Bad Ballet
In Bad Ballet, three dance artists and a dance historian counter the homogenisation, discipline and hierarchies often associated with ballet through desire, exchange and joy. Andrew Champlin, Elizabeth Ward and Kevin Fay will co-facilitate a virtuosity-indifferent class, share their research and the ballet stories carried in their bodies, and transmit choreographic material based on The Nutcracker. Anna Leon will propose a lecture exploring non-centralised, invisibilised histories of ballet as a popular entertainment spectacle.
Programme:
12.00–16.00: workshop
16.00–17.30: break / meal
17.30–19.00: lecture
Both class and talk are open, without a prerequisite of having studied ballet.
is a performance artist and international dance teacher. He studies the philosophy of ballet instructor Janet Panetta, a practice that also guides his art research on learning as the experience of freedom. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The New School, an M.A. in Choreography from Stockholm University of the Arts, and a PhD candidate at The University of Applied Arts Vienna.
born 1977 in Detroit, is a dancer and choreographer and occasional Outside Eye. She is interested in how individual and collective dance histories are shaped by geography and the movements of people and ideas. Her earliest performing experiences were dancing children’s roles with the Atlanta Ballet. In Austria her work has been shown at brut, WUK, TQW, Wiener Festwochen, ImPulsTanz, and steirischer herbst.
holds a B.A. in Dance & Communication Studies from Northwestern University and is a freelance contemporary dance artist based in Brussels, Belgium. He has collaborated on projects with Veli Lehtovaara, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing, Eleanor Bauer, Marc Vanrunxt, Fabrice Samyn, and Olga de Soto. He also contributes to grassroots activist work with State of the Arts. With residency support and a research scholarship from The Flemish Authorities, Kevin has an ongoing research project that interrogates masculinity from queer, feminist perspectives. In this, he organises open, performative reading circles called conversing with masculinity and develops choreography. He has taught professionally in both the US and Europe, and his teaching of ballet is influenced most strongly by Janet Panetta and Zvi Gotheiner.
is a dance historian working in and through research, curatorial theory projects, teaching and dance/performance dramaturgy. Currently, she works as a theory curator at Tanzquartier Wien and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she researches peripheralised dance modernities through a focus on ballet in early 20th-century Greece. She has taught at the Universities of Vienna, Salzburg and Bern, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and SEAD.
Lecture: free admission
In English