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PAF SUMMER UNIVERSITY 2017 - PHILOSOPHY, INDIGO DANCE, MUSIC, POETRY - Aug 7th / Sept 4th

Submitted by Valentina Desideri on Sat, 2017-06-10 16:01

7 - 14 August
PHILOSOPHY - Upping the Ex-ante

Once more we try to shake out some dust and find the best neglected pages to ponder in a shared manner and collaborative mode. This week makes a wager on the ability to philosophise through uncertainty, where the minutiae of self-abolition propels thought and initiates its wandering. Always a messy process: the accumulation of philosophical ‘interest’ seems to remain problematically individual. This muddle might be why a kind of neo-existentialism is so evidently on the rise. The spontaneous philosophy of philosophers—elaborated currencies—should be questioned, opening vectors of ludic exchanges. Dialogue finds itself occurring in ancient texts and while washing dishes.

The tension between self-abolition (as an ideal) and individual presentations creates an urgency to realise what a sustained thinking together can do. Collective philosophising requires more than a few dice rolls, oblique strategies, and parlour tricks to get us out from behind our desks, our thoughts from out of our heads: lest we forget that philosophy was once peripatetic.

This year we go sans-speaker, clearing the board. Things will be immanently shaped by those present, so bring something to do, something to speak through or to speak through you, something to think-with—collectively. Or not. There is no obligation to prepare anything ex-ante (in advance). The board will fill with freshly-minted proposals—philosophical, musical, mobile, poetic, filmic. To share one’s work is to test past and future collective memory as much as map the current terrain of thought: we can draw different lines in the dust.

Food will be handled through a combination of collective organisation and nominated helpers. The format will depend on the number of attendees, but we expect it to be between €10-15 per person per day on top of the stay per night. Reservations at contactpaf@gmail.com
Prepared by Ben Woodard, Amy Ireland, Matt Hare, Katrina Burch, Lendl Barcelos.

15 - 21 August
DANCE - Indigo Dance Work

The last three years the dance week during the summer university at PAF was known as Indigo Dance Festival a highly convivial week with an extra luxurious attitude. These have been absolutely fantastical, but sometimes it takes closure to generate opening.

This summer at PAF we leave the festival business to the festivals, and go to work.
Instead of having a huge palette of proposals in a summercamp/work as leisure vibe, we ask what knowledges, dances and conversations can happen, when we work together and next to each other. This year we don’t do Indigo Dance Festival we do Indigo Dance Work.

The week will be organized in three activities: dancing, writing and rehearsing.
Dancing will be like in dance classes, tba.
Writing will be a writing studio/workshop facilitated by Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness and Chloe Chignell.
Rehearsals will be for one big dance piece choreographed by Emma Daniel and Adriano Wilfert Jensen, to be presented at PAF in the end of the week.
Everyone is welcome to invite themselves to join everything.
And for the rest PAF culture: The Do’er decides, Make it possible for others and Don’t leave traces.

Food will be taken care of by extra chefs during the week.
Prices: 18€ per night (+12€ yearly membership)
17€ for 3 meals a day and coffee and tea and wine
For the complete week 210€ including 6 nights in PAF, 3 meals/day incl. coffee & wine and PAF membership valid for one year (12€).
Reservations at contactpaf@gmail.com
More information tba at www.indigodancefestival.tumblr.com
Questions at emmadaniel@live.fr
his week is prepared by Emma Daniel, Linda Blomqvist, Adriano Wilfert Jensen

22 - 28 August
MUSIC - musiking, practicing, playing

Not knowing what to expect but being prepared to expose oneself, leaving our habits at home, contaminating the social, playing political, loving yourself enough to feel the need to betray it, i.e. taking risks individually and collectively is what PAF Music Week 2017 will be about. It concerns our respective practices of music, our ways of collaborating, our parts in the collective mood and organization, and our abilities to describe and discuss music together.
We will favor ideas, experiences, trials, initiatives, games, texts, collaborations, performances, lectures etc where personal habits and collective norms become the #1 materials and terrains of experimentation. We love PAF because it can be a blank score with the capacity to turn overnight into an unheard symphony by means of collective energy, unbound creativity and thorough thinking. The week wants to be this symphony.

We organizers decided not to organize but to foment it by proposing a frame and applying to ourselves exactly what we require from all participants. Therefore we have a plan, but no program. Here are the main orientations so far :
. There is no leader, no dedicated speaker, we all create the week.
. We favor ideas where music is played, displayed and thought in other configurations than the good old concert and where the economy of attention is being redistributed.
. We favor ideas where genres, tools and situations are being shifted, subverted, "détournées" in order to give birth to unexpectable results.
. We tend to favor collective endeavors, but see no dogma here..

