao Fiadeiro,
Susan Leigh Foster, Deborah Hay, Claudia Henne (moderator),
Pirkko Husemann (moderator), Myriam van
Imschoot, Mette Ingvartsen, Benoit Lachambre,
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Thomas Lehmen, [whose studio
the symposium took place in] Xavier LeRoy, Susanne
Linke, Mark Tompkins, and Georg Weinand.
4. The IAB was formed by William Forsythe (choreographer),
Scott deLahunta (dance researcher),
Gabriele Klein (Hamburg University), Ric Allsopp
(MMU) Marijke Hoogenboom (AHK) joining in July
2009, and Anita Donaldson (HKAPA).
5. The Fachkommission consisted of Rhys Martin
(UdK), Helge Musial (HfS) (substitute: Ingo
Reulecke), Thilo Wittenbecher & Martin Nachbar
(Tanz RaumBerlin), Gabriele Brandstetter (Free
University, Berlin) (substitute: Mieke Matzke),
and Eva-Maria Hoerster (Managing Director, HZT).
6. See www.hzt-berlin.de
7. A term drawing on Frederik Jameson’s notion of a
‘political unconscious’ (1981) and explored by Sergej
Pristaš for his 2012 workshop Helsinki – [see Networks].
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20

PROGRAMME
Developing from the initial pilot phase (2007–2009) the core programme
structure has provided a flexible framework within which
SODA students and staff have explored the tensions, trajectories
and directions that SODA has taken within the institutional and
educational frameworks that it has had to operate within or find
ways of accommodating. SODA in many respects tracks the development
of the dance, performance and art worlds and reflects the
more recent impact of social media. This includes not only the
various ‘turns’ since the 1990s in the field of dance and performance
- linguistic, conceptual, digital, educational, affective, sensory
and so forth; but also (as primarily an international programme)
the experiential, educational and artistic backgrounds
and assumptions of the staff, students, visiting artists and mentors
(see Lists) who have shaped the broader directions and ethos
of SODA. As Sabine Huschka indicated in the 2006 Symposium
‘the choice of teachers and their respective profiles would determine
largely the contents of the education’ (Cramer, 2006:24)
As things change and transform over time, so then do attitudes
and approaches to the core terms of the programme – solo, dance,
and authorship. If the title (in 2006) presented a potential problem
to the artists and theorists who attended the Symposium,
then the shift of approach to the title not as a problem but as a
problematic through the experience of the pilot programme
(2007–2009) became not only a memorable and useful acronym,
but also a useful and productive point of discussion and disagreement
in both practical and conceptual modes, a catalyst for positioning
and integrating both practical and theoretical approaches
to making art work. This would confirm a sense (in both educational
and artistic environments) that how we think of arts practice
and how we receive arts practice has been contested since
antiquity as a source of both pleasure, disagreement, censorship
and emancipation.
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
21

The development of the initial educational framework for SODA
(2010–2012) that incorporated the experience of both the 2006
Symposium and the two-year pilot phase, produced a programme
structure that has remained substantially in place with few alterations
over eight annual intakes of students including the most
recent SODA intake (2017–19).
STUDENT HANDBOOK EXTRACTS (2010–2017)
What is ‘solo / dance / authorship’?
As an MA program that proposes as its basis an open, interrogative
field of enquiry, rather than a fixed set of references, the terms
of its enquiry - ‘solo / dance / authorship’ - are contained in the
program’s title. As a set of references ‘solo dance authorship’
might conventionally be understood as the authoring of solo
dance - a form or genre which points to an established history
and tradition of dance performance. But in the context of contemporary
and emergent practice, the three terms can be additionally
or equally understood as a nexus of unstable and contested
meanings. Together they suggest a mode of enquiry into embodied
compositional practice that separates the individual terms –
solo / dance / authorship – and their possible relationships, a
territory signified by the slash that indicates both difference and
interdependency.
The terms can be read as inclusive of a range of associations:
‘solo’ as: unaccompanied, independent, solitary, single, individual,
alone, virtuosic; ‘dance’ as: movement, gesture, motion; ‘authorship’
as authority, authenticity, control, origination. They can also
be read for what they might exclude or veil: collaboration, participation,
co-operation, everyday movement, anonymity, openness,
informality, and so on. In the context of MA SODA ‘solo / dance /
authorship’ is proposed as a field of enquiry that sets up conditions
for embodied and conceptual engagements from which
contemporary compositional practices can emerge and which
forms a platform for research, exploration and production.
22

In this sense ‘solo / dance / authorship’ forms a poetics: a means
of making; a compositional approach to contemporary practice. It
questions the terms of its own constitution and in doing so opens
potential and generative areas of enquiry. The MA SODA does not
therefore propose a restricted approach to solo dance making, but
sets up the conditions that allow students to identify and develop
for themselves and with others their compositional and embodied
practice and its contexts. ‘Solo / dance / authorship’ as a mode of
enquiry does not seek to establish a definition of its terms but proposes
an increasing understanding of the range of its possible
manifestations, contexts and applications.
What is the approach to learning?
The two-year MA SODA course combines a taught program with
individual performance-making and independent research, tutorial
and mentoring support. Emphasis throughout is placed on
individual motivation and approaches to learning which underpin
the student’s ability to:
• articulate their practice to themselves, to their peers
and to a public - through presentations, performances,
and the sharing of processes; through the development
of a Workbook - a document that maps the progress
and process of individual performance making –
and through critical framing statements and other
modes of verbal presentation and writing that contextualize,
extend and inform their work;
• develop practice-based and intellectual research
skills – through engagement in seminars, critiques,
lectures, and intensive workshops lead by choreographers,
performance art-makers, media-artists, theorists
and creative writers;
• identify specific learning needs in order to develop
their work and understand the contexts of its production
and dissemination.
23

CORE APPROACHES
MA SODA focuses on a number of core approaches that support
and develop each student’s individual trajectory through the
course. Independent work and the development of the student’s
own reflective practice is the main focus and point of reference
throughout the course.
• Contemporary Arts Practice: A key proposition of the studycourse
is that students are engaged with dance and body-based
performance practices that are concerned with current and
emergent cultural, artistic and aesthetic circumstances and
contexts, and the reciprocal impact that such contexts and practice
have on each other in terms of form, process and reception.
The contemporary in this sense is an engagement with and
reflection on what is happening now. MA SODA suggests that
contemporary arts practice can usefully and productively be
seen through the lens of ‘solo / dance / authorship’ and composition
both in historical readings of these terms and as focus
for research.
24

Sonja Pregrad (2011) Wall Writings in Studio 8 Photo © Ric Allsopp
• Theory: The approach to theory is designed to ensure that the
theoretical issues emerging within an individual student’s practice
can be located in relation to current arts discourses. It is
concerned both with the methodological implications of theoretical
enquiry by practitioners as well as with specific bodies of
theory. It addresses the possibilities and limitations of shared
theoretical discourse across subject fields. Linked to this it poses
questions about the relation of subject-specific fields of enquiry
to contemporary meta-discourses.
• Practices / Making New Work: MA SODA guides and enables the
student to work towards the thinking and making of a substantial
practical work (or set of works) of their own devising, designed
to define their own position within their field of practice by the
end of the study course. This is achieved through a series of
shorter formal, informal and / or intensive engagements with the
methods, processes and contexts of making and thinking about
work. Small performance ‘studies’ are planned, encouraging the
student to test ideas, for an audience of peers, during their
development, as part of the process towards a resolved work.
25

• Contexts: A ‘given’ of the MA SODA study course is that arts
practices do not take place outside of a set of contexts – cultural,
political, environmental, social, aesthetic, historical, personal –
and that a key relationship between making, thinking and doing
is not only a formal one, but a contextual one. A central question
then is always ‘for whom?’ What are the circumstances and imperatives
of making work, of engaging with a particular poetic or
compositional approach?
• Composition: The term ‘composition’ is used – as opposed to
‘choreography’ or ‘dramaturgy’ – to suggest that much contemporary
arts practice employs a very plural and diverse range of
strategies and tactics for making relations between the material
and immaterial ‘stuff’ of performance; and draws increasingly on
cross-disciplinary and cross-media methods, approaches and
discourses. The current (at least Western) performance arts
context of ‘making work’ could indeed be said to be post-disciplinary
and inter-medial.
• Diagnostics: Diagnostics is designed to underpin an approach
to MA level study that works for a productive relationship
between practice and theory through systematic self- and peerevaluation,
and an engagement with a range of methodologies
for learning, practice and research. It is also designed to mobilize
the student group as a cross-disciplinary resource for all
students. The diagnostic part of the first Semester takes as its
main focus the student’s own analytical account of their
engagement with performance practices and associated discourses.
Each student will describe and present their past work,
present position and their aspirations. They will reflect on their
working and learning practices, and consider and respond to
feedback from peers and tutors. They will offer considered feedback
to peers. As an integral part of the learning process, each
student makes a presentation to the group and participates in
formative peer-assessment as part of their engagement with the
work of peers. Diagnostics uses critique and feedback as a part
of its methodology.
26

• Critiques & Feedback: Group critiques are meetings in which
participants discuss each other’s work or research. These meetings
take place on a regular basis throughout the first two semesters.
Students present their work for a group discussion at least
once a semester. All students are expected to take part in all
group critiques; since the critiques are about looking at work
and thinking through artistic questions together, their success
as a stimulating and supporting course element depends on
everyone’s commitment to participate and make them productive.
In presenting individual work to the group, the group critique
functions as a forum for critical reflection on individual
practice, and allows students to test their work, intentions and
way of looking and contextualizing on an audience of peers.
Being confronted with the way others read individual work or
comment on the way it is framed may help in making artistic decisions
or opening up new perspectives. Vice versa, discussing
the work of other students is an exercise in reading art / performance
works, in thinking out loud and testing and comparing different
perspectives.
• Modes of Writing: The exploration of a range of modalities of
writing in relation to performance making takes as its assumption
that language (as both speech and writing) is not distinct or
separated from dance and body-based performance forms, but is
an integral part of any form of embodied thinking and making.
Writing and orality are therefore approached as a means of opening
up our understandings, interpretations and engagements
with performance thinking and making. Modes of writing would
include writing as, for, or with, performance; its implications for
compositional structures and for forms of writing in relation to
performance; critical and discursive writings; descriptive writings
and so on.
• Textual Practice(s): The exploration and engagement with structures
of language (that is, forms of textual practice) in relation to
writing, provides a bridge between body-based and dance practices
and their articulation and exploration by other means. This
might include critical readings and evaluations of the work of
contemporary practitioners in both script- and art-based writings;
the exploration of procedures, textures, assemblages, compositional
structures, forms, scripted performance behaviors, and
editorial approaches leading to sustainable writing / textual
practice(s); live, visual, sonic, spatial and digital treatments of
writing in its relation to performance.
27

• Research for Artists: Research for artists proposes that thinking
and making in the field of performance requires approaches and
methods beyond academic, analytic and objective methods, and
that individual artistic practice often involves an eclectic range
of generative knowledges. Some (conventional) methodologies
are taught or demonstrated. Others are examined critically, often
using a case-study approach that reviews methodology from
the point of view of both intention (or framework of assumptions)
and of outcome. The range of methodologies examined
will include: postgraduate level study skills; methodologies for
academic research; practice as research / practice as learning;
research requirements of practical projects; documentation;
collaborative work.
Yaron Maïm (2017) from Material for a Solo VIII - XCVZ, eXit the Cage of the Virtual Zoo Photo © Ric Allsopp
28

COURSE STRUCTURE
The MA uses both formal and informal structures as the basis for
its enquiry. As well as a modular format, these include participation
in local and international networks enabling exchange research
and dialogue; opportunities for students to curate single
workshops, seminars, and lectures with invited artists, and visiting
exhibitions, performances and other relevant cultural and
educational activities in Berlin and elsewhere.
Semester 1: Questions of Practice 1: Diagnostics /
Writing Practices / Making New Work
takes three key approaches to making and thinking practice:
diagnostics – the ability to share processes of making work;
writing & research for artists – the ability to place practice in relation
to language and identify and utilize appropriate research
methods with which to develop practice; making new work - the
ability to identify and develop new approaches to making and
thinking practice.
Negotiating Solo / Dance / Authorship: Lecture / Seminar Series 1
explores critical, contextual, and theoretical understandings of
key terms of the course. The first series of lecture / seminars addresses
the contexts, implications and relationships of the key
terms of the MA - ‘solo’, ‘dance’ and ‘authorship’ - in relation to
contemporary arts practice and theory.
Semester 2: Questions of Practice 2:
Compositional Strategies & Tactics
examines the work process of composition as research through
artistic practice by exploring and testing various compositional
strategies, tactics and work processes and analyzing the aesthetic
and cultural contexts that make them possible and support them.
Compositional Practices & Contexts: Lecture / Seminar Series 2
addresses questions of thinking and making contemporary practice
in relation to the histories and strategies of 20 th and 21 st century
compositional practice and contexts.
Semester 3: Independent & Collaborative Research
following an initial independent research proposal at the end of
Semester 2, you embark on a sustained program of individual
research designed and structured in discussion with tutors.
29

Semester 4: Final SODA Project & Documentation
The Final SODA Project involves the production of a performance
work that engages with solo and/or collaborative dance authorship,
that can be performed or presented in the public arena, and
meets conceptual, aesthetic and production criteria that apply in
wider professional arts communities and / or the cultural location
for which the work is designed. Students prepare an initial proposal
for their project at the end of Semester 3 which is negotiated
and finalized with tutors / mentors toward the beginning of the
final Semester 4. The project is shown publicly as a part of a negotiated
MA SODA performance platform. This final module also provides
an opportunity for students to engage in a detailed documentation
and reflection on their work. The documentation takes
the form of a substantial critical framing statement that positions
the work in relation to the student’s own experience and to wider
cultural and aesthetic questions and conditions, and a final workbook
devoted to the compositional, conceptual and contextual
processes of the project.
Igor Koruga (2012) from Come Quickly, My Happiness is at Stake Photo © Igor Koruga
30

WORKBOOKS & FRAMING STATEMENTS
Modes of written work and documentation are integral to the development
of your practice within MA SODA. These take the form
of workbooks (process documentation) and written papers (essays
and written framing statements).
Workbooks
Writing as a way of engaging research through practice plays a
vital role in MA SODA from the outset. The emphasis is on developing
an ongoing practice of writing as a tool, and its employment
in the processes of research and artistic exploration. The Workbook
is to be thought of as integral and integrated space for writing
in the context of the MA.
The Workbook is a term (and material form) that has a long history
in fine art and choreographic practice – from Leonardo to Marcel
Duchamp to Tracey Emin; from Raoul Auger Feuillet to Yvonne
Rainer to William Forsythe. Within the Art School tradition, the
Workbook is presented alongside the final artwork as a commentary
on the process of making. In the context of MA SODA the
Workbook is a selection or collection of different writings, notes,
texts, graphic materials, sound or video files gathered together
and displayed in a book, a folder, and/or stored on, screened
through, digital media.
The Workbook is imagined as a cross-media working space whose
contents are not expected to have coherence as a single piece of
writing. They should have instead the coherence of a learning process
that relates to the experience and processes of MA SODA.
The overall form of the Workbook is not prescriptive. It is an open
work whose form and content document and extend the practice-led
research of the individual student. It is a document that
assembles the processes of making and research, and whose
multiple contents provides a descriptive, critical and interrogative
commentary for the individual’s practice.
The Workbook maps the research trajectories of its maker using
different modes of documentation, writing and graphic representation.
It enables the reader / user to explore the way individual
students might effectively represent their own processes
of inquiry, their production processes, and those of other artists.
The process of making the Workbook is not in any essential sense
separate from the processes of making art / performance work –
both provide a means of questioning, exploring, and reflecting on
the act of composition, of bringing material into dialogue with a
spectator, a reader, an audience.
31

Marcio Carvalho (2011)
from Workbook 401
Photos © Marcio Carvahlo
32

The more complex the Workbook becomes, the more it needs (in
the context of MA SODA) a means of navigation for the reader
which might include: contents pages, indexes, introductions,
sections, pagination, framing statements, glossaries, acknowledgements,
colophons – the paratextual paraphernalia of the
making and research processes. Like any writing the Workbook
is a formalization of memory – both prospective and retrospective
– and care should always be taken in selection, commentary
and presentation.
The Workbook is a key formal element of assessment throughout
the MA SODA course. The objectives of the Workbook include
self-reflexive written accounts of performance making; the production
of performance documentation; and facility with writing
appropriate to interpretation and explanation. In terms of assessment
the Workbook will provide evidence of the making processes
and the individual student’s ability to articulate their own practice
in critical and reflective modes.
Framing Statements
The written Framing Statement which forms an integral part of the
Final Project assessment is a concisely articulated and considered
written statement that informs a reader of the contexts,
research questions and processes that inform the work; provides
an overview of the intentions, aims and positioning of the work;
and gives the reader a frame of reference - descriptive, discursive,
critical, theoretical - through which to engage with the work.
The Framing Statement should link or refer to the aims and intentions
of the Final Project Proposal.
As a part of the creative process of MA SODA, the Framing Statements
(both Verbal and Written) and the Workbook should find
their own forms appropriate to the individual students’ learning
process and the development of an articulated, critical and reflective
practice. In the Final Project module (401) it is suggested that
the Framing Statement might take the form of a performance program
or exhibition catalogue as appropriate.
33

