Symposium, Workshops, Labs in collaboration with Tanzquartier Wien and MDW universität für Musik und Darstellende Künste Wien
Ancestral Futurities
Encounters with Heritage in Contemporary Dance and Choreographic Practices
31.10, 02. & 03.11 | Tanzquartier Wien
Concept: Ulduz Ahmadzadeh with with the contribution of Sevi Bayraktar
Curation Team: Ulduz Ahmadzadeh, Beatriz Herrera Corado, Christina Gillinger
With contributions by: Ulduz Ahmadzadeh, Joshua Akubo Gabriel, Beatriz Herrera Corado, Bianca Figl, Nicole Haitzinger, Till Jasper Krappmann, Simon Mayer, Şebnem Sözer Özdemir, Amanda Piña, Negin Rezaie, Urmimala Sarkar, Elnaz Sheshgelani, Hamidreza Ojaghi
How do artists engage with the cultural heritage, dance practices and rituals connected to
ancestrality? What strategies and methodologies are used by artists/ researchers in their
practice? How can knowledge systems, narratives, memories, and traditions be transmitted,
and how do their meanings shift in contemporary art contexts?
This encounter seeks to generate a transformative movement into a future that reframes,
expands, and critically positions dance knowledge systems in the dominant frameworks of the
European and North American dance canon.
Over the course of three days, artists, scholars, cultural practitioners, and other interested
individuals will come together to exchange ideas, methods, and experiences around
knowledge systems applied in contemporary dance practices. The program includes scholarly,
and artistic engagements organized in panel discussions, lectures, and studio labs. It creates a
space to acknowledge the diversity of bodily epistemologies, highlighting how social,
political, spiritual, and ancestral movement practices inform, challenge, reshape, and expand
contemporary dance and choreography. The aim is to collectively generate an ongoing
questioning of what we label as traditional and contemporary and investigate ways of creating relationships among translocal experiences and their transmissions.
Studio Lab
This three-hour Studio Lab brings together artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners in an
embodied research space, to share and explore how ritual, and ancestral movement practices
are carried, transformed, and reactivated in contemporary dance and performance. Moving
beyond discussion, participants engage in collective exercises, transmission scores, and hybrid
research practices to investigate how knowledge lives in the body, how it is passed between
individuals and contexts. It pays particular attention to how its meanings shift through
different choreographic practices and stagings. The Lab critically engages with contemporary
structures of knowledge production, representation, and power that shape how dance is
circulated, interpreted, and valued. The Lab is process oriented and research driven,
encouraging interdisciplinary experimentation. It creates a space of exchange at eye level,
where participants actively contribute their own practices within a framework developed by
the facilitator and invited guests.
Facilitators hold the space, propose methodological structures, and support a collective
process of exploration. They are responsible for clearly communicating the format and setting
conditions of participation in advance.