DansFunk Festival: Forum

Safety & Security within Dance & the Arts

The DansFunk Forum is a day for exploring the festival’s main themes of safety and security within dance and cultural in greater depth.

With keynote speaker Emma Holten, disabled dance artists, academics and practitioners including Diana Niepce and Kenny Fries, and festival curator Filip Pawlak, we'll look at how safety affects the way artists work. We'll also ask how secure freedom of expression really is, when money, politics and society all feel less stable. 

Everyone is welcome to join DansFunk Forum. You might be an artist, a student, someone who works in culture, or just curious about inclusive and norm-breaking arts. 

Tickets

Since the forum has a limited number, tickets are required. Tickets are free and can be booked on this website. 

If we can help you with ticket bookings or you have any questions, contact us by email to  dialog@skanesdansteater.se or phone +46(0)703-44 58 11.

Program

09:00–09:30 A soft arrival

You are invited to join us for a gentle beginning to the day with morning coffee, freshly and baked muffins. Come and meet new people.

You can also watch the video performance Up In The Attic by Mikołaj Sobczak and Mira Thompson.

09:30–09:40 Welcome

Skånes Dansteater and our host and festival curator Filip Pawlak will welcome you.

09:40–10:30 Keynote Speaker: Emma Holten

Writer and researcher Emma Holten will give the keynote speech: How do we balance safety with freedom? 

This seems to be the constant question for artists. You must experiment, push boundaries, and also live, eat, care for your loved ones. The history of feminism can teach us about how to view freedom in new ways, and how to find the radical potential in depending on others..

10:30–10:40 Short break

10:40–11:50 Panel Discussion: Unusual alliances

A discussion between Diana Niepce (choreographer), Kenny Fries (writer and curator) and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt (associate professor at Copenhagen University) on brave art and high demands on culture in a changing world. Filip Pawlak is hosting. 

Today, there seem to be increasing demands on cultural organizations and artists to be everything, to everyone, all of the time. Dance companies, theaters, and venues are asked to do and be many things; they should be accessible meeting places for all, whilst at the same time they should be places where artists should be able to make bold, brave, challenging work, with unlimited freedom. But is it really possible for them to be both?

Dance by disabled artists can be powerful. It can break away from what people expect dance to look like, and it can show the power that society holds over disabled people. In this discussion we’ll ask how art can stay brave whilst still keeping public support for art to be funded.

11:50–13:20 Lunch break

Skånes Dansteater’s Theatre bar will be open with a vegetarian lunch alternative to buy. You’re also welcome to bring your own lunch and use the Skånes Dansteater kitchen. Coffee and tea will be served for free.

13:20–14:15 Open Studio: Demy Papathanasiou

This year's festival artist-in-residence, Demy Papathnasiou invites you to join her in the studio, where she will share some of what she has been working on during her residency. This will include a discussion with Aristide Rontini about her work and she will ask us: Do you feel safe?

Demy is a Greek choreographer and dancer whose work creates spaces where everyone can feel safe and equally present, whatever their body or ability.

14:15–14:30 A short break. 

14:30–15:10 Conversation: Art Made In Conditions of Danger

What happens to norm-breaking art created out of resistance when mainstream society feels threatened? What creative strategies do artists working on the fringes of the mainstream employ? A conversation between the acclaimed writer and curator Kenny Fries and Iury Salustiano Trojaborg, who, in her research at Lund University, has explored how collective histories can be brought to life, experienced, and transformed through performative practice. In this conversation they will explore the tensions between feelings of pride and suffering in art making. They will examine the creative strategies employed by artists working on the fringes of the mainstream, those who build their art partly (though not exclusively) on a sense of injustice, suffering, and the need for justice.

15:10–15:20 Provocation: Mira Thompson

In a short video provocation by disabled performer and researcher Mira Thompson, we will be invited to reflect together about where our own sense of safety begins and ends. 

15:20–15:30 Closing Words

Drawing the day to a close will be DansFunk curator Filip Pawlak and dance artist Aristide Rontini.