EXTRACTS I
The contributions that constitute the three sections of Extracts –
from student workbooks, from alumni and current students, and
from staff – are in response to an invitation send out in July
2017 to all the SODA graduates and staff from (2007–2016). It
invited some help, direction and information with some or all, of
the following:
• a short thought (max. 150 words) that distils the ‘essence’ of your
SODA educational / artistic / conceptual / or social experience
• what hyperlinks to your own current (and past) work can you offer?
• what imaginative / discursive / poetic / educational / transdisciplinary
/ philosophical / artistic spaces have been opened-up for you
by SODA over the last decade?
• what examples / brief extracts / images can you offer from SODA
workbooks, lecture series, workshops, performance that have
made an impact on you, or remain in memory as distinctive or
exemplary of the SODA programme?
Given the format and timescale of the printed book, it has only
been possible to include a selection of the ideas, images and
extracts that have been contributed or that have emerged during
its compilation. The digital version (www.issuu.com/hztberlin)
enables hyperlinks to SODA student and staff work listed in the
Addenda or elsewhere in the book.
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
35

Céline Cartillier
MA SODA 2012–2014
Céline Cartillier (2013) from Pathfinder’s Rhapsody Photo © Marion Borriss
Rhapsody for Pathfinders is a collection of texts which trace the r e-
search and creation process I have been undertaking and developing
mostly during the third semester of the SODA program. This documentation
presents the different aspects and steps of the work I have
been doing in this period and the materials that enriched the performance
practice. There are writings, readings, quotes, notes inspired
by books and movies. There are scores and performance directives
directly connected to a physical and vocal training. There are texts
and poems that I wrote on the perspective of the performance. Some
of them don't appear in the performance. But they are like the companions
of the whole process.
Rhapsody for Pathfinders is also the title I choose to give to the research
presentation of the third semester.
I entered in the SODA program with intentions for a project I called for
an ideal theatre. Since April 2012 I dedicated my work to search for
relations between ideal and representation in the frame of a performance
practice.
I took this research semester as an opportunity to reconsider what
the components of an ideal theatre are to me. What do I mean by ideal?
What do I mean by theatre? What do I mean by an ideal theatre? I
went back to the original meaning of those words. The seat of an ideal
theatre is obviously the idea. An ideal theatre is consequently a theatre
that gives precedence to the mind and the imagination. Originally
theatre comes from the ancient greek verb théaô which means ‘to
see’. In the third term of the research I deeply measured how all my
inquiries for an ideal theatre embedded a phenomenological dimension,
a phenomenology of the gaze. An ideal theatre, a place to see
from the imagination.
From Rhapsody for Pathfinders – a workbook (April–July 2013)
36

dearest one,
things happen behind your back.
a lot of things. happen.
words are said. eyes are riveted.
some words are bitter, some eyes are warm.
there is a zone in your neck, precisely –
a crevasse, called the door of the wind.
from there, drafts enter.
from there, you can hear the voices haunting the icy wind.
from there, you can feel the gaze penetrate you.
there are parts of your body that you cannot see.
your back is one of them.
you are ahead of it and yet it escapes you.
your back is your missing image.
ô no no not the only one missing....!
one of those images that looks back at us,
your back is the invisible stranger that follows you.

Felix Marchand
MA SODA 2007–2009
Felix Marchand (2009) from
Awareness Etudes
Photos © Felix Marchand
38

Awareness Etude for 6 performers and an Audience (2009)
Awareness Etude 1 – Bones
Map the pathway of the bones in one specific body part (hand, foot, head...). Use the
floor to give you the feedback where you are. The rest of the body follows the initiation
of the mapping. Moments of stillness can happen by the consequence of the mapping
or by a conscious decision. The generated shape allows two possibilities to continue:
continue mapping the bones; traveling through space in the shape you are in.
Awareness Etude 2 – Skin and Nerve system
Create a movement phrase, which is based on what your body remembers from past
rehearsals.Go through the movement phrase by following your sensations, which are
stimulated by the skin and nerves.
Awareness Etude 3 – Blood
Listen to your heart and blood circulation. Use the rhythm of the circulation to
spread the blood into the space. Shift the focus from which part of the body the blood
is coming.
Awareness Etude 4 – Muscles
Progress from bouncing into jumping. Focus on expansion and contraction of the
muscles. Use the bouncing to keep up the motion. JUMP
Choreography: Felix Marchand (HZT, Berlin)
with Toronto Dance Theatre (2009)
Dancers: Yuichiro Inoue, Brodie Stevenson,
Andrew Taylor. Matt Waldie. Sarah Wasik.
Linnea Wong.
Working period: 20 April–23 May 2009
Premiere: 21 May 2009 at Winchester Street
Theatre, Toronto Canada.

Flavio Ribeiro
MA SODA 2012–2014
‘How can you erase what
you are doing in the process
of doing it?’
This question came to me as
Siegmar Zacharias asked me right
after a research presentation I
did last semester. She asked me
how I could turn the process of
erasure so that I could erase the
work and in a way put the
audience to work in this erasure.
Well, Siegmar put the question in
a much more elegant way, but I
was a bit brain dead after having
shown my research, so I am
probably misquoting her here,
as I often do.
(from text for 401 Final Presentation / going through the motions / version 1 (17/7/2013)

41
Flavio Ribeiro (2013) from Workbook 301 Photo © Flavio Ribeiro

Kat Válastur
MA SODA 2007–2009
www.katVálastur.com
42

One of the most important aspects of this experience
that affected me once I became a
student of the master program SODA, also in
the long run, had to do with my artistic migration.
The decision of moving to a new country,
a new city to develop artistically, joining a
new social context. The SODA as a Solo /
Dance / Authorship Master course activated
exactly this condition, the experience of seeing
myself as an artist outside my ‘regularity’
and nationality in a suspended time that was
given in the two years of studies. In that time
I spent hours and hours in the studios waiting
to experience something that would throw
me in a state of temporary amnesia in order to
start again, and in a way it happened. During
the SODA I set the crucial question ‘what is
there left to be danced?’ and I made Lang
which became the core for many works that
followed. It felt like a new beginning in all
terms, which I embraced with full affirmation.
There was also a precariousness in the attempt
as the course was in a pilot state when
I entered the program. It was a try-out for
everyone and it felt that all students, invited
teachers, mentors, founders had to put our
hands in order to shape its form and structure.
I am happy that the course got strong
and became one of the most known dance
master programs in Europe.
One of the most exciting things that happened
to me during these two years of self
exploration, was to find ways to expand into
unfamiliar territories. I tried to encounter the
possibilities that appear in the specific process
of how to get to an artistic core, with
choices like the one to stop moving in the
studio and embrace stillness instead, observing
only what moves around me, as a starting
point or proposing wrestling as a reflection of
dance. I felt the whole experience as a good
timing between me and the art I was about to
create. It was also a unique moment as
through SODA I had the chance to be present
with my work in the dance scene of Berlin
that was just about to flourish. That unique
moment defines my work until now.
Kat Válastur (2009) from Workbook
Photo © Kat Válastur

Jee-Ae Lim
MA SODA 2011–2013
www.jeeaelim2.wordpress.com/about
Raw Material is about the individualized notions of traditional 전통 Korean dance
춤 in the light of personal identity 정체성. It is a series of works that I have been
developing over the last year and a half. It attempts to appropriate the Korean
traditional dance 춤 form as a resource for exploring new ways of using the body
몸as a generative source of ideas. Altering the process in this way allows me
to establish and unfold an infinite number of possibilities 가능성 of using body 몸.
Mainly, I 나 am questioning the veracity of transmission 전달, the validity 타당성
of authorship 저자, 근원, and the originality 원형 in traditional dance that confronts
the notion of the body 몸 by putting it into different contexts. The body 몸 is
always in a transitional state. This means it is not possible to keep the body 몸
in a fixed set of rules. However, the handing over traditional dance is a repetitive
반복적인 process of how close I come to the given 주어진 form and an exactness
of the historical masterpiece. It bounds my body 몸 to a state where I am
constantly affected by an external environment, culturally and socially.
44

Jee-Ae Lim (2011) from Raw Material Photo © Sven Hagolani
In this sense, I want to question 질문 my own understanding of complexity in my
body 몸 that exists both in tradition and in a contemporary code of body 몸
movement and gestures in order to escape from the everyday 매일 habitual,
institutionalized practice of limited 제한된 individuality. This not only creates a
contrast between 사이 two different codes of the body 몸 but it also puts the
body into a gray zone where my work is constantly reevaluating the originality
원형 of a certain form of dance. I do this simultaneously through contamination
and articulation of body 몸 images. Raw Material examines how my body 몸 is
being re-conceptualized when there is an attempt to open to new possibilities
가능성 from the given traditional form. It also explores how the body is engaged in
a constantly changing process of rearrangement, reconstruction 재구성, and
deconstruction 해체, most of which is done in silhouettes that represent the
given 주어진 form. This allows me to reflect on my own presence. The body 몸
image is projected and dissolved as soon as it resonates. The body 몸 is being
re-formulated by an ever changing environment but it has yet to produce a
fixed identity. Every single movement that follows, proposes a transformation
변형 that is created in a repetitive pattern of composition. From Raw Material (2012)
45

Maria Baroncea
MA SODA 2012–2014
Maria Baroncea (2014)
from wear text
Photos © Maria Baroncea

In the ‘wear text’ installation ready-made white t-shirts are provided. On the front and
back side of each t-shirt there is a short, well readable text, printed in black letters.
These texts are basically about the situation of being together under the same roof and
sharing the same space, the same moment. Most of them are meant to direct attention
to relational aspects (‘Come closer’, ‘Read me like a book’, ‘as if I were your mirror’, ‘as
if we love each other’), some of them focus on the present moment (‘busy with the
present’, ‘beautiful tension of the situation’), others tend to open perspectives on text
(‘Txet smees awylas fmialair’, ‘Any text is a bridge between people’). Each participant is
asked to pick a t-shirt, wear it and join the temporary group, entering the space of the
installation one by one. As a whole, the worn texts on the shirts become the physical
surrounding. Nothing more will happen, the participants should just experience together
the meaning that emerges from their interaction. This being a first try out in this form,
the duration of the situation is decided by me experiencing the fresh installation.
Interaction of written text and body, the idea of bodies wearing text came as an obvious
but challenging idea.
Our bodies are formed and informed through our relationship to our physical environment
as well as they are carriers of information themselves; written text would become
common physical environment and encourage an embodied experience of the worn text.
Worn text for creating an experience of togetherness in a group and to stimulate interrelations
between people, with the environment, through written text; different from
wearing text like logos, slogans or functional information - communication in one direction,
from the person carrying the message to an indifferent outside world.
The intention of the experiment is to reconcile the relations between people and the space.
The t-shirts are conditioning the identity of the participants, but at the same time the
interaction through text keeps the multitude of possibilities open to interpretation and
imagination.
Different to most everyday situations, the text here will remain fluid, associative and not
pinned down to a specific meaning. This becomes a situation of experiencing the formation
of meaning together, by participants, by body interaction and positioning in space.
Opens also the possibility of a choreographed text – literally speaking. Different forms
for this installation to happen; a more directed set-up: imagine the space having chairs
and tables arranged in a certain way, or even concrete situations where a group of people
have dinner wearing t-shirts that frame their experience one way or another; or the
worn the text could be choreographed or performed (performative or choreographed
kind of events, to installations or social games).
from Workbook 401 ‘A Certain Togetherness’ (2014)
47

Mirko Winkel
MA SODA 2007–2009
www.mirkowinkel.com
www.finaleform.de
Our group represented the first round – we were, so to say, the guinea
pigs, there to get the course up and running. The selection committee
assembled a group of various places of origin, experiences, age
and artistic disciplines, to make an example of how a contemporary
education could look like in a field that, at this time had a big identity
crises I felt: the dance world. For me it appeared to be a great opportunity,
coming from the performance art tradition within the visual
arts. 10 years ago, performance art was just before become a big
thing in museum contexts and still a niche, while the dance scene
looked at »performance« as an opportunity to renew itself irrespective
of physical skills. I saw the course as an opportunity to re-position
and question my previous work within the dance context.
I experienced SODA as a considered ambitious conceptual setup
and well reflected experiment, that unfortunately lacked the atmosphere
of common objectives within the student body, and it lacked
experience from teachers’ side to apply their vision into practice.
We all spent a tumultuous time with each other. The module and
examinations system reminded me of an outdated educational sys-

tem, much different to what I experienced from German (visual) art
academies. This was a big setback. So my final examination after
the first semester was the presentation of a curriculum that I developed
for the second semester for the whole course. It relied on
education on the basis of one’s own responsibility, rather than fulfilling
measurable qualification demands. The confrontation with
the system felt first like a waste of energy, but later confirmed my
interest in institutional critique, which I continued to deal with in
my practice.
During the studies, I got to know great people, like Ellen Van
Schuylenburch, who, after a lifelong career in international dance
companies decided to study SODA but quit shortly after the beginning
of the course. It didn’t match her expectations. I also got to
know Christoph Winkler, with whom I continued to work on many
projects. And I developed a great friendship with fellow student
Anat Eisenberg, with whom I started to collaborate as well. Together
with her I organized a showing of students’ works within the festival
Tanz im August (2008).
Mirko Winkel (2009)
from Workbook
Photos © Mirko Winkel
49

Selected Screen Shots from SODA online Workbook catalogue (2009) (with apologies to Corsin Gaudenz whose Workbook

is missing). Photos © Anat Eisenberg / Susanne Martin / Thérèse Nylen / Rita Roberto

NETWORKS
Education does not operate in isolation, and the field of dance and
the SODA programme are no exception to this. The field of contemporary
dance, certainly in the experience of European dance,
has been nomadic since the 1930s both out of necessity and desire
as the pre-1939 and post-1945 histories of contemporary
dance and its movements and influences from the old world to the
new world and back attests. SODA can trace aspects of its educational
and artistic provenance to many of the key sites of radical
and experimental dance education and practice in Europe and
America including Black Mountain College, Judson Dance Theatre,
Dartington College of Arts, the School for New Dance, Amsterdam,
and the European Dance Development Centre in Arnhem, as well
as other institutions including Laban (London), Palucca (Dresden),
Folkwang (Essen), and Codarts (Rotterdam).
From its inception SODA provided a focus for applications coming
from a wide international pool of artists, researchers, and postgraduates
covering a range of disciplines, professional and artistic
backgrounds. Consequently, the informal networks that individual
students bring with them and return to, contributed to the
more formal international networks in the fields of contemporary
arts, dance, performance and education that SODA was already
participating in. These networks and the formal and informal links
to other institutions, teachers, and companies are an integral part
of the biographies and professional backgrounds of both SODA
students, staff and the wider circle of mentors and artists associated
with the programme.
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
55

The educational, artistic and cultural benefits of networks of exchange
and mobility have created confluences, influences and relationships
that continue to shape the collaborative work of individuals
and advance the field of contemporary arts practice. For
example, the third semester of the two-year programme (April–
July) since the pilot phase has required students to ‘devise, plan
and implement a programme of individual research that informs
their development and understanding of artistic practice’ (Handbook,
2017: 24). The value of research and the exchange, and exploration
of methods, approaches and assumptions that are integral
to it, has been supported by SODA in several ways as indicated in
the following report from October 2008. It also reveals how much
the initial programme was shifting in negotiation with the experience
of the first intake of students.
Erasmus Intensive Project, Berlin (2011) Photo © Marion Borriss
56

