Public talks
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PUBLIC LECTURE THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ
26 February 2024, 19:00
Wiels Auditorium
Free entrance, reservation required via this link
Organisation: PARTS, in collaboration with Kaaitheater and Wiels


PARTS, Wiels and Kaaitheater organise a public lecture by Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, well-known specialist in Black Dance Studies and Queer and Feminist Studies.
The public lecture happens in the context of DeFrantz’ seminar for the MA students at PARTS.

Let’s Go Outside: Dancing Beyond the Institution

The institutionalization of dance in academic settings has forced a reckoning with genre, access, aesthetics, and histories as an act of imagination, at least. This talk focuses on the ways that dance resists containment by institutions, and how imagination operates as a form of study. Calling on the rhetorics of dance as protest, as erotic demonstration of possibility, and as manifestation of outrageous style, we wonder together at the ways dance arrives outside of the scaffolding of the linguistic, to demonstrate ways to be in relationship to authority while moving in another direction. Afrofuturism might show us a way …

26 February 2024, 19:00
Wiels Auