Angélique Willkie, Professor of Contemporary Dance at the Université de Montréal, draws on a wealth of multidisciplinary experience and many years of collaboration with internationally renowned artists. In her keynote, she reflects on the "relational body" of the performer. Their relational relationship to the world is conditioned, among other things, by their morphology, gender, sexual orientation, ableness, ethnic and cultural origin and social class. They are thus specifically situated, in a complex relationship to the outside world. This complexity - she urges - should be used more often as an active starting point for new creations. It depends on how and also which bodies are staged in their multi-layered interconnectedness. While the concept of the body as a supposedly neutral canvas for performance is still very present in contemporary dance and circus, Willkie draws attention to standardizations of these bodies. She questions existing preconceptions about what constitutes contemporary quality in dance and circus, what is supposedly "neutral" and to what extent performatively deployed bodies are involved in the reproduction of colonial thought patterns.
The relational body - Angélique Willkie