Solo Dance Authorship at the HZT-Tanzplan Berlin
In August 2006, an international symposium on ‘solo /
dance / authorship’ was instigated as part of the preliminary
research into the development of the HZT. Two
years later and after over 100 national and international
applications, the first MA SODA (Solo Dance Authorship)
programme is halfway to completion. While obviously focusing
on the post graduate development of a strong individual
artistic signature, SODA’s artist centered and
practice-led research philosophy also seeks to explore
forms of collaboration within a peer-to-peer framework.
To tackle this challenge, an intensive series of transdisciplinary
encounters with leading artists and academics
and with contemporary choreographers formed the
basis of the first semester. But while good in theory, in
practice this often proved difficult. Students expressed
a need for more time spent on independent research
and more influence over input perceived to be closer to
their own interests. [...] In the present third semester,
under tutorial guidance SODA students have been required
to propose and implement strategies for the research
and development exclusively designed for their
own work. Along with artistic collaborations, attendance
at external workshops and courses and Berlin
based studio research this also may include periods
outside Berlin; Susanne Martin for example, will spend
a month at the choreographic research centre Critical
Path in Sydney, Felix Marchand at Centro L’Animal a
l’esquena in Girona, Spain. In October several students
will be participating as guests in an official meeting of
the European MA in Contemporary Arts Practice & Dissemination
(MACAPD) at Dartington College of Arts in
the UK, 1 while Aikaterini Papageorgiou [Kat Válastur]
will be performing new work in Athens and Prague.
(SODA Archive, 2008)
In July 2009 as a part of their Final SODA Project, the pilot students
proposed an international Post-Graduate Meeting for the
26–31 July with the intention to ‘keep the meeting / gathering relatively
small scale but outward looking.’ 2
57

SODA POSTGRADUATE PLATFORM 2009
MA SODA focuses on dance and performance making
within the wider field of contemporary arts practice. It
enables students to identify, research, develop and extend
their work in relation to the increasingly cross-disciplinary
and cross-cultural contexts of contemporary
performance. International exchange and dialogue is a
key aspect of the HZT’s approach to dance education
and MA SODA is linked to a network that includes the
European MA in Contemporary Arts Practice & Dissemination,
Dartington (UK); L’Animal / University of Girona,
ES; and Maska, Ljubljana (SI); and the MA Choreography
programme at ArtEZ, Arnhem (NL).
The first SODA postgraduate platform SODA WORKS
(26–31 July) at the Ufer Kitchen and Studios is an initiative
of the graduates and staff of the MA SODA (Solo /
Dance / Authorship) pilot programme at HZT / UdK
Berlin. It is organised in two parts – as an informal
gathering (by invitation only) to share work, food, ideas
and possi bilities with an international network of
postgraduate students and guest speakers (26–28
July) and as three evenings of public performance
showings and discussions.
Erasmus Intensive Project, Berlin (2011) Photo © Marion Borriss
58

The SODA WORKS performance showings are a series of
early and late evening public performances at the UdK
Uni.T Theatre (29–31 July) of work from the MA SODA
and MA Choreography students.
Focusing on the conditions and contexts of contemporary
practice in the field of dance, choreography and
performance, the SODA WORKS gathering will organise
itself around three central topics:
• how is contemporary work being made: strategies, tactics,
interventions, compositions – the ‘how’ of practice;
• what does contemporary work address: performance
theories, analysis, critical and cultural theories, dissemination
- the ‘what’ of discourse;
• where does contemporary work take place: positioning,
participation, negotiation, curation - the ‘where’
of engagement.
The gathering will invite three guest speakers, Bojana
Kunst, Jochen Roller and Sharon Smith, to inform, provoke
and expand each of these topics in three days of
guest talks, conversations and discussions with and
among students. The topics will be framed and modulated
by sharings of recent work – installations, documentations,
readings, improvisations and interventions
– from both host and invited students. (SODA Archive, 2009)
Further exchanges included visits of SODA students to Dartington
College of Arts in Devon, UK (2007) and ArtEZ in Arnhem (2010).
The Erasmus Student Exchange programme enabled Jarkko
Partanen from TeAK / UniArts, Helsinki) (2010–11), Meredith
Glisson from Falmouth University / University of the Arts, Philadelphia
(2015–2016); Hana Vojáčková from Central St. Martins University
of the Arts, London (2014–2015) to study and work with the
SODA students; and Phoebe Robinson from Critical Path in Sydney
joined the SODA programme as a guest in 2011–2012. Further formal
intensive programmes with other European MA programmes
were developed through SODA / HZT between 2011 and 2016.
59

Erasmus Intensive Project, Berlin (2011)
Photo © Marion Borriss
60

ERASMUS INTENSIVE PROJECT (2011–2013)
This three-year Erasmus Intensive Project (2011–2013) developed
by Eva-Maria Hoerster & Ric Allsopp during 2010, created a formal
network between SODA / HZT and a network of six other MA programmes
3 some of whom had already been involved since 2006
in the MA Critical Arts Practice & Dissemination network initiated
at Dartington College of Arts, UK. The Intensive Projects (IP) were
focused on three 10-day workshops held at the beginning of the
academic year in the autumn where students and professors explored
the practices, methods and concepts of physically-based
performance, composition and choreography. 4
The work, voices, and discourses of the Intensives are collected in Practicing
Composition: Making Practice eds Kirsi Monni & Ric Allsopp (2015) Helsinki:
Kinesis. Further documentation of the three Intensive Ptojects is available on both
HZT and UniArts Helsinki websites.
61

ERASMUS IP REPORT (2012) - LITÓ WALKEY
Introduction
This report documents three parts of SODA’s contribution to the
Erasmus event.
1. Preparation;
2. SODA Presentation;
3. SODA Workshop with Erasmus partners.
The nine first year SODA students took part in all three parts and
were facilitated by Litó Walkey. The Erasmus partners participated
in the third part [see Note 3, p.70].
Central notions introduced throughout SODA’s contribution included:
time constraints, micro formats, collaboration, creative response,
documentation, performance directives, and accessing
kinds of ‘doing before deciding’.
The second semester of SODA’s first year focuses on modes of
composition. As this Erasmus event took place in the beginning of
the semester, the students were asked to reflect on their current
practice and identify compositional devices already present in
their work. They were asked to each illustrate their compositional
strategies within a five minute performance. In response to each
other’s emblematic performance, the students developed a creative
response in the form of a written performance directive.
The performances and written directives were assembled for the
SODA presentation. The presentation intended to introduce insight
into each student’s relation to composition through a short
performance preceded by a short framing statement written and
read by another colleague. The framing statement highlighted aspects
of how the performance was operating, combined with the
responder’s particular perspectives of observation.
The workshop applied modes of activity similar to the ones practiced
by the SODA students in preparation for the Erasmus presentation.
The starting point for the workshop was a written directive
written by one of the SODA students. This led to performance
responses, descriptions, reformulations, transfer of performance
material and finally to a new composition in writing.
62

1. SODA Preparation for ERASMUS
Identify a specific example of composition within your
current practice.
Construct a demonstration, illustration or physical exploration
of this example.
Perform this within five minutes.
Observe one partner with a focus on the system that ‘binds’
content as opposed to the content itself.
How is composition functioning?
Respond through a short written summary (2–3 sentences) of
the compositional elements you observed as essential in your
partner’s performance.
Write to reflect on YOUR OWN COMPOSITIONAL APPROACH
(considering experience of creating, performing, observing
partner’s performance, giving and receiving feedback)
Can it be applied to various material or is it specific to
certain material?
Do you understand composition as container for
essential elements?
What is the relation to time?
Is it made up of parts? How do you distinguish these parts?
Could you invite someone else to apply this approach?
How would you do this?
How could you score this composition?
Compose three questions influenced by YOUR points of
interest in relation to composition (extracted and reformulated
from writing).
Interview your partner with these questions to gather more
information about THEIR compositional approach.
Create a response in the form of a performance directive –
Assemble and compose the answers gathered from the interview
and the written summary of the observed performance. Formulate
this as a suggestion for performance - highlighting essential
compositional concerns that you observe in your partner’s work.
Preparation for SODA Presentation:
Document, notate what is necessary to re-perform short performance
that illustrates compositional aspect of your practice.
Prepare to read creative response in the form of a performance
directive as a framing statement for your partner’s performance.
63

2. SODA ‘Partner Profile’ Presentation for ERASMUS
General Order:
Litó introduces
1.
Willy frames Jee-Ae – Jee-Ae performs
Jee-Ae frames Willy – Willy performs
2.
Hana frames Sonja – Sonja performs
Sonja frames Hana – Hana performs
3.
Lisa frames & reads Andrew’s summary for Igor –
Willy performs Igor
4.
Joana frames Marcio – Marcio performs
Marcio frames Joana – Joana performs
5.
Sonja reads Igor’s frame for Lisa – Lisa performs
Lisa frames Andrew – no performance
Litó leads all participants into the presentation
[...]
Litó requests all Erasmus participants (including SODA students)
to ‘steal’ a fragment of movement material from any of
these performances.
3. SODA ‘Partner Profile’ Workshop for Erasmus –
Monday 23 October
Andrew’s ‘missing’ performance after Lisa’s compositional
performance directive / framing statement links us to
afternoon workshop.
Here again:
About Andrew Wass’s performance (written by Lisa Densem)
Clothes or objects can be worn or carried
They can be laid out one by one
They can re-make yourself and/or your space
Perform a re-made world
Stop when you must
Become as you were
64

Here are three stages of creation:
Explore, experiment, execute
Continuous individual writing for five minutes taking above text
as starting point.
Use (1) the above text, (2) the continuous writing and (3) the
movement material fragment ‘stolen’ from the SODA presentation
performances as compositional GUIDE for creating a two
minute performance.
(20 minutes work time)
Pair up and perform as a ‘private performance’ for each other
Perform two times each with attention to possible discrepancies
between original plan, first performance and second
performance.
Write a description in five points of what you performed
Extract one description point and teach it to your partner
Write a new performance directive. Assemble and compose with
the following ingredients:
- individual continuous writing
- Lisa’s directive in response to Andrew’s performance
- stolen fragment of material from morning SODA performances
experience of creating and performing two minute performance
response
written description of your performance
description extract of two minute performance you observed,
taught to you by your partner
Read/Look at some of the new directives and have a discussion
about the workshop.
Litó Walkey, February 2012
65

CAPTURING DANCE: BERLIN - COLOGNE (2015–2016)
The project Capturing Dance 5 initiated by Sigrid Gareis sought to
apply new performance theories about the significance of documentation
in the artistic process from the visual arts and transfer
them to the field of dance in a multiple-phase, flagship project
partnership between Tanz Fabrik, Berlin, HZT (MA SODA) & KHM
(Academy of Media Arts) Cologne. On a practical level the project
was divided into five phases taking place with a group of 20 young
choreographers and new media artists from MA SODA / HZT, Berlin,
and KHM, Cologne (students and emergent artists) as well as a
collection of notable theoreticians and curators from dance, new
media and performance. The SODA students were mentored by
Boyan Manchev with Eva-Maria Hoerster 6
In June 2015 the project started with a three-day internal introduction
and orientation in Berlin for the choreographers and new
media artists. In October 2015 a public symposium on dance documentation
as artistic practice took place at Uferstudios, Berlin.
Starting from the performance theories of the 1990s, historical
and contemporary methods of documentation as artistic practice
were introduced and discussed by project participants and interested
members of the public. In February 2016 the participants
met in Cologne in a laboratory setting where two workshops were
performed as well as the first concrete photographic and film material
of the development of dance projects or productions have
been taken. Leading up to the start of June 2016 the projects
planned by the participating choreographers were documented in
a series of one-week-long residencies. The results of the documentary
processes were exhibited at the end of June 2016 in the
Ebensperger Gallery in Berlin in collaboration with the curator
Thomas Weski and Sigrid Gareis.
The project’s goal was to develop exemplary artistic and documentary
material from working and production processes and
broaden the possibilities of available forms of documentation
within the dance field for the future.
www.capturingdance.de/symposium
66

Janine Iten
MA SODA
2014–2017
Janine Iten (2015) from Moving Bodies Photos © Jeanine Iten
67

Enrico Wey
MA SODA
2014–2016
ON AN ANIMAL|CAPTURING DANCE|A MANIFEST (2016)
This is nothing new. 20
20 It is with full awareness that most if not all content in this document is borrowed,
stolen, appropriated, reinstated as scattered shards to be reformed, reposted,
repeated, re-envisioned, destroyed, to reanimate from ashes. And is in fact, encouraged.
The curse and pursuit of understanding leads to further confusion. However,
the value lies, as previously mentioned several times, in the intent. The act of questioning
to further understanding and research contributes to the cyclical knowledge
of the subject. Is dance something that one can contain and what is the purpose of
that container? Striving to maintain ephemera is a backwards approach. What one
could strive for, as one of many possible proposals, is to maintain ephemerality, allowing
for it, the richness of content that can affect change, affect thought, are fleeting
as thoughts themselves and yet impact can be everlasting. To acknowledge this,
is to give oneself over to this power, to give it power, give it import. A document exists
in traces, in physical forms, in memories, in an indescribable feeling. The urge
and desire to recreate or retrieve this feeling and the inevitable failure of these acts
is what propels and pushes us further into the dance. It allows space, it allows for
evolution. The moment our capacities of pursuit end, is when the dance ends. To which
one may ask again, ‘Why capture it at all?’ A question that asks us to be continued...
68

EXCHANGE PROJECT:
BERLIN-STOCKHOLM-MONTPELLIER (2015)
In February 2015 an exchange project took place with the Masters
programmes of HZT Berlin – MA SODA and MA Choreography; Centre
Choréographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon,
Montpellier (CCNMLR) – MA ex.e.r.ce; and the University of Dance
and Circus, Stockholm (DOCH) – MA Choreography. The project
involved thirty-one students and six staff 7 and aimed at sharing
and discussing the different approaches of the programmes regarding
research and methods, including the question: how to exhibit
and share research? The focus was on three specific topics:
• composition in contemporary performance and dance
making;
• scoring methods and engagement in the process of
scoring own work; experimentation with score writing
• writing – especially the connection/relation of writing
and research and artistic practice; how writing interferes
with artistic practices; specificity of artist’s
writing; including writing in the work (scores, documentation
etc.); and how this can be exhibited.
The meeting included a daily warm up session facilitated by students;
three parallel workshops on writing, composition and scores;
and respective reports to the whole group. The afternoons followed
the concept of open space-formats, where three proposals by students
and staff could run in parallel. The evenings were used to see
performances, partly as a group, partly individually. Staff facilitated
and supervised the working sessions with the students and a staff
exchange meeting happened with additional guests Britta
Wirthmüller (HZT) and Isa Wortlkamp (FU Berlin) focusing on the
question of how to exhibit and share research, and addressing how
writing is included in the different study programmes.
In addition to the exchanges and networks mentioned here, SODA
and its students, staff and alumni continues to develop its formal
and informal international networks through involvement in festivals,
performances, residencies, and artistic projects in Berlin,
Bucharest, Zagreb, Tel Aviv, London, Porto, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sofia,
New York, Singapore and elsewhere.
69

