ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s a new generation of young choreographers – often inspired by the strategies invented in the context of the Judson Dance Theater during the 1960s – has entered the field of contemporary dance in Europe and raised questions about the resonances between products and processes, bodies and politics, and choreography and the sensible, understood as an immanent place of concepts, percepts, and affects. This has happened in a time of advanced globalization, a development tangential to the international dance markets. 6MONTHS1LOCATION is a collective experiment that took place at the Center for Choreography and Dance in Montpellier in 2008. It was part of the ex.e.r.ce08 educational program, and, as such, combined concerns about the relations and cross-currents between education, research, and production in dance. There were nine participants invited in the framework of ex.e.r.ce08 and nine participants in that of 6MONTHS1LOCATION. Each offered his/her own particular project and participated in two or three others. In total there were eighteen projects, and a few preceding questions holding them together. What procedures, working methods, formats, discourses, and new concepts might result if eighteen people stay together in one location for the duration of six consecutive months, not to work on one larger common project, but to share different approaches, interests, and backgrounds? Most of the time before the meeting in Montpellier, the members of this temporary group had gone in different directions; everybody being busy with his or her own work, always changing places, cities, institutional contexts, collaborators, colleagues, and friends. Therefore, the residence at the Choreographic Center was a state of exception, in contrast to, as the initiators (Bojana Cvejić and Xavier Le Roy) put it, “a free market, in which artists are forced to constantly reinvent themselves as a desirable commodity competing for a limited number of opportunities in the shrinking curated spaces.” 1