Creative Crossroad Residency
13 – 23 May 2025
The choreographer Maud Blandel will be the artist in residence during the 18th edition of the “Antistatic” festival. Her artistic research is being carried out within the framework of the “Creative Crossroads” program of the “Life Long Burning” (LLB 3) project.
Initially trained as a dancer, Maud Blandel is a choreographer living in Lausanne (Switzerland). She completed her training with a Master’s degree in Theatre Direction from La Manufacture (Lausanne), and continued her education with The Work.Master programme in performance at la HEAD in Geneva. In 2015, she founded the association I L K A and began her own projects. Her approach to dramaturgy, her taste for transformation and her concern for musicality lead her to create unusualand powerful choreographic objects.
Her creations include Touch down (2015), Lignes de conduite (2018), Diverti Menti (2020), Double Septet (2021) and L’œil nu (2023), awarded with the Swiss Award for choreographic production in 2023.
In her recent works, Maud is interested in exploring physicalities and states of presence resulting from a constant negotiation between principles dictated by/for the collective and individual expressivity. Recently involved in the sound creation of L’oeil nu, she now gives sound and music a decisive place as a genuine dramaturgical tool in her creations.
Alongside her work, Maud has collaborated with artists such as Cindy Van Acker, Heiner Goebbels and Romeo Castellucci, and is currently very active as a dramaturg with young performing artists.
Maud has been artist-in-residence at the Arsenic (Lausanne) since 2018, and will be associate artist at the CNDC in Angers (2024 – 2026) and at Bonlieu scène nationale in Annecy (2024 – 2027). Since 2016, her work has been supported by Parallèle based in Marseille.
RESEARCH PRESENTATION
In her epistolary fiction, Three Guineas, published in 1938, Virginia Woolf gives form to the response of an ‘educated woman’ to the question her interlocutor, an ‘educated man’, addresses her: “According to you, what can be done to avoid war?”
Using this book as a starting point for an upcoming work, Maud Blandel opens a wide-ranging research aiming to transpose the links between war and patriarchy onto the stage in the form of a grotesque choreographic satire.
As part of the Creative Crossroads Programme of The Life Long Burning project, the residency at Brain Store Project during the Antistatic Festival in Sofia will be the very first step of the research process. It will focus mainly on the relationship between sound and movement, following the idea that “there is no such thing as military music, only military relationships to music”.
The performativity sought will be above all anarchic: any attempt to march in step or obey the beat will be deliberately sabotaged.
Capacity Grid
Inge Gappmaier (www.varukt.at) is a choreographer, dancer, dance-pedagogue, dramaturge and researcher based in Vienna. The focus of her work is the reflection of the contemporary self-conception of the human body between poetry, technology, historical developments and socio-political structures.
The residency is dedicated to a first articulation of a performance, inspired by José Saramago’s novel „Blindness“. Like Saramago’s ‘white blindness’, which strips society of empathy, with this work Gappmaier aims to explore the dynamics emerging from a devaluation of physical presence in favor of digital disembodiment.
She creates an immersive, choreographic format that puts the body, its materiality and presence, hence intelligence, sensibility and vulnerability into focus. She works with the skin as a boarder between inner and outer landscapes.
What makes a human being human? How is the politics of guiding attention affecting our capacity of being empathic? How to deal with the macro-politics reoccurring in the micro-politics of dance, choreography and encounters with an audience?
Gappmaier studied Choreography and Performance at the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen (GER), as well as Contemporary Dance Education at Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. She receives various scholarships, including the DanceWEB scholarship at the ImPulsTanz festival as well as an annual federal research scholarship,
In international collaborations, she presents her artistic work as performances, installations, digital formats and texts a.o. at brut Wien, KubusEXPORT, Kosmos Theater Wien, Albanian Dance Meeting, Korrespondance Festival (CZE), Novi Ganz Zagreb and Plesni Teater Ljubljana. Most recently, the immersive dance performance “now” and the duet with herself “protect. there is no wind in geometricals worlds” premiered at brut Vienna.
Open House
21 may, 17:30
Toplocentrala, Hall 4
The young dance artist Ana Petkova shares her experience as a scholarship recipient of the prestigious DanceWeb program in Vienna. The discussion will be moderated by dance and theater critic Angelina Georgieva, who will also share her impressions as a guest visitor at the “Moving in November” festival in Finland and its audience engagement formats.
Open House is part of the project “Life Long Burning – Future Lost and Found (LLB 3)” and is carried out with the financial support of the “Creative Europe” Programme of EU.
The residency and Capacity Grid are part of the European project “Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found” (LLB3), co-financed by Creative Europe Programme of the EU and the National Culture Fund, Bulgaria, under “Creative Europe” subprogramme.