1. The MA in Contemporary Arts Practice & Dissemination
(MACAPD) (2006–2010) initiated by Ric Allsopp,
Tracey Warr and Roger Sell at Dartington College of
Arts from 2003, was a two year full-time, cross-disciplinary,
practice-led Masters Award. It provided students
with a unique opportunity to explore strategies, ideas
and practices that permeate contemporary arts. Structured
around a common framework of intensive meetings
and three-month residencies, it enabled students
to meet, work and engage with contemporary arts
practice across a network of five European partner institutions:
Dartington College of Arts (Network Co-ordinator)
(UK); Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning
Academy, Rotterdam (NL); Centre L’Animal / University
of Girona (ES); Maska Ljubljana / Nova Gorica University
(SI); and Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts (LT). The network
shared a practice-led and critical approach towards
the media of production and dissemination in
the fields of writing, visual art, performance, theatre,
choreography, and curating.
2. The Platform involved staff and students from ArtEZ
Dance Academy (NL), MA Contemporary Arts Practice
and Dissemination (MACAPD), Dartington College of
Arts (UK), MA Dance Theatre and Choreography, Trinity
Laban (UK); MA Choreography & Performance, University
of Giessen (DE) and was organised by Rita Roberto
(MA SODA) and Anne-Mareike Hess (MA Choreography).
The postgraduate contributors invited were three
MA Choreography students from ArtEZ, Arnhem (NL):
Emilie Gallier, Tomaz Simatovic and Julian Barnett; four
students from MACAPD at Dartington (UK) and the
Centre L’Animal/ University of Girona (ES): Katie Connor
and Nicolas Y Galeazzi; Ayara Hernandez & Ixiar Rosas;
alongside the six MA Choreography students then at
HZT - Claudia Garbe, Jana Unmüßig, Barbara Bess,
Marina Tenorio, David Bloom, Ann-Mareike Hess, and
Shang Chi Sun.
3. MA Choreography, School of Dance, ArtEZ, Arnhem,
NL (dir. Joao daSilva); MA Choreography, Theatre
Academy the of University of the Arts, Helsinki, FI
(dir. Kirsi Monni); MA Dance Theatre: The Body in
Performance, Trinity / Laban, London, UK (dir. Martin
Hargreaves); Dance Programme, Falmouth University,
UK (dir. Ric Allsopp) ; MA Performance Dramaturgy,
Academy of Drama Arts; University of Zagreb, HR
(dir. Goran Sergej Pristas) ; and (in 2013) MA in Performing
Arts Practice and Visual Culture, University
of Castilla-La Mancha, ES (dir. Victoria Perez Royo).
4. The first IP - Practicing Composition: Making Practice
- was held in October / November 2011 at Uferstudios
in Berlin. Staff from each programme presented
their curricula and pedagogical objectives and held
presentation workshops. Lectures and workshops were
given by artists and researchers including Rabih Mroué,
Linah Saneh, Litó Walkey, Scott deLahunta, and Deufert
& Plischke. The students from different programmes
worked in groups for the second week presenting
demonstrations of their work in the end of the IP. The
second IP - Choreography: Aesthetics and Social Experience
- was held at the Theatre Academy Helsinki in
October / November 2012. 31 students and 14 teachers
participated from six MA programmes with Helsinki
students from the TeAK Choreography, Directing, Live
Art and Performance Theory programmes. Workshops
lectures included Sergej Pristas, Ric Allsopp, Esa
Kirkkopelto, Konstantina Georgelou, and Saara Hannula.
The third IP - Composition: Poetics and Procedure in
Individual Performance - was held in Berlin in October
2013. It concentrated on notions of structure (poetics)
and making (composition) in individual and solo work,
signature and authorship and included lectures and
workshops from Miika Luoto, Sandra Umathum, Ric
Allsopp, Elena Giannotti, Vaginal Davies, Victoria Pérez
Royo, Konstantina Georgelou, Jasna Zmak, Sophia New
and Martin Hargreaves.
5. A Tanzfonds Erbe Project by Tanzfabrik Berlin,
HZT Berlin (Inter-university Centre for Dance),
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln KHM(Academie of
Media Arts, Cologne) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
DFG (German Research Foundation)
Project Verzeichnung; in cooperation with Galerie
Ebensperger Berlin and Luxoom Lab, the Theatre
Studies Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin, the
DFG research project ÜberReste; supported by Tanzfonds
Erbe – a German Federal Cultural Foundation
initiative; and the Schering Foundation.
6. Project Participants - Artists: Akseli Aittomäki,
Saori Hara, Liad Hussein Katorowicz, Janine Iten, Lisa
Müller-Trede, Lulu Obermayer, Valentin Tszin, Enrico
Wey, Yuebing Luo (MA SODA students at HZT) and
Mariana Bártolo, Hannah Doerr, Peter Haas, Krzysztof
Honowski, Şirin Şimsek, Walter Solon, Felix Zilles-Perels
(students at KHM) as well as predominantly younger
artists from Berlin and Cologne: Christina Ciupke,
Miriam Gossing, Felix Ott, Benjamin Ramírez Pérez, Lina
Sieckmann. Theoreticians taking part in the symposium:
Philip Auslander, Barbara Clausen, Susanne Foellmer,
Barbara Formis, Babette Mangolte, Eric Morrill. Project
mentors: Phil Collins, Eva-Maria Hoerster, Boyan
Manchev, Tobias Yves Zintel and the assistent
Ale Bachlechner for the study programmes in Berlin
and Cologne, Sigrid Gareis as project initiator, Patrick
Ebensperger representing the gallery, Ludger Orlok
from Tanzfabrik Berlin, Barbara Greiner, project manager,
Mira Lina Simon, production assistant, and Alexandra
Hennig, project documentation.
7. HZT Berlin: MA Choreography (4 students) and MA
Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) (6 students); staff: Rhys
Martin (head of the MA SODA programme), Sophia New
(lecturer MA SODA), Eva-Maria Hoerster (coordinator HZT);
CCNMLR Montpellier: MA ex.e.r.ce (15 students); staff:
Anne Kerzerho (director of pedagogy), Laurent Pichaud
(artistic director); DOCH Stockholm, MA Choreography
(6 students); staff: Frédéric Gies (head of programme).
70

Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani

EXTRACTS II
Sophia New
MA SODA Staff
2011–2017
SODA is a bubbly soft drink usually containing water and sugar. It
can be drunk alone or mixed with other beverages. SODA is a
course that is a container filled, enlivened and challenged by
those that engage with it. In the ten years that it has bubbled
along I have had the pleasure to witness many different flavours
of engagement and the marvellous mixing of approaches
amongst different year groups.
Choosing a year group is a bit like alchemy: the Commission’s job
is to get just the right mix to cause a stir but not an explosion. It is
a risk and every year there is the anticipation of whether the brew
will bond or break. I say this because the year group is just as vital
as the structure and input of the staff and guest teachers. At MA
level the kinds of conversations that can be facilitated can, at best,
provide a fabulous cocktail of reflection, insight and inspiration.
What exactly solo dance authorship is and how it is understood
is often a topic of conversation. How might a practice that stems
from drawing or economics or anthropology enter the realm of
dance? How can a room full of performers involved in a process
of investigation and research be authored as a solo? In what
ways can two years’ worth of ideas and work be shared with an
audience through different means? How as an artist do we speak
about, to and with a certain practice that is being developed?
It is the variety of answers and proposals that make SODA a truly
refreshing experience, which will hopefully continue to question
the role of making work as an artist in an institutional environment
in the twenty first century.
www.planbperformance.net
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
73

Boyan Manchev
MA SODA Staff
2011–2017
META-CRITICAL EDUCATION, OR THE POLITICS OF USE OF
SODA: SOME PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
ON EDUCATIONAL MICROPOLITICS.
It has been a vortex, seemingly with no end. A marriage of Heaven
and Hell. Obviously, much passion and commitment were
needed for this program to persist through the hurricanes of the
last ten years. And here we are now, at a safe shore that has sedimented
for a decade. So, as SODA’s protocol requires, let’s start
with the questions:
How to transmit and produce knowledge without reducing, misguiding
or even corrupting the singularity of artistic practice?
How to open horizons for (self-)understanding and growing
awareness of artistic practice without negating its driving intuition,
including the intuition of the concept? In other words, do we
have a practical means to overcome the Kantian opposition
between intuition and concept, which has dominated artistic
practice and education in the last two centuries (only changing
the privileged term in the opposition but without affecting its dichotomic
structure)? How to evaluate without judging?
To answer such questions – or rather to make them effective by
practical means - suggests a meta-critical vision on both artistic
and reflexive practice, on both ‘art’ and ‘theory’ or ‘critical discourse’.
Hence, I took MA SODA’s challenge at a level of complexity
I found adequate for my own meta-critical questions at the
time. In other words, I tried to push further and experiment with
this meta-critical vision in the frame of the SODA ‘reflexive’ modules
I was directly responsible for as Professor of Theory between
2011 and 2017.
The task was to experiment with and foster the experience of reflexive
knowledge as a premise of this educational adventure, and
therefore to experience it precisely as a form of adventure in
knowledge, practices and techniques; thus, to foster a new understanding
of practice, by practicing reflexive thinking while
unlocking the immanent critical, reflexive – if not ‘theoretical’ –
potential of artistic practices themselves.
Such a platform meant taking certain risks, especially in the context
of a service-oriented educational economy in the field of the
arts: in the first place, to maintain the educational format itself in
its humanistic meaning of uninterested transmission and common
production; but also of creation, of knowledge, while pushing
further its limits and experimenting with its form and content.
74

Unavoidably, and on meta-critical premises, we had to contest the
processes of commodification of ‘critical discourse’– a process of
establishing critical and conceptual normativity, an engine of control
for value production – and confront this process by opening
spaces for imagination and experimentation with philosophical
thought, with reflexive tools.
Such orientation implied as well an attempt to overcome the ongoing
bureaucratisation of education and the client-focused reduction
of intellectual and pedagogic labour through its fragmentation
and adaptation to quantifiable formats, through sustaining a
process of profound and complex research and experimentation.
These are the only premises for continuity and persistence in the
creation of a common good as a final and utopian horizon of any
educational process. As such, my six years with SODA felt like a
durational meta-critical seminar, an enduring commitment to an
idea and will to invention in which I didn’t feel alone, sharing beliefs
and conviction and giving each other courage with wonderful
colleagues and students.
SODA Lecture-Seminar Series 2011–2017
My most important activity in the framework of SODA was the concept
and the realisation of the public lecture series, accompanied
with closed seminars, happening throughout each semester.
The Lecture Series were an integral part of SODA’s teaching modules
and set out to enlarge and make more complex the educational
perspective. I aimed at a conceptual continuity for the lectures,
while trying to present a variety of critically important
subjects, thus achieving a complex spectrum and multiple conceptual
perspective. More specifically, I tried to open-up the educational
frame of SODA to broad philosophical concepts such as
subject and creation, contingency and composition, necessity
and desire, movement and metamorphosis, production and value.
In the continuous stream of the series one might identify a few
tendencies that coexisted throughout the years. On one hand, I
presented leading philosophical voices whose conceptual practice
had the potential to stimulate and inspire the students and
the critical artistic community in Berlin 1 . On the other hand, I invited
leading theorists and historians of dance, performance and
theatre, or some of the younger most original scholars and artists
in the field 2 . In my introduction and in the moderation of the lecture
panels I tried to establish a continuity of questions and reflection,
thus involving the students and the audience in a common
intellectual endeavour.
75

The continuity of questions and reflection was guaranteed above
all by my own public lectures (usually 1 or 2 in a semester). Initially
I aimed at presenting specific moments of my actual research
which could be enriching for educational purposes, but which
would also have the potential to prolong the common work or
open new spaces by means of experimentation: a laboratory
space to test philosopher’s tools. From 2015 on I moved the focus
towards a continuous and conceptually homogeneous series
within the semester, in collaboration with the UdK Studium Generale
program, where I examined subjects crucial for contemporary
knowledge and artistic practice and presented their complexity
as models for future experimentation. The general topics of these
continuous lecture series, taking place from 2015 to 2017, were
Philosophy of Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis of Philosophy; The
World must be Romanticised; Human Transitions; and The Future
of Art.
www.boyanmanchev.net
1. Including Chantal Mouffe, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Frédéric Neyrat, Esa Kirkkopelto,
Timothy Morton, Federico Nicolao.
2. Including Hans-Thies Lehmann, Ric Allsopp, Franz-Anton Cramer, Helmut Ploebst,
Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Sergei Pristaš, Nicholas Ridout, Joe Kelleher,
Constanze Schellow, Noémie Solomon, Martina Ruhsam, and Bignia Wehrli.
76

Litó Walkey
MA SODA Staff
2007–2013
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIVES
if language could
be movement
and the double
wasn’t a concern
then we are already
in a new world
not for rest
but for another way
escape in other worlds
Be attentive to it
Make it take place ‘on stage’
Describe it as a kind of logic that sings
Make it be exemplary
Activate a part, parts, or the whole
Make it with or without words
Make an environment for it
Join it with another logic
Make it as an accompaniment
Be inattentive to it
every two minutes there is a face that fits the body not until now
did you know love with pulsing sound in the eyes to touch
silence to feel the weight of dedication between you and me
every sound has a face looking sideways do you know
Be attentive to it
Make it take place ‘on stage’
Describe it as a kind of logic that sings
Make it be exemplary
Activate a part, parts, or the whole
Make it with or without words
Make an environment for it
Join it with another logic
Make it as an accompaniment
Be inattentive to it
77

A DISRUPTION DEDICATION
slice/twice
background
Instigate disruption, not occasional, but incessant. light loops
Redundantly repeating light loops what was just said. double
negative tempts us to invent a myth of meaning With or without
light loops words. Accompanied by double-tongued flute an
awareness or address of who this action is dedicated to.
middle
perform it as a memory of 1979 dedication water’s over your head:
for we “who love Can I walk in your sleep to be astonished” for
we “water’s over your head who love to see water’s over your
head sound water’s over your head”
And you can’t annul a shake of that by Can I walk in your sleep
shaking it again
foreground
the eye swims at the horizon two body parts at different water’s
over your head frequencies carry show me again two words with
not the first part of your body you think of without eyes, find
show me again the most luminous detail: add a stutter to it add
a stutter to it add a stutter to it
What has become light loops show me again heart?
Be attentive to it
Make it take place ‘on stage’
Describe it as a kind of logic that sings
Make it be exemplary
Activate a part, parts, or the whole
Make it with or without words
Make an environment for it
Join it with another logic
Make it as an accompaniment
78

Be inattentive to it
This is backwards
This is forwards
This is round
o o o
This is counting
This tells
This is empty
o o o
This is thinking
This is time turned down
This is not what I expected
Be attentive to it
Make it take place ‘on stage’
Describe it as a kind of logic that sings
Make it be exemplary
Activate a part, parts, or the whole
Make it with or without words
Make an environment for it
Join it with another logic
Make it as an accompaniment
Be inattentive to it
79

Ric Allsopp
MA SODA Staff
2007–2011
2017–2018
SOME REMARKS ON A SPACE OF APPEARANCE
If we follow de Certeau’s formulation that ‘space is practiced
place’ (1984:117), then, in performance, a space of appearance is a
consequence of the practice of (a) place. It is a space within the
material representations of performance where something appears,
a moment (or moments) in time, in which the conditions
that constitute place (the physical, aesthetic, and institutional
‘givens’ of the performance) give way to something in excess of
those conditions. Such moments, which are both collectively and
individually perceived or ‘read’, enable the unapparent to become
apparent, an appearance beyond the possibility of documentation.
A specific, momentary ‘world’ is created – a possibility (and a
confirmation perhaps) of a state or a dynamic beyond the material
conditions that performance can establish. The conditions for
such a space can be reconstructed or repeated (in Gertrude
Stein’s sense of repetition without sameness), but there is always
the possibility that a space of appearance may not be produced
through the simple repetition of conditions.
This space of appearance then is not to be imagined as something
that emerges only as a consequence of a dramatic or narrative
world. In other words, it is not the revelation or recognition of
something that clarifies or resolves in some way a dramatic situation;
it is not necessarily predictable or constituted in advance. It
is an epiphanic or visionary space in the sense that it reveals
something or some affect, that was not apparent before, and that
persists beyond the material and aesthetic conditions of performance.
It is a space that does not require spectacle, that operates
at the level of the everyday, where it might be mistaken for the insignificant,
the peripheral or the nugatory. Here I am thinking of
performance at its most ‘reduced’ - in a culinary sense of its most
intense and concentrated rather than stripped down - that can
produce a space of appearance, in the condition of the bare, unadorned
physicality of the performer in communication with an audience,
operating within a dispositif (or apparatus) of the sensory,
an apparatus which is not however separated from the wider contexts
of performance and its ideas, images, stories, memories, and
politics. (Allsopp, 2010: 20–21)
Published in 25 Years: Bergen International Theatre - an Anthology ed. Marie
Nerland, Bergen: BIT (2010: 19–26) and in Flemish translation in Etcetera
Vol. 29 No. 124, (March 2011).
80