Practically:
We will share as much information possible before August so that you know better the context and its ressources (spaces, technical equipment...).
On the first day, will take place a meeting of collective decision making where all ideas will be put on the table and discussed until a program appears.
The meeting will take place in PAF where everybody is hosted, in St-Erme, an hour from Paris.
PAF MUSIC WEEK starts on Aug 22nd for lunch at 2pm and ends on Aug 28th evening. We ask all participants to do their best to be there during the entire time.
For the complete week, price is 210€ including 6 nights in PAF, 3 meals/day incl. coffee & wine and PAF membership valid for one year (12€). Otherwise 18€ per night (+12€ yearly membership) and 17€ per day for 3 meals and coffee and tea and wine.
Reservation at contactpaf@gmail.com
For more questions, write to Ana anaberkenhoff@posteo.de, Perrine antre2deux@gmail.com and/or Fred homnimal@gmail.com
Ana Berkenhoff, Perrine Bailleux and Frédéric Bernier

29 August - 4 Sept
*** PAF POETRY WEEK ***

This year's Summer University at the Performing Arts Forum (Saint Erme, France ––http://www.pa-f.net/) will host a week dedicated to poetry. We invite you –– poets, theorists, activists, and other stranded cognitarians –– to actively participate during a week of presentations, performances, small workshops and interventions that will be scheduled more or less formally from breakfast to rave-time, alongside the lectures of three invited speakers: Peli Grietzer, Ed Luker, and Mia You (more details below).

Following the configuration of the space and the collegial spirit of Summer University and PAF at large, the protocol we suggest is not the one of a poet on a stage reciting in front of a solemn audience (or not only). We’d rather go for a mode of experimentation with the methods that we use to engage with poetry: as performance, text group reading, showing the critical work that we strive to do and more, asking of poetry that it recover or produce singular powers of explicitation of potentially manifold extension, beginning with its own practice. As conversations start more easily when there is an imaginary centre to hold on to, without this setting the boundaries of the exchange, one of the questions we would like to put to the fore is that of the false dilemma between lyrical confession and formalism, shedding light on their relationship to contemporary modes of poetic subjectivation.

This is quite an endeavour, not in the least since there will be many languages at the table. But if we are successful, we will have established a new custom: a week of poetry at PAF!

Invited speakers:

*** Peli Grietzer is completing his PhD in mathematically informed literary theory at Harvard (Comparative Literature) and the HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics. His dissertation borrows mathematical forms from deep learning theory to model the ontology of "ambient" phenomena like moods, vibes, styles, sensoria, cultural logics, and structures of feeling, and goes on to deductively derive Modernist poetic practice from this premise. He is an on-and-off contributor to the ambient/archival literature collective Gauss PDF, and working on a feature film with video artist Tzion Hazan.

*** Ed Luker is a poet and a theorist. He is completing his PhD at Northumbria University on the politics of attention in the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne. His theoretical writing has engaged with issues of lyric poetry, militant poetics, fantasy, labour and the work of Prynne, Olson, Sean Bonney and Connie Scozzaro among others. Ed's poems are published in three chapbooks: /Peak Return/ (Shit Valley Press, 2014), /Headlost/ (Rivet Press, 2014) and /The Sea Together/ (Materials Press, 2016).

*** Mia You is a poet, critic, translator and theorist, completing a doctoral dissertation on the influence of Gertrude Stein on contemporary poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2016 her first collection of poetry, /I, Too, Dislike It/, was released by 1913 Press. Her poems also have appeared as a chapbook, /Objective Practice/ (Achiote Press, 2007), and an artist’s book, /YOU/ (created by Thorsten Kiefer, 2004). She is collaborating on a book of hours and movements with Lyn Hejinian, writes essays and book reviews. You was born in Seoul, South Korea, grew up in Northern California, and now lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Practicalities:

PAF Poetry Week starts with a welcome dinner at 9pm on August 29 and ends on September 4 with a lunch. Preferably, participants stay for the whole event, but it's up to you. You can always stay longer.

We estimate the total costs for the full week to be between 180 and 210 euros. [PAF asks a fee of 18 euro per night when staying for five nights or longer, 20 euro/night for short stays. Besides this, you will need a PAF membership of 12 euros, valid for one year. Food (3 meals per day, coffee/tea and wine) will be organized collectively and, depending on the number of participants, we aim to spend between 10 and 15 euros per day.]

Organizing group: Persis Bekkering, Silvia Mollicchi, Olivier Surel, Thea Porter.

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