Sophia New
MA SODA Staff
2011–2017
EXPANDING NOTIONS THROUGH PRACTICE
Introduction – in which I consider the issues of teaching and
learning in 21 st Century
In this paper I will be referring to the dual perspectives that I have,
both as an artist and teacher, referring to the UK (where I am from)
and Germany (where I have lived for the last 15 years). I am advocating
for an educational system that is regularly reassessed by
and through the work that students bring to a course and in dialogue
with the institution. I see higher education as having the
potential to find an equilibrium between necessary institutional
structures and questioning their relevance in relation to contemporary
arts practice. (It is perhaps important to note here I will refer
mostly to MA student work rather than BA). I am, however, also
aware that there is another debate to be had in terms of the increasing
administrative demands and time restrictions required
and imposed by Bologna 1 . But despite this, how can one retain
flexibility to respond to students’ individual research trajectories
without having to regularly re-write the official study regulations?
How do we keep a manageable balance between clear communication
and structure of a course and feeding the ever- needy machinery
of bureaucracy?
These issues are part of my current position at a relatively new
institution: the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz / Inter-
University Centre for Dance (HZT) which will be 10 years old next
year (2017). It is in the process of trying new structures and being
student responsive, whilst also establishing itself as a permanent
and sustainable institution, with the current process of appointing
longer term positions for its staff.
I also wish to reflect upon teaching itself as a practise that has
shifted and changed, especially in the last 20 years, and to acknowledge
that the old hierarchies of imparting knowledge from
the top down has evolved into a situation of facilitating, guiding
and framing the practices of the current students. This concurs
with Paolo Freire’s position in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(1970) in which he argues that the educator, rather than depositing
‘superior knowledge’ to be ‘passively digested, memorized
and repeated’, must engage in a ‘genuine dialogue’ and ‘creative
exchange’ with the students. So, this represents a radical change
of the role of the teacher to opening up a situation for the sharing
of knowledges and peer exchange (which is also a means of resisting
the neo-liberal mode of the student as ‘customer’ and
81

staff as ‘service providers’). What I intend then in this paper is to
share with you how I have learnt and continue to learn through the
practices of students both as an artist and teacher. [...]
The Middle – in which I consider how student work continues to
push boundaries for me now
I have been teaching on the MA Solo Dance Authorship Course at
the HZT for the last four years and from the most recent cohort of
students who have recently graduated, two are from Fine Art, two
have a dance background and one has a theatre and ethnography
background. This variety of backgrounds and practices is typical
for the course and we deliberately look to create a cohort of students
whose practices can challenge, compliment and intrigue
one another, as we consider peer learning to be just as important
as the content that we offer as staff. Students who choose this
course also choose to place themselves within a context that examines
what a body-based practice does and what that means for
contemporary discourse.
‘What can a body do?’ is a fundamental question that has always
concerned performance makers, but what has changed in the 21 st
Century? Thinking about that question in relation to those specific
students, one thing I can say is that the Internet changes their relationship
to their body and their access to knowledge and means
of researching.
An illustration of this can be found in the work of the recent graduate
Joshua Rutter, a contemporary dance maker from New Zealand.
He takes actions that he finds on the internet in YouTube
‘how to’ videos which he says ‘sustain my interest as a doer’. Like
such videos his aesthetics are often DIY-makeshift and making-do:
part of an old wig is sellotaped to a bit of wood found in
the studio. During his time at HZT in his performance research he
was interested in ‘notions of training, rehearsal and performance
which blur into one another’.
When watching Josh’s shows one has the sense that these are
actions he has tried before but they might just go wrong this time.
This genuine ‘not-knowing’ requires a new kind of attention from
the live audience. Rather than watching something ‘new’ or even
‘improvised’, they witness rather, something that can genuinely
fail. When things do go wrong or unexpected things arise, he refers
to them in the piece as ‘beautiful problems’ which may be the
twisted bodies of himself and the two other performers about to
fall over or a slowly deflating inflatable with a large hole from too
much human manipulation.
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I am reminded of a quote from Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being
Just (2013): ‘When we come upon beautiful things […] they act
like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to
some vaster space;’ (Scarry, 2013: 111) Joshua’s naming of the unexpected
in this way opens an imaginative realm that suddenly
transforms something that could be seen as banal or mundane.
His radical insistence on retaining the fragility of trying something
out in front of an audience is not only inspiring for my own performance
practice, which is often concerned with being in and responding
to the moment, but I also find that it resists the commodification
and product-producing trap that artists are often
critical of, but end up falling in to.
Joshua Rutter (2015) from Patterned Interference Photo © Marion Borriss
Another example of a student’s work expanding my knowledge of
what performance research can do is that of Hwa Yeon Nam . She
is a visual artist from Korea who previously studied sculpture but
wanted to explore how she would use her own body in performance.
She has spend her time at the HZT fascinated by comets
and their relation to time in performance. Through her research
comparing the performer’s body and the comet’s celestial body,
notions not only of time but also dimensions and scale in performance
are exploded. In her illustrated final MA thesis she points
out that: ‘...Halley’s Comet is [...] a body that lacks its presence
almost at all times from a human perspective. The chances that
we might see the comet are only once or twice in a lifetime.’ 2
Hwa Yeon is an artist who knows how to take her time in performance.
In her performances she explored being her bored dog under
her desk, the movement of ants with their paths traced with
83

Hwa Yeon Nam (2015) from Body of Time Photo © Marion Borriss
string, and the orbit of comets reduced to the scale of her body
within the studio theatre. When she considers the works of Mette
Invagarsten’s Evaporated Landscapes and William Forsyth’s Choreographic
Objects she concluded for her own work that she is
interested in a ‘choreographic other’ which is defined as:
A choreographic other is more than a thing or an object. It
is rather the subject of time. It is the condition of time that
initiates one’s future. A choreographic other not only enables
the time of a being to transgress its present but also
transforms a being into an orbiting body.
Time becomes not only ‘not purely personal duration’ but also
choreographic. It is no exaggeration to say that over the two years
of following Hwa Yeon’s work I came to see time in performance
within a new light – that of an expanded, extended scale of the
macro and micro and to consider time as a separate ‘body’ that is
both over there, out there and here right now.
An interesting challenge to the MA SODA course requirements is
how to have a one hour exam when the artist/student wishes to
work with the frame of extended time and a one on one performance
rather than a show in a theatre that seats 120 people. This
is not only a challenge to incorporate such a practice into the
course structure but also for the institution to justify the expense
resource of having a large theatre available.
84

Mădălina Dan’s The Agency of Touch challenged our requirements
for the graduating performances by being a one-on-one performative
installation. In order for the work to reach a larger public it
was necessary for Mădălina to perform the work for 6 days for 8
hours a day so as to accommodate 70 people. Mădălina’s background
is in ballet and choreography but in the years before coming
to the MA she was involved in what within the Anglo-Saxon
world is known as ‘socially engaged practice’, working with
among others, the Roma community from her native Romania. In
The Agency of Touch the distance or gap between the performer
and audience (even the examiner!) is radically collapsed through
‘an instant choreography’ performed directly onto the audience’s
body. She says:
I am interested in touch as a performative, intentional gesture
on the body of the other as on a canvas, […] I am also
interested to leave open receivers’ active participation in
the reception of the touch choreography, intensifying his/
her sensorial faculties of subjectively perceiving the work
on his/her own body.
Thinking about the relationship of how the body is changed
through its encounter with technology Mădălina argues that her
project is a direct result of:
an alienated and sensorially deprived context caused by a
virtual-technology era, by social inequalities and other factors,
this practice privileges touch, haptic, physical experiences
over the visual experience dominating the contemporary
technologised society.
In Peter O’Connor’s and Michael Anderson’s recent Applied Theatre:
Research - Radical Departures (2015) there is also the call for
the body to be put back into the research frame, that it ‘almost
disappeared within Western Academic thought, in the privileging
of knowledge that stems from intellect as opposed to the senses’
(O’Connor & Anderson, 2015: 26). In surrendering my body to be ‘the canvas’
for the performance I was able to delight in a new kind of
playfulness and consider how a therapeutic approach can lead to
a holistic, sensorial and potentially synaesthetic experience.
Mădălina’s work made me reflect on my own early one-on-one
performances as well as challenging me to open myself to being in
the position of an examiner being touched for 20 minutes by the
student I was examining.
85

Mădălina Dan (2015) from The Agency of Touch Photo © Marion Borriss
The End – in which I wonder how to strike a balance between the
act of facilitation and one’s own artistic development
To be clear I could just have easily taken more time to discuss the
work of other students at the HZT who’s practices cover areas of
expertise that I had little knowledge of before such as Economics,
Anthropology, Ethnography, Linguistics, and from dance practices
such as Traditional Korean Dance, Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Ballet
and somatic practice. Coming into contact with these practices I
see myself being in an environment of ‘contagion’, (to borrow
Sarah Whatley’s term from yesterday) 3 . I am taken outside any
comfort zone of my known references and thrown into the mash
up of a diverse set of references (not unlike being on the internet).
How then do we go about sharing or creating a language within
which to have meaningful exchange? Well, we try to practice different
forms of feedbacking – being careful to position or contextualise
where a comment or opinion might originate from or trying
to find tools to assist the ‘maker’ in taking their creative work further.
I do this within a format open to all students called Maker’s
Open and some students use this as a platform for showing work
while others are clear that they want to practice giving feedback.
Facilitating this format has also made me aware when doing
showings myself to become clearer about what I want to know
from an audience in relation to the stage of the work.
Another format we regularly use that I have begun to question is
mentoring: there has been the idea for a while floating around at
the HZT to shift the dynamic of mentoring from it mostly being
an imparting of knowledge of an older person to a younger and to
86

turn the tables. One student admitted to me recently that she tries
to find a way to meet in her mentor’s house or studio, engaging
them in conversation about their work before turning to her own.
Students have also begun to acknowledge that all sorts of people
and things ‘mentor’ them: their friends, peers as well as books,
the work of others etc. I was moved to hear that one student regularly
visits a much older woman in her 80s where the exchange
between them is that the student questions the older woman
about music and literature, which were the subjects she used to
teach, while the dance student teaches her how to be less afraid
of falling at home. I have also begun to seek mentoring for myself
outside of the HZT and work to articulate what it is I want from a
mentor which is in itself a great advantage.
One of the challenges for artists working in higher education today
is how to find the time to keep up with the requirements of the
course – to be available for the tutorials, showing and feedback
sessions, the intensive workshops, the marking of workbooks and
exams (all of which have proved to be invaluable for the course and
the trajectory of the student development), and to make your own
work as an independent artist. It seems that the smartest, most
economical model is to find ways of making the work within the
teaching environment or at least explore avenues that are of current
interest for your own artistic development within the course.
At the HZT there is an understanding that staff need a ‘research
month’ a year to develop their own work. I hope that these structures
work to keep the ‘genuine critical engagement’ between
staff and students, allowing the influence (contagion) to travel in
both directions and ultimately for the exchange to be fruitful and
deep in an environment of respect, generosity and curiosity. [...]
Conference Paper for ‘21st Century Performance Research’, Malta University (March, 2016)
1. Since 1999 the Bologna Process has supported the voluntary regulation of Higher
Education and promotes mutual recognition of qualifications, transparency of systems, and
mobility of staff and students across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).
2. Halley’s Comet is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 74–79 years that last
appeared in the inner parts of the Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061.
3. Sarah Whatley is Professor of Dance and Director of the Centre for Dance Research
(C-DaRE) at Coventry University (UK).
87

INTERVIEW: RHYS MARTIN (2017)
Ric Allsopp: These are the questions
I would like to ask you: What
do you consider to be the ethos of
the SODA programme? How has your
view of SODA changed over time
from 2005 to present, and how has
that shifted in relation to what your
view of dance and choreographic
practice is and is becoming; how far
does the programme reflect, integrate
or align with the wider contemporary
field of choreographic
performance practice? Okay, so
let’s start with the question of ethos.
Rhys Martin: It’s a great question
because it’s been a surprise to me how
many people have applied to the programme
since we began. I didn’t really
know this 12 years ago – there was a lot
of guessing, and bravado, right at the beginning
in 2005 when we were fighting to
get SODA accepted – but I had a gut feeling
at the time, a perception that the educational
system for dance was changing.
To embrace a new kind of academic profile
by reorienting towards cognitive learning
benchmarks and moving away from the
empirical and the intuitive, the academy
was losing a segment of artistic practitioners.
I felt that there was a need to bridge
an emerging gap between these approaches.
This had a lot to do with my own experience
of escaping from academia.
After studying literature and fine
arts at university, I found out that I wasn’t
interested in purely pursuing the theoretical,
so I kind of fled to the practice. Beyond
a desire to do something other than read,
I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my own
practical artistic ability. I first set out to
be a painter - but by chance and circumstances,
ended up being connected to
dance. I became totally fascinated by the
exoticism, not of the established but of
the fringe, alternative, demi-monde, marginal
art world. Peopled by individuals who
I found to be committed and profound
thinkers but who didn’t share at all in the
ways I’d learned to relate to ideas within
academia. Initially communication with
them was awkward, even suspicious. Discourse,
tropes and rhetorical exchanges
were not cool – but there was a fantastic
vitality of action despite, in my view an
often self-indulgent, narcissistic eccentricity,
which I saw at the time as an inability
to think critically. But I nevertheless
grew to understand the ‘logic’ of idiosyncracy
as a key to artistic practice. Years
later, as a performer and maker entering
the professional mainstream, I remained
attracted to those anarchic practices and
artistic work. Work anchored in strong and
individual empirical intuition that was unsettling,
difficult and strange.
Part of the ethos of the SODA
course is attached to being able to empower
interested artists, whose creativity
lies outside the academic or professional
mainstream; and to access and benefit
from the educational institution. I am
convinced it is absolutely critical for contemporary
artistic and social evolution.
I am deeply curious to learn how to support
such individuals make quantum leaps
of imagination and gain poetic insights.
In my professional experience this seldom
happens in a logical or strictly coded cognitive
referential frame. The idea is to provide
an autonomous institutional space to
allow a rigorous mode of research and
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development driven by individual perceptions
of the world; but to do this with a
heterogeneous community able to share
its understanding of being in the world
within a wider artistic and social context.
RA: How would you summarise that?
If you are saying that you think that
the SODA programme is there to
provide a space for individual exploration,
that you can follow your own
work and your own intuitions, how
does that idea relate to what is happening
and what has happened with
SODA? Are you able to summarise
what you think it is that SODA is
offering - what are the distinctive
things about it that makes it different
from other postgraduate programmes
that we are in touch with?
RM: I am aware that what I just said
could be patronising; but I don’t think of
it as a place in which society domesticates
critique by marginalising its own eccentricity
in bourgeois art academies. Despite
its unerring focus on the individual, as
artist, as maker/performer, the SODA programme
has never just been a place for
cultivating solipsism. On the contrary, it
has always been a test of how to maintain
an openness to the otherness of one’s
peers, even where difference borders on
conflict; for instance when people have
said ‘Why should I have to deal with that
which doesn’t interest me?’ or ‘Why am
I being addressed as part of a group?
I don’t see myself as part of a group. I am
an individual practitioner!’ But for me,
university is an exercise in democracy, and
not solely about artistic agendas. It’s
about working within a multiplicity of doings
and thinkings; about being able to
cope with these other ways without losing
one’s own perspective; to balance
and square the circle of how to commit to
one’s own direction, and at the same time
be a supportive part of a community. The
SODA programme seeks to practice this, in
ever changing iterations. Its emphasis on
the relationship between collective and
self, differentiates it in its aspiration from
similar programmes interested in
research- driven learning and expanded
notions of choreography and dance, and
of course, through its specific focus on the
terms ‘solo’ and ‘authorship’.
RA: How far has that shifted then in
your view? It seems to me that
looking at the early SODA materials,
that’s not where it started, in the
sense that one of the critiques of the
notion of solo as an educational
frame in the initial Symposium was
precisely that it would spawn very
individualistic work, or that it would
become very solipsistic; that you
would have a group of separate individuals
who just happened to be in
a loose framework following their
own thing. It seems to me that SODA
has shifted from that kind of position
to a point where it is very group focussed.
There is a lot of learning
that is done together – whether that
is input, or simply being together in a
space where you are doing the
same kinds of things. I am wondering
where you think that has come
from?
RM: The value of a move away of
hierarchical learning structures and content
has become clear, but keeping a balance
between ‘those who know and those
who are learning’ is still a challenge. To go
all the way back to the beginning, one of
the mistakes I made was perhaps the assumption
that there would be students
who would be interested in being part of
a group which simply saw value in discussion
with their peers and invited established
artists with other ways of seeing
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the world than theirs. This collapsed. The
whole approach to learning has become
much more institutionalised. My aim was
to start a dialogue with experienced practising
artists and to use them as a living
resource library to answer questions and to
offer experience, to see where this would
develop. The result was open ended. To my
surprise there was a huge push back from
from some students who seemed uninterested
in exploring experience, outside
their own concerns. There was a feeling
that they were wasting their time by being
asked to listen to discussions of no relevance
to their perceived direct interests,
suggesting that traditional forms of lessons,
such as close-reading practice,
practice and theoretical lectures, were of
more value. Counter-intuitively, this was
the pedagogical world I had rejected, and
contrary to how I and many of my generation’s
peers emerged as artists via engaging
directly and openly with established
practitioners. So, we moved the focus
away from a generic sense of enquiry to
concentrate on the specific questions of
individual students. This approach, which
now combines taught input with individual
enquiry, has proved better suited to the
needs of current emerging artists.
RA: I read in the 2006 Symposium
report put together by Franz-Anton
Cramer, that Alice Chauchat had
said during the Symposium ‘I don’t
want to be told what I have to study’,
which I thought was an interesting
position to hold. It’s a position which
seems to stand against your sense
that because you are interested in
solo or your own work, it does not
necessarily exclude the idea that
you can find out about yourself, and
what it is you do as an individual,
through a discourse or a practice
that involves other people. Is that
the position you are taking?’
RM: To find out from each other, by
being open and curious about the
apparently non-relatedness of other work,
as opposed to assuming or speculating
that what we have to say to each other may
be not of interest for our own customised
concerns. My own initial leanings were
towards Paul Illich’s idea of ‘de-schooling
society’ and Piaget’s thoughts on teaching
creativity, which I had encountered in my
postgraduate studies in art education.
Ideas that argued against the convention
of knowledge as appropriation, in favour
of learner-driven contexts which emphasise
a creative environment through which
we can learn together. Yet this proved far
from simple at the time. I put a lot of effort
into talking to colleagues and asking them
not to teach their particular, regular approach,
but to ‘just be there for questions
and exchange.’ In what I called an ‘artistic
reference frame’ I asked people like Deborah
Hay 2006) along with two colleagues of
her choice, to offer their knowledge within
and open and flat hierarchy of discussion
and exchange. Not to say that this is the
way to do anything. But then, despite the
success of this experiment, the same approach
was rejected in the programme
with statements like ‘I’m not here to do
solo’. Susanne Linke for example, who
gave a workshop in the first week of the
pilot programme, despite a willingness to
experiment soon resorted to rather conventional
strategies of teaching, in the face
of an inability on all sides to reserve judgement
about procedure and practice. It surprised
me how often the class refused to
at least enter a positive and open discussion
about how to take on board the perceived
eccentricity of other artists. For
me it was simply historical the way that
Susanne Linke has come to her own decisions
and actions as a solo practitioner.
One could choose to go with it or around it
and certainly not to stubbornly reject iconic
role models out of hand. This resistance
was a shock. Statements like ‘I don’t have
90

time because my life’s too short to be able
to do things for which I can’t immediately
see personal value’ really threw me. This
was commoditised thinking; needing to
know in advance why it’s necessary to do
this or that, as opposed to a phenomenological
evaluation through experience. I
thought ‘where is the epistemological progress
in that?’
Now ten years down the track, I’ve
employed those lessons about institutional
behaviour on all sides; about expectation
and habit, and fear attached to a responsibility
when determining one’s own educational
trajectory, when challenged to set up
from scratch; where, despite institutional
critique, there is often quick acceptance of
the security and comfort of the system.
Rethinking the coordinates was simply a
lot of work and effort during the pilot phase.
When it became apparent that the first
proposal was proving too radical, I offered
the students the opportunty to reconsider
and for us to develop the program together.
In fact, the system had given us this fantastic
opportunity at the prototype stage,
but there was little real enthusiasm for this
challenge and nobody ‘had time’. So, to go
forward we stepped back.
RA: I remember that at the end of
the first year in 2008 we realised that
we needed to re-formulate the programme
for the second year and put
more structure into it.
RM: Yes, and it took a lot of the fear
away. There is a lot of fear in the author /
performer relationship - fear of failure, of
exposure, of self-confrontation and loneliness.
External structure has provided some
helpful security but without courage, determination
and confidence no structure
will prevent this. If we ask why people see
themselves in the programme, my observation
is that it is to do with the desire not
only to come here to make a specific kind of
work through performance, but to finally
engage the world entirely on their own
terms. Many of the motivation statements
from SODA applicants regularly explain
that their needs as artists aren’t compatible
with other study programmes. Their
aspiration is not only to do and make work,
but also to understand both the work itself
and the processes and choices that
bring it into the world. In a self-authored
practice, rewards and risks are closely
wedded. Recognising its precarious nature,
we have developed our generic tools for
diagnostic analysis of own work, for writing
and documentation, and for the crafts
of invention and composition.
RA: How might this relate to
performing for others?
RM: People rightly assume that
SODA is a place to share new and emerging
work with others. A place for what is
otherwise a potentially lonely, detached
and demanding pursuit. Instead, we are offering
a research community context to
enable work on what one does, not what
one is.
But what is oneness? For example,
Rebecca Schneider, in her article ‘Solo,
Solo Solo’ (2004) adds her voice to those
critics who argue that there is in fact, no
true solo. Coming from such intertextual
and postmodernist readings, solo is inevitably
impossible, a ‘group’ work always,
made via all the other contributions to the
performance, via cultural transmission or
cooperation as artist partner. But this is
to deny plain experience, when as author/
performer you are taking the heat at that
moment of presentation. I have always
maintained this to be an extreme focus of
decision making. Final responsibility is an
immanent feature of the liveness in selfauthored
work: the apex of any pyramid of
influence. The audience identifies you as
91

an artist; you the maker and you the person
claiming their attention. The personal
becomes public. Self-authored performances
require specific skills and knowledge.
In my work as a director and choreographer,
I never felt personally exposed
in the same way as when on stage in a
solo of my own making. There is a heightened
awareness of presence, of the timespace
continuum, of the freedom and constraint,
power and responsibility. From my
own personal experience, I realised that
making solo work was an exceedingly demanding
form of social interaction. SODA
continues to ask what are the conditions,
methods and processes that can be identified
in making new work of this kind. What
are the epistemological consequences of
the coexistence of subject and object
when seen through the practices of the students
and their collaborators and mentors?
RA: Looking back, what do you think
about the elements of the course?
What you have described is that it is
not simply a free space in which we
decide what it is that we are going
to do, but it has to fit within a given
academic framework. What do you
think about the relationship between
the elements that make up the
course - essays, workshops, lectures,
training etc. - and does this support
the more radical notion that the individual
can find their own direction,
but find it in relation to other people
and still develop their work. Do you
think that those elements work as a
set of ingredients that can essentially
‘teach artists how to make art’
given that people say you can never
teach people how to be artists?
Effectively the elements of the SODA
programme haven’t changed significantly
since 2010 when we put the
validated programme in place building
on what we learned from the
pilot phase. Since that point those
ingredients have remained relatively
stable.
RM: I’ve kept them stable deliberately
and quite stubbornly because of the
immediate demands of delivering an enormously
challenging study program for staff
and students alike. All the elements that
make up the SODA programme have been
in some way useful, but none of them in
themselves are fixed. They are simply
formal constraints which help students to
identify discursive and practical issues
emerging from their own work or that of
others. But by dealing with constraints we
are also busy with escaping them. We
have experimented with writing and textual
practices that lie outside received
academic orthodoxies. We have for example
investigated ways of writing that deal
better with questions of subjectivity and
embodied experience; embraced non-linguistic
experience and knowledge through
somatics, proprioception, intuitive belief
and speculative insights; employed diverse
strategies of feedback and critique, and
practice-specific forms of documentation.
We have explored inputs from critical,
media and literary theory, from queer and
performance theory; and from philosophy,
sociology anthropology and psycho analysis,
as well as from dance and choreography,
and worked with mentors and collaborators
and a myriad of other transdisciplinary
concerns and interests.
We are still developing the curriculum
structure, deciding and appointing
staff and harvesting a diversity of student
learning experiences. We have been
tremendously fortunate to have found
wonderfully committed colleagues who
have shaped and developed the program
with me, in particular, yourself, Sophia
New, Litó Walkey, Boyan Manchev and
Sheena McGrandles, not to mention my
HZT colleagues and many loyal guests.
92

Until now, I haven’t felt we had the need,
the time and or occasion for a major review.
We were still learning how to use the program
in its initial form.
Each intake of students has been
so fundamentally different, that every year
the program has required us to adapt to
new challenges and provide appropriate
responses within its existing parameters.
It has been a steep learning curve for all
involved. But I have always thought that ten
years was about the right time to have
enough information to think about and
consider our achievements so far. On a
year-to-year basis, there is always a
reason to think how to do this or that
differently – and we have done this or that
differently, trying things out, following
suggestions from staff and students.
As a pedagogical rationale, to test its
sustainability over time. I’ve just kept on
saying that we keep it like this until we
will have a quantitative and qualitative
basis for discussion. In the education
game, I think we have moved a long way
but we don’t have to change the position
of the goalposts. Little has stopped us
from playing the field where they are.
Berlin, 30 July 2017
www.rhysmartin.com
93

EXTRACTS III
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
95

Ana Monteiro
MA SODA 2010–2012
www.fakenature.carbonmade.com
Ana Monteiro (2011) from Showcase Photos © Sven Hagolani
96

From my SODA experience, I took away
the desire to think and practice choreography
from expanded points of view,
tearing through artistic and academic
milieus in order to keep asking vital
questions about life and how to live
together. I never forgot the title of a
text we read during the program
‘Looking Away from Art’, I cannot find
it now, maybe it never existed. Somehow
it has been in those tensions, displacements
and movements of looking
away and back to artistic and aesthetic
endeavours that I have been dwelling
ever since, while expanding notions of
collective to the non-human and fostering
the desire of living in the south
of the planet.
Ed. The text was Irit Rogoff’s ‘Looking Away:
Participations in Visual Culture’ (2004, 117–134)

Andrew Wass
MA SODA 2011–2013
www.wasswasswass.com
98

Andrew Wass (2012) from The Signal and the Noise Photo © Marion Borriss
My time in the SODA program re-affirmed the value
and the necessity of physical practice. The tacit
valorization of the conceptual, of the cerebral over
the corporeal, the sweaty, the repetitive led me to
investigate and search for the conceptual and
theoretical within physical practice. Continued
physical research has proven for me, time and time
again, the reciprocal and cumulative relationship
between theory and practice. My research, post-SODA,
has led to expanded notions of theory: theory as the
liminal spaces between practices, theory as the
search for equivalences among disparate practices,
theory as doing whatever it takes to get beyond my
habits/training/proclivities/milieu/genre/idiom.

Willy Prager
MA SODA 2011–2013
www.antistaticfestival.org
www.brainstoreproject.com
www.nomaddanceacademy.org
Willy Prager (2012) from The Victory Day Photo © Marion Borriss

Reformulation, translation, horse-jump, parasitizing, mapping
are the tools that I use in my work as an artist and producer.
SODA, deufert&plischke and Victoria Pérez Royo are some of
my main influences in my practice.
I still present my SODA works Transformability (2012) and
The Victory Day (2013) in many festivals around Europe.
I still meet my SODA colleague and friend Sonja Pregrad.
We keep our collaboration and together, in Berlin, we created
the performance Sequel for the Future - A Dance in 2043 /
A Dance in 2044 (2014) and a year later Balkan Dance Reality
Show (2015) (together with our Giessen colleagues Iva
Sveshtarova and Rose Beerman).
I still meet my SODA colleague and friend Igor Koruga.
We keep thinking about the future of the Balkan region and
we are partners in the NOMAD Dance Academy network. For
the last 12 years NOMAD keeps advocating for better dance
conditions in the Balkans, develops alternative educational
programmes, exchanging artistic practices and theories.
I still create performances with my colleague and friend Iva
Sveshtarova in the frame of our organization Brain Store
Project, which this year we are going to celebrate its 12th
year. Our most recent performances are Our Last Pas de Deux
(2014), Dance Simulation (2016) and Shamebox (2017)
I still co-organize the Antistatic-Festival for Contemporary
Dance and Performance in Sofia together with Iva Sveshtarova
and Stephan A. Shtereff (www.antistaticfestival.org). This
year we celebrated its 10th edition. During all these years we
have presented more than 100 performances from around
the word, many workshops, lectures, discussion etc. Most
recently we presented HZT artists such as: Dragana Bulut,
Igor Koruga, Sonja Pregrad, Daniel Kok, Helena Botto, Elisabete
Finger, Jee-Ae Lim, Tian Rottevel, Lee Meier, Zeina Hanna,
and Andrew Wass.
I still believe in the Armenian philosopher Irina Porruzian.
101

Daniel Kok
MA SODA 2010–2012
www.diskodanny.com
Since SODA, I have constantly tried to
balance out different facets of a professional
choreographic practice - such as
theoretical research, heuristic processes,
collaborative processes, artistic production,
dissemination of work, etc. I realise
that these different interfaces of an independent
practice (‘solo’, ‘dance’ and
‘authorship’) make contacts with different
members of the international dance community
who may not be concerned with
the varied aspects of my work. I have had
to negotiate, sometimes defend, the wearing
of these different hats.
More importantly, SODA was where I worked
through my persistent desire to dance. In
SODA, I found a way to deal with the politics
of relationality in performance by referring
to the figure of a pole dancer as a dispositif.
Since then, I have explored other figures
of performance, such as the cheerleader,
the bondage master, the devadasi (Hindu
temple dancer) and the octopus.
A short list of what I am ‘busy with’
these days:
• Referring to Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonism’
and ‘radical democracy’ to define
‘audienceship’ which I distinguish from
‘spectatorship’.
• Squaring Ranciere’s Politics of Aesthetics
(2006) with Queer Theory.
• Articulating the Female/Feminine/Feminist
Gaze as an alternative to the status quo.
I see this as an urgent project in the light
of current ‘masculinist’ politics.
• Identifying ‘ways of seeing’ in the visual
arts that can augment, and thereby offer
insights to the ways dance spectatorship
is configured.
• Studying Indian classical performance;
specifically the principles behind
abhinaya – the use of hands, eyes and
facial expression.
During SODA, I tried to read broadly and to
synthesise my interests by attempting to
marry notions and practices from Anthropology,
Economics, Design, Art and my personal
life. I was also looking for ways to
adapt into my work my love for pole dance
then. I think I left SODA having not yet
resolved these different ideas that were
floating around for me. I’d like to think that
I’m now quite a bit clearer about what I
am trying to do. The SODA workshop that
left the deepest impression on me was
definitely with Jeanine Durning. There were
also other seminars and workshops (eg:
with Ric Allsopp, Deufert & Plischke) that
gave me valuable insights into the ways
that text and movement can inform each
other in dance. By this, I am not only referring
to how text and movement operate as
performance material for the stage. More
significantly, I am inspired by what I understand
as a post-structuralist approach to
text and movement that can be applied
across different aspects of choreography.
102

Daniel Kok (2011) from The Gay Romeo Photos © Sven Hagolani

Enrico D. Wey
MA SODA 2015–2017
www.enricowey.com
104

SODA was a struggle. It opened up a line of questioning
that I was not prepared for, in terms of what I wanted
out of making and of process. The challenge of
academia and context in the offered format gave me
pause. What sort of spaces do I occupy? Where do I
place myself within these structures? This friction led
to new understandings of the roles I play and how I
consciously choose to approach them. It came and
went, slipped into softness, and try as I might, the
experience continues to remain unclear. These notknowings,
these persistent questions sink in further.
Certain depths have shifted and that is perhaps a sign
of strength. Enrico D. Wey (2006) from Still Lives Photo © Manuel Moncayo
105

Yaron Maïm & SODA Year 1 & Year 2 Students
www.groupsolo.org/publication
‘With her sword in one hand, parchment in the other, she ventured
onto the battlefield, gracefully.’
(Liadain to Nicola)
‘‘Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent
than war?’ (Gloria Anzaldua).’
(Agata to Maque)
‘The eye of the hunter, the eye of the prey, the third eye and the eye
of the tiger, all of them the same.’
(Maque to Agata)
‘Spread out inspirations with a lucid theory and trashy practices
even into non-conductive matters.’ (Furu to Taylor)
• ‘All over watched by machines of disgraceful love.’
(Pauline to Alejandro)
‘From utopian body to individual body, how are we, together?’
(Pauline to Larisa)
‘There must not be limits of human endeavour. We are all different.
No matter how hard life is, there is always something you can
do and succeed in. While there’s life, there’s hope.’
(Larisa to Pauline)
‘I-Ching You-Ching thank you for reading me, but will we ever find
the answers?’
(Mmakgosi to Mariana)
‘Once upon a time I was falling in words, but now I am
only falling in white.’
(Alejandro to Jan)
The assemblage and the score on these pages, made especially for the present book, gives an
insight into one process of art making – the collaborative ‘groupsolo’. It follows procedures of
sampling, copying, remixing and sharing – see www.groupsolo.org/publication
106

‘When you swallow your heart where does it disappear into?’
(Mariana to Mmakgosi)
‘Janine builds delicate makeshift boats that look like giant polygon
mesh or stringed instruments.’
(Yaron to Janine)
‘Human emotions abstracted and rendered into clear geometric
forms with the intention to create a universal aesthetics.’
(Janine to Saori)
‘You are a master of short stories, sharp humor, deep questions and
unexpectable answers, always never too much, never too close to
the point to have opportunity to see it.’
(Evgenia to Furu)
‘Everyday drawing in combination with object and movement,
metamorphosing into poetic universe of visuality.
‘I draw or paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse
in me.’ (Franz Kline).’
(Felix to Yaron)
‘Evgenia creates (worm)holes that transport bodies and their
consciousness to unexpected landscapes.’
(Nic to Evgenia)
‘So, here are some brooms and a vacuum cleaner. Would you,
please, help me clean the stage?’
(Jan to Felix)
‘A comfortable tinnitus, it sounds familiar to me, I’ve heard it
somewhere, sometime.’
(Furu to Liadain)
The drawings on pages 108–109 have been made by Yaron Maïm – www.yayaMaïm.com
in collaboration with all the current first (2017–2019) and final year (2016–2018) SODA
students – www.groupsolo.org
107

1. Nicola Van Straaten
2. Jan Rozman
3. Mariana Vieira
4. Maque Pereyra
5. Felix Ofosu Dompreh
6. Janine Iten
7. Larisa Navojec
8. Yaron Maïm
9. Furutan Michiyasu
10. Pauline Payen
11. Agata Siniarska
12. Evgenia Chetvertkova
13. Liadain Herriott
14. Mmakgosi Tsogang Kgabi
15. Taylor Kendall
16. Alejandro Karasik
17. Saori Hara
108

Drawing
© Yaron Maïm (2017)

11. Photo © Agata Siniarska
14. Photo © Thomas Aurin
1. Photo © Nicola Van Straaten
16. Photo © Ailin Formia
15. Photo © Brigid Cara
12. Photo © Evgenia Chetvertkova
2. Photo © Anže Kokalj
10. Photo © Pauline Payen 8. Photo © Yaron Maïm

9. Photo © Evgenia Chetvertkova
13. Photo © Paul McCarthy
6. Photo © Janine Iten
3. Photo © Mariana Vieira
7. Photo © Hrvoje Jelinčić
4. Photo © Maque Pereyra
17. Photo © Otome Kaita
5. Photo © Philip Weinrich & Felix Ofosu Dompreh

Katrin Memmer
MA SODA 2012–2014
www.katrinmemmer.de
Katrin Memmer from
almost a no body (2013)
Photo © Marion Borriss
There have been many influences and thoughts
which grew on me during my time in SODA. As a
lover of quotes I have picked three which still
come to me from time to time. One for example
appeared in the first workshops with Boyan
Manchev. We were engaging with Derek Jarman’s
book Chroma: A Book of Colour (1993) and
I had picked the colour blue and the chapter
‘Into the Blue’, where Jarman writes:
‘For accustomed to believing in image, an absolute
idea of value, his world had forgotten the
command of essence: Thou Shall Not Create
Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you
know the task is to fill the empty page. From the
bottom of your heart, pray to be released from
image.’ And the second: ‘For blue there are no
boundaries and no solutions. (Jarman, 1993: 115).

During our Erasmus Intensive Project (2012) in
Helsinki I got to know the Finnish artist Terike
Haapoja. I have not forgotten her. Look at her
work: In and Out of Time (2005). At the same
event I attended a lecture by Ric Allsopp on
Latency and Composition in which he mentioned
a quote by Charles Olson, which says: ‘One loves
only form, and form only comes into existence,
when the thing is born.’ (Olson, 1992:7)
Beside this the workshops with Michael Klien and
Joao Fiadeiro come to my mind as an important
input which SODA gave me. And also a quote from
Joao (or as I later found out maybe not only of
Joao, but also of Master Yoga from Star Wars):
‘Don’t try. Do. Or do not. There is no try.’
113

Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez
MA SODA 2013–2015
www.ixchelmendozahernandez.weebly.com
I would like to come back to the concept that drew a line of
research, questioning and discovery, during my research at the
SODA program into the phenomenon of the Visual Ghost. During
that time I had made investigations of how this phenomena can
be created not only through the body, but as well with the use of
sound, text and their combination. The aim was to find ways to
provoke the audience to experience certain kind of ‘images’ not
present in vision, nevertheless still present. The Visual Ghost
corresponds to ideas that suddenly become apparent through our
senses, by experiencing them, a kind of awareness or
consciousness that materializes, making them graspable. We live
in a world that has material and visible elements as well as the
immaterial and the invisible. For me it is interesting to think and
experiment into how these invisible elements come into
presence, and as a result of what kind of events.
114

Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez (2014) Re-entering: Visual Ghost Photos © Christiane Schniebel

Elisabete Finger
MA SODA 2010–2012
www.elisabetefinger.com
Elisabete Finger (2011) from Studies for
Monstro Photo © Ric Allsopp
Elisabete Finger (2011) from O.
Photo © Sven Hagolani
Elisabete Finger (2011) from Workbook. Photos © Elisabete Finger

Since more than a year I have been working in a series of situations I’m calling ‘Studies for
Monstro’. The studies for Monstro are possible compositions for the same group of elements:
an egg, two pieces of fur, an arrow, a hole, a golden helium balloon, a song, coca-cola,
something red, something hairy, something flying, something turning, something dying, and
a body in action. O. is the 6 th and the last experience in this series. O. is a circle, a hole.
O. is for me (headless) an abyss, a fascinating and almost unbearable vertigo. O. may be for
you a precarious image-movement, an image that is made and unmade, that is traversed, torn,
pierced, devoured by Monstro.
(SODA Works programme note, December 2011)
117

Helena Botto
MA SODA 2013–2015
helenabotto.weebly.com
Helena Botto (2013/14) from The Silly Piece Photo © André Uerba

Helena Botto (2013) Feeling Like Not Feeling Photo © Helena Botto
In 2013 I wanted to enter in the MA SODA programme as a way to disrupt
a certain methodological tradition in which I was taught and
operated for many years in making work. During the first year I was
obssessed by the question: ‘How can I break my patterns of performing
and construct a “new” way of making work?’ With time it became
clear how näive that question was and how impossible it would be to
reboot my body and make it a blank sheet.
119

Kyla Kegler
MA SODA 2013–2015
kylaaverykegler.com
120

My experience in SODA was a process
of identifying and articulating the fundamental
questions and musings that
motivate me to make work, and then
using that insight to produce. It was a
wealth of conversations, input, and relationships
that I cherish and which
have forever changed my relationship
to art making, fortifying in me a conviction
in the unique potential of artistic
research as a lens through which to interpret
life.
Prior to SODA I was working in the field
of visual arts and social arts practices,
and had no exposure to the somatic,
body-based discourse that I was introduced
to during SODA, and which I have
since adopted fundamentally into my
own practice and artistic discourse.
The diversity in culture, sensibility, and
professional backgrounds coming from
my colleagues was a precious resource
that both challenged my existing ideologies
and opened me to a far more interesting
conversation than would have
been possible had we all come from
more homogenous circumstances.
You and I are collaborators.
You are my host.
We occupy your headspace and generate
your thoughts and sensations,
together.
We enable each other’s present modes
of existence.
We hold each other accountable.
While you are here with me, thinking
about these words, we will explore ways
that we can use your mind and your
body to decode and perceive the world
around us, to dwell in your sensations
and interpretations of our ideas.
If at any point you need me, I will be here,
inside of you.
I have no autonomous agency.
My work and I exist through you.
I need you to help me understand what
this experience means, now that it belongs
to you.
121
Kyla Kegler is an artist based between Buffalo
NY and Berlin. She holds an MA in Solo/
Dance/Authorship from HZT Berlin, 2015, and
is currently on a fellowship to complete an
MFA in Visual Arts at the University of Buffalo,
USA (2018). Her recent research explores
therapeutic bodywork and haptic language.
She makes videos, audio guides, installations,
performances, and paintings that seek
to privilege the body as an intelligent sense
organ in an art-experience.
Kyla Kegler (2013) Photo © Kyla Kegler

Mădălina Dan
MA SODA 2014–2016
www.Mădălinadan.tumblr.com
www.cargocollective.com/theAgencyofTouch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFjVeepIwXs&t=32s
As an educational and academic framework, SODA program distils eventually
in a very specific and pragmatic artistic process characterized by having to
engage simultaneously in practice, discourse, methodology, documentation,
logistics of making work. I could not say that I would engage in a similar process
in every work I’ll make, but for sure I have a toolbox of notes, references,
tools, shortcuts, encounters to revisit. After finishing the program, in 2016,
as an associated artist at The National Dance Center in Bucharest I invited my
SODA colleagues to show the work and their artistic research produced in this
framework in Bucharest. It felt relevant and necessary to create this sharing
space, both for the dance and performance field in Bucharest and also for
us, the ‘graduates’ to transplant our work and methodology in another artistic
community. Over the two years, SODA was also a context to reflect upon
problematics such as: the privileges of studying in general, the access - who
gets to benefit from Western art school education, where does the financial
support comes from, the profile of students who study in HZT.
It would not make sense to list titles, names and references, there are too many,
and I find more distinctive the processes of learning from colleagues, teachers,
mentors, visits to the library, watching DVDs in the Mediathek, going to lectures,
taking classes etc. I found a real pleasure and gratitude to be in the study
state, to have extraordinary encounters with very generous and gifted teachers,
artists and peers.
As a visible proof, I would share a few pages of my notes from SODA, also to
trigger my memory, but unfortunately I don’t have them with me right now.
What also stays distinctive is processing references, scraps of texts, ideas,
images, conversations into useable material of work for workbook, essays
and artistic input.

123 Mădălina Dan (2015) from The Agency of Touch Photos © Marion Borriss

Sheena McGrandles
MA SODA 2010–2012
SODA Staff 2013–2017
www.sheenamcgrandles.com
Sheena McGrandles (2012)
from Meatbook
Photos © Sheena McGrandles
Sheena McGrandles (2011)
from EEE Series
Photo © Diego Wiltshire
124

Arriving as a student in April 2010 with 9 others we were
informed that SODA was not a residency, we couldn’t just float
in and out, curate our schedule and get distracted by the metropolis
of Berlin. Although the focus was on our individual
practices which had various needs we were clearly in an
educational frame. SODA, a creative friction for some, became
a temporary artistic dwelling during my two years of study. At
this time we were a group of distinctive people from Europe,
Asia, Canada and Australia all there to interrogate, come closer
and to (re)formulate our practice. This chosen group was
the foundation of my study. It was a group that functioned as
a peer to peer physical network, locating itself on the perimeters
of my work, critically entangling itself in my ‘messiness’
and (un)consciously contaminating my research. It is in this
regard that I see SODA as a mesh of people, contexts, resources,
aesthetics and perspectives, offering a sort of distracted
and informed companionship in the process of doing and
thinking. It is a situation that I have not found myself in again
and often something I long for; to be followed and at the same
time follow another’s work so closely. In short my essence of
SODA is that of a temporary ecology of idiosyncratic mismatched-matched
artists that come to their own work,
through and with the presence of others.
I developed a meatbook in parallel to the performance Eee (2012). I wanted to expand the
notion of the book and the material forms it normally takes, but more importantly I wanted
to find other modes in which I could materialise my research. It was framed as a performative
action that documented my process in the studio and at the same time raised
questions and interests around my curiosity of body, language and voice and its potentials.
It took a whole day to cut, sew and stamp the meat. I chose a specific text from one
of the works of Beckett, Unnameable (1953) which talks explicitly about the position of
the voice, in-between.
Sheena McGrandles (2011) from EEE Series Photo © Sven Hagolani

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz
MA SODA 2014–2016
www.liadland.wordpress.com
www.instagram.com/liadland
www.facebook.com/liadhusseinkantorowicz
The documents ‘i embody everything’ + ‘i woke up after sleeping 10 hours’ are from an intensive with
Eva Meyer- Keller for making new work. In it is a text I used in making a performance, using the Adrian Piper
photo I Embody Everything that You Most Hate and Fear (1975) from her series The Mythic Being, which made its
way to my workbook.
The first image is a collection of photos used in a Victoria Pérez Royo ‘Tarot card’ reading.
She asked us to bring photos that we are drawn to so they can be used to read our future.
If you look at the photos, they were most definitely a direct indication of what my performative future would look
like, at least in the scope of the SODA study programme.
I finally woke up after sleeping for 10 hours. I slept with my dress on. I was shaking for about an
hour in bed. I pushed the alarm buzzer 6 times before getting up.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
My mind started racing over things that need to be done today, this week, in the next two months. I have a meeting
to prepare for tonight, and one tomorrow morning.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
I go to the computer to write an email to confirm it. Instead of opening my mail I open facebook to look at the
route of this Saturday’s gay pride march.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
There’s some debate about why the alternative gay pride in Kreuzberg is too commercial and shouldn’t be supported.
I open the facebook page of an Israeli friend of mine who participated
in the online debate.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
She wrote a status equating the mega-fascist Israeli independence day festivities to experiencing the world cup
in Germany when Germany plays and her downstairs neighbours yell ‘heil hitler’. I comment on that post. Then I
remember that I still have a meeting to confirm via email.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
I go to make coffee. I throw the old coffee beans out and realize that the package-recycling part of the trash
needs to be taken out. I say to myself ‘ill do it later’. I wait for the coffee to be ready and sit by the computer
again.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
I’m reading a text from a lecture I attended about post colonial justice and Berlin, and riots. My coffee is ready.
Then I jump to texts written by and about Adrian Piper. In between I think about my former boyfriend. I start to
shake.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
In between reading about Adrian Piper I check my former boyfriend’s facebook wall. Considering that we are still
in contact, I wonder if to tell him that if he fucks this girl he’s around who was my friend and stabbed me, I’ll stop
talking to him.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
Dear Walid, I decided that our current relationship hurts me and catches me at weak points rather than being
empowering. So, I want to end it for now. No wait. I decided not to be in contact with you any more. Please stop
contacting me. I formulate this in my head several times over coffee, but never send this text message.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.
I write a facebook post about the world cup and gay pride. I drink some coffee, then check how many people
liked it.
I embody everything you most hate and fear.

127
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz (2015)
Photos © Liad Hussein Kantorowicz

ADDENDA
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
129

MA SODA STUDENTS
(2009–2017)
SODA Pilot (2007–2009)
Anat Eisenberg, Corsin Gaudenz
Thérèse Nylen, Rita Roberto
Susanne Martin, Mirko Winkel
Felix Marchand, Aikaterina Papageorgiou
(Kat Válastur)
SODA 1 (2010–2012)
Sheena McGrandles, Ana Trincão
Keith Lim, Ana Monteiro
Dragana Bulut, Elisabete Finger
Zoja Smutny, Yair Vardi, Daniel Kok
SODA 2 (2011–2013)
Andrew Wass, Willy Prager
Igor Koruga, Marcio Carvalho
Hana Lee Erdman, Sonja Pregrad
Jee-Ae Lim, Joana von Mayer Trindade
SODA 3 (2012–2014)
Niels Bovri, Allison Peacock
Maria Baroncea, Katrin Memmer
Céline Cartillier, Kiran Kumar
Sergiu Matis, Flavio Ribeiro, Lisa Densem
SODA 6 (2015–2017)
Enrico D. Wey, Akseli Aittomäki
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz
Lisa Müller-Trede, Luo Yuebing
Lulu Obermayer, Valentin Tszin
[Janine Iten]
SODA 7 (2016–2018)
Felix Ofosu Dompreh, Alejandro Karasik
Yaron Maïm/ Larisa Navojec
Pauline Payen, Maqué Pereyra D. Medina
Jan Rozman, Agata Siniarska
Saori Hara, Janine Iten
SODA 8 (2017–2019)
Nicola Van Straaten, Mariana Vieira
Mmakgosi Kgabi, Evgenia Chetvertkova
Furutani Michiyasu, Liadain Herriott
Taylor Kendall
SODA 4 (2013–2015)
Helena Botto, Rodrigo Garcia Alves
Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez,
Yusuke Kimura, Kyla Avery Kegler
David Pollmann, André Uerba
SODA 5 (2014–2016)
Andrew Kerton, Hwa Yeon Nam
Ivo Serra, Joshua Rutter
Mădălina Dan, Miral Yigit Daldikler
[Saori Hara]
Exchange students & guests (2010–2016)
Jarkko Partanen (2010–2011)
TeAK, UniArts, Helsinki FI
Phoebe Robinson (2011–2012)
Critical Path, Sydney AUS
Hana Vojáčkova (2014–2015)
Central St. Martins, London UK
Meredith Glisson (2015–2016)
Falmouth University UK
UArts, Philadelphia USA
130

SODA STAFF
(2007–2017)
HZT DIRECTION & ADMINISTRATION
(2006–2017)
Rhys Martin
Director since 2007
Ric Allsopp
2007 - 2011
2017 - 2018
Litó Walkey
2009 - 2013
2017 - 2018
Boyan Manchev
2011 - 2017
Sophia New
2011 - 2017
Sheena McGrandles
2013 - 2017
Nik Haffner
Artistic Director since 2012
Artistic Director (team of Directors) 2008–2012
Boris Charmatz
Artistic Director (team of Directors) 2006–2008
Ingo Reulecke
Artistic Director (team of Directors) 2006–2012
Eva-Maria Hoerster
Managing Director (team of Directors) 2006–2013
Project Coordinator since 2013
Sabine Trautwein
Administrator 2006–2013
Administrative Director since 2013
Maximilian Stelzl
Technical Director since 2014
131

SODA WORKS
(2009–2017)
SODA New Performance Work (July 2009)
Rita Roberto Envisage
Thérèse Nylen Piece
Susanne Martin Rosi tanzt Rosi- The Conference
Corsin Gaudenz Lass uns immer aufbrechen und nie
ankommen. Eine Verzettelung
Anat Eisenberg A Provocation Pure and Simple
Mirko Winkel Tricks
Felix Marchand Awarness Étude for One Performer and
an Audience
Aikaterina Papageorgiou (Kat Válastur)
So Many Gens Dark
SODA WORKS (December 2011)
Ana Trincão Crystal
Zoja Smutny This I LOVE YOU Thing
Elisabete Finger O.
Daniel Kok The Gay Romeo
Keith Lim re:self->com
Dragana Bulut Pass it on
Sheena McGrandles Eee
Ana Monteiro Showcase
Yair Vardi You never look at me from the place I see you
(January 2012)
SODA WORKS (December 2012)
Jee-Ae Lim Raw Material
Marcio Carvalho Impossible Chronologies
Joana von Mayer Trindade ZOS (She Will Not Live)
Willy Prager The Victory Day
Andrew Wass The Signal and The Noise
Sonja Pregrad The Carnival Tent Rusts in the Evening
Breeze
Igor Koruga Come Quickly, My Happiness is at Stake
Hana Lee Erdman These Children Singing in Stone
SODA WORKS (December 2013)
Niels Bovri The Théatrophone
Allison Peacock Zebra
Maria Baroncea A Certain Togetherness
Katrin Memmer almost a no body
Céline Cartillier Pathfinder’s Rhapsody
Kiran Kumar Project Entitled ‘Architectures of Dance’
Sergiu Matis Keep It Real
Flavio Ribeiro STUFF
Lisa Densem Silently the Birds Fly Through Us
SODA WORKS (December 2014)
Kyla Avery Kegler Histrionics of a Contortionist
(Flip it and Reverse it)
Rodrigo Garcia Alves StudioDisorder – La Maison
Baroque
André Uerba Terrarium
Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez Re-entering: Visual Ghost
Yusuke Kimura I saw a shadow in the dark
David Pollmann YUKO & VORTEX
Helena Botto ABRAHAMIC WHOLENESS (or my god is
better than yours)
SODA WORKS (December 2015)
Andrew Kerton The Work / _ fieldnotes
Hwa Yeon Nam Body of Time
Joshua Rutter Patterned Interference
Ivo Serra P dance
Mădălina Dan The Agency of Touch
SODA WORKS (December 2016)
Enrico D. Wey ruhestätte | still lives
Akseli Aittomäki Actors of Production
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz Terrorist Superstars
Lisa Müller-Trede effusion 01-07
Luo Yuebing Mesh Work
Lulu Obermayer Manon Lescaut
SODA WORKS (December 2017)
Agata Siniarska the soft act of killing
Maqué Pereyra TaypiMami – Footnotes to Myself
Felix Ofosu Dompreh Laborlaboratory
Janine Iten States of Transition
Jan Rozman ƒ (being)
Pauline Payen A Very Unique Gift
Alejandro Karasik Machine of Grace
Larisa Navojec A Solo Together
Yaron Maïm Material for Solometrics
Saori Hara Da Dad Dada
132

VISITING GUESTS & MENTORS
(2007–2017)
Visiting Guests & Mentors (2007–2017) including:
Detlev Alexander, Ric Allsopp, Una Bauer, Antonia Baehr, Rosemary Butcher,
Jonathan Burrows, Ramsay Burt, Rosa Casado, Alice, Chauchat, Emilyn Claid,
Franz-Anton Cramer, Bojana Cvejic, Kattrin Deufert, Igor Dobricic, Joanne Dudley,
Jeanine Durning, Ewa Einhorn, Kate Elswit, Joao Fiadiero, Heiner Goebbels, Nik Haffner,
Julyen Hamilton, Heide-Marie Härtel, Deborah Hay, Helgard Haug, Reinhild Hoffmann,
Myriam van Imshoot, Marc Jackson, Janez Janša, Joe Kelleher, Jeuno Kim,
Esa Kirkkopelto, Bojana Kunst, Vivien Lee, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Xavier Le Roy,
Susanne Linke, Sarat Maharaj, Boyan Manchev, Annemarie Matzke, Eva Meyer-Keller,
Catherine Milliken, Timothy Morton, David Moss, Chantal Mouffe, Martin Nachbar,
Sophia New, Isabel de Navarán, Frédéric Neyrat, Kira O’Reilly, Anja Osswald,
Jeroen Peeters, Thomas Plischke, Helmut Ploebst, Sergei Pristaš, Nicholas Ridout,
Daniel Belasco Rogers, Victoria Pérez Royo, Felix Ruckert, Martina Ruhsam,
Elisabeth von Samsonow, Miriam Schaub, Constanze Schellow, Robyn Schulkowsky,
Noémie Solomon, Sharon Smith, Robert Steijn, Litó Walkey, Bignia Wehrli,
Christoph Winkler, Siegmar Zacharias
External Examiners (2009–2017)
Ric Allsopp (2012), Sonja Augart, Simone Aughterlony, Silke Bake, Toni Cots,
Reinhild Hoffmann, Bojana Kunst, Margie Medlin, Peter Stamer, Maren Strack
Erasmus IP (2011–2013) including:
Sergej Pristaš, Joao Da Silva, Kirsi Monni, Konstantina Georgelou, Jasna Zmak,
Victoria Pérez Royo, Martin Hargreaves, Ric Allsopp, Rabih Mroué, Lina Saneh,
Litó Walkey, Scott deLahunta, Deufert & Plischke, Esa Kirkkopelto, Saara Hannula,
Miika Luoto, Sandra Umathum, Elena Giannotti, Vaginal Davies, Sophia New,
Terike Haapoja, Eva-Maria Hoerster
133

Photo © Sven Hagolani
Rhys Martin (Director, MA SODA since 2007) graduated from Sydney
University in Literature and Fine Arts before his move into dance
and Australia’s innovative fringe theatre scene, where he was a
founding member of the experimental One Extra Dance Company
under choreographer Kai tai Chan, eventually performing with the
company in London. After briefly working with a dance in education
company in England, he moved to Germany to join Reinhild Hoffman’s
internationally celebrated Bremer Dance Theatre. After touring
extensively, he later moved with the choreographer to work alongside
the acting ensemble of the Bochumer Schauspielhaus. Since
1986 he has worked extensively as freelance director and choreographer
for dance, opera, musical, film and theatre. His work was
awarded first prize at the Unesco XII Choreographer’s Competition
in Cologne and at the Theaterzwang Theatre Festival in Nordrhein-
Westfalen, recommended for a London New Choreographers Award
and a special mention in the Concours de Lausanne in Switzerland.
He has been invited internationally as a teacher of contemporary body-based
performance practice and is currently Professor of Dance, Choreography and Musical
Staging at Berlin’s University of the Arts and program founder / director of the HZT
MA in Solo Dance Authorship. Besides directing and producing numerous student
performances, recent commissions have included an invitation from the education
program of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to choreograph a new orchestral work
commissioned from leading American jazz composer Wynton Marsalis conducted
by Sir Simon Rattle for two hundred Berlin young performers (2010), and a commission
for the Theater Ulm, where he choreographed and directed a radical new production
of West Side Story (2016)
Photo © Sven Hagolani
Ric Allsopp (MA Staff 2007–2011; 2017–18) is an independent writer,
editor and consultant, and Emeritus Professor of Contemporary
Performance at Falmouth University, UK where he was Head of
Dance & Choreography from 2011–2016. He lectured in Theatre at
Dartington College of Arts (1982–90) and was involved in the innovative
Performance Writing course between 1996 and 2004. He has
worked extensively in continental Europe since 1990, teaching at
the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam (1990–94),
the European Dance Development Centre in Arnhem (1998–2000),
and making individual and collaborative performance works (1997–
2001) as well as leading writing and choreographic workshops and
lecturing in Holland, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain,
Croatia and Slovenia (1992–2011). He was a Senior Research Fellow
in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan
University (2007–2009), a member of the International Advisory
Board and Guest Professor for MA SODA at the HZT, University of
the Arts, Berlin from 2006–2011. Since 1996 he has been Joint Editor of Performance
Research, a bi-monthly international journal of contemporary performance (London &
New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis) recently editing issues ‘On Radical Education’
(2016), ‘On Sleep’ (2016) and ‘On Performance & Poetics’ (2015). His research interests
include poetics and histories of ‘open work’, the choreographic image and
spaces of appearance, and relations between writing, dance and poetics. His work
has been published in a variety of books and journals including Frakcija, PAJ,
Tanz-Journal, Theater der Zeit, and Performance Research.
134

Photo © Matthias Heyde
Litó Walkey (MA Staff 2007–2013; 2017–18), of Canadian Greek origins,
is a choreographer and performer based in Berlin.
Her artistic practice works with inscribed compositions that access,
index and invite a relation to performance through suggesting processes
that re-route and re-centre natural trajectories of attention.
Litó initiated as if it’s just about to happen (2016) a publication of
collaborative writing expanding from workshops facilitated at HZT
Berlin. Her performance projects include asweare/ Weld Company
(2017), A populated soliloquy (2016), aswebegin / Weld Company
(2013), Where’s the rest of me? (2012), Like that,Like this (2008),
instanded i turn (2006), The Missing Dance No.7 (2005) and wings
raised to a second power (2002).
From 2002–2009 Litó was a member of the Chicago-based performance
group Goat Island. She maintains ongoing collaborations
with artists such as Boris Hauf, Jeanine Durning, Lucy Cash and Karen
Christopher and worked as a performer with choreographers Vera
Mantero and Martine Piscani (a.o.). Litó completed her BA and Masters Studies in
Choreography at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Litó has taught regularly in
the MA SODA and BA Dance Context Choreography programs at HZT Berlin since
the pilot phase in 2007, and was Professor and Head of the BA program at HZT from
2013–2016. She teaches in the MA Choreography program at DOCH Stockholm and
is often invited to advise on choreographic work.
Boyan Manchev (MA Staff 2011–2017) is a philosopher, and Professor
at the New Bulgarian University (since 2001), Guest Professor at
Sofia University (where he taught between 1997 and 2001), Hollins
University (USA), and UdK Berlin. He is also the former Director of
Programme and Vice- President of the International College of
Philosophy in Paris (2004–2010). Boyan has lectured widely at
European, Asian and North- American universities and cultural
institutions. He has also participated as author, theorist, dramaturge
or performer in theatre and contemporary dance projects, including
Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield’s The Frequently Asked (2007);
Boris Charmatz’s expo zero and poster session Mouvement for the
Festival d’Avignon (2011); Ani Vaseva’s Frankenstein (2010), A Dying
Play (2010), and Phaeton: Miscreants (2013); and Vierte Welt Kolaborationen
Pandora’s Daughters (2016).
Photo© Marion Borriss
In the last two decades Boyan’s work has focused on ontology,
philosophy of art and political philosophy. He is consistently developing the project
of a philosophy of metamorphosis, based on an idea of a dynamic modal ontology.
He is the author of eight books and around two hundred book chapters, catalogues
and other publications in more than twenty languages including: Clouds. Philosophy
of the Free Body (Sofia, 2017), Logic of the Political (Sofia, 2012), Miracolo (Milano,
2011), L’altération du monde (Paris, 2009); La Métamorphose et l’Instant –
Dés organisation de la vie (Paris, 2009). His book The Body–Metamorphosis (Sofia,
2007) deals extensively with contemporary art, performance and dance.
135

Photo © Sophia New
Sophia New (MA Staff 2012–2017) studied Philosophy and Literature
with German at Sussex University (1993– 1997) and has an MA
in Feminist Performance from Bristol University (1998). She is a
co-founder of plan b with Daniel Belasco Rogers. Since 2002 they
have made over 25 projects for different cities, festivals, and galleries.
Their work is often site-specific and includes performance, GPS,
sound and video, dealing with issues around personal data and the
everyday. She also has worked as a solo performer and video maker
and had grants from Artsadmin, the Anglo German foundation in
London and Isis Arts in Newcastle. As a freelance performer she has
worked with Antonia Baehr, Penelope Wehrli, Petra Sabish, Gob Squad,
and Forced Entertainment. She has taught on performance courses
in Gloucester University, Aberystwyth University and Das Arts in
Amsterdam, as well as giving courses on Urban Interventions with
Daniel Belasco Rogers at the HafenCity University Hamburg, Leipzig
University and Art school. She regularly teaches Live Art and Performance
with Siegmar Zacharias at Folkwang University for the Arts, Bochum. Sophia
was a Professor at the HZT from 2012– 2017 teaching mainly on MA SODA but also
on the other two courses and developed the Makers Open as a format for all students
to show and feedback on work at any stage. Her pedagogical interest is in specifically
supporting students in finding ways to express within the work and through
supporting statements and documents, a synergy between making and reflecting
on one’s own practice.
Photo © Diethild Meier
Sheena McGrandles (MA Staff 2013–2017), born in Northern Ireland,
graduated with a BA in Dance Theatre from Laban Center, London
(2007). With a scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen
Volkes in 2012 she completed her MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship at
HZT/UdK, Berlin. In 2013 Sheena was selected for the 8–month
residency in Kampnagel Hamburg ‘K3’ in which she developed the
work true balls (2013). She has been the recipient of the ‘travel and
training’ grant from the Irish Arts Council for research projects in
Vienna (2013) and San Francisco (2015). Sheena’s works have been
presented both nationally and internationally and currently she is
developing a series of works with Claire Vivianne Sobottke Bounty
(2016) and Soft Burn (2017). Sheena’s artistic practice, both performative
and visual is concerned with queering the body in performance
and the representation of women on stage. She is currently
an artistic research associate on the BA Dance, Context, Choreography
at HZT, and artistic director of Agora MOVE.
136

References
Allsopp, Ric (2010) ‘Some Remarks on a Space of
Appearance’ in 25 Years: Bergen International Theatre,
ed. Marie Nerland, Bergen: BIT
Allsopp, Ric (2015) ‘Performing Poetics’ in Contact
Quarterly Vol.40, No.1 (Winter / Spring) pp.24–26
de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday
Life trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of
California Press
Cramer, Franz-Anton (2006) ‘Symposium Solo Dance
Authorship - A Summary’, unpublished report, SODA
Archive, Berlin: HZT
Freire, Paulo (2007 [1972]) The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed trans. Myra Ramos, New York: Continuum
Illich, Ivan (1999 [1971]) De-Schooling Society
London: Marion Boyars
Jarman, Derek (1993) Chroma: A Book of Colour
London: Vintage
Manchev, Boyan (2007) The Body-Metamorphosis
Sofia: Altera
Martin, Rhys (2005) ‘Proposal for MA in Solo, Dance /
Choreographic Authorship’ unpublished paper, SODA
Archive, Berlin: HZT
Martin, Rhys (2006) ‘Draft SODA Curriculum’ unpublished
paper, SODA Archive, Berlin: HZT
Monni, Kirsi & Ric Allsopp (eds) (2015) Practicing
Composition: Making Practice Helsinki: Kinesis / UArts
O’Connor, Peter & Michael Anderson (2015)
Applied Theatre: Research - Radical Departures
London: Bloomsbury
Olson, Charles (1992 [1960]) The Maximus Poems
Berkeley: U. California Press
Ranciére, Jacques (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics
London: Bloomsbury
Ridout, Nicolas (2009) Theatre and Ethics London:
Palgrave Macmillan
Rogoff, Irit (2004) ‘Looking Away: Participations in
Visual Culture’ in After Criticism: New Responses to Art
and Performance, ed. Gavin Butt. Oxford: Blackwell
Scarry, Elaine (2013) On Beauty and Being Just
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Schneider, Rebecca (2004) ‘Solo, Solo, Solo’ in
After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance,
ed. Gavin Butt. Oxford: Blackwell
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report, SODA Archive, Berlin: HZT
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conference Paper for ‘21st Century Performance
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137

With thanks
to the following whose energies
and visions have helped to shape
the programme of the HZT Berlin
since its inception including:
Barbara Kisseler, Claudia Feest
Tanzbüro Berlin:
Barbara Friedrich, Karin Kirchhoff
the partners of the
TanzRaumBerlin network;
Madeline Ritter and the entire team
of Tanzplan Deutschland.
SODA gratefully acknowledges
financial support for this publication
from:
Prof. Martin Rennert, President of
the Berlin University of the Arts,
Ständige Kommission für Künstlerische
und Wissenschaftliche Vorhaben
(KKWV);
Freundeskreis der UdK, Berlin –
Karl Hofer Gesellschaft e.V.;
Buchhandlung EbertundWeber.
Production
Editor: Ric Allsopp
Design: Ta-Trung (Pierre Becker,
Henning Ramke)
Print: H. Heenemann GmbH & Co. KG
Image & Photo Credits:
David Bergé, Marion Borriss,
Sven Hagolani, he.he, Matthias
Heyde, Yaron Maïm, Diethild Meier,
Manuel Moncayo, Christiane
Schniebel, Diego Wiltshire.
Translation & SODA Support:
Vera Laube, Elsa Goulko
Contents
© HZT Berlin
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced
in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photography,
recording or information
storage or revival) without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Produced for the 10 th Anniversary
of the HZT Berlin.
Publisher
Berlin University of the Arts, 2017
ISBN 978-3-89462-297-8 (Brochure)
ISBN 978-3-89462-298-5 (PDF)
Bibliographic Information of the
German National Library
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
lists this publication in the German
National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic
data are available in the
Internet through http://dnb.d-nb.de
A digital version of this
publication can be found at
www.issuu.com/hztberlin
The HZT Berlin is administrated by the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK),
the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst ‘Ernst Busch’ in cooperation with TanzRaumBerlin,
a network of Berlin’s professional dance scene.
138

139

The HZT Berlin is administrated by the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK),
the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst ‘Ernst Busch’ in cooperation with TanzRaumBerlin,
a network of Berlin’s professional dance scene.
140
ISBN 978-3-89462-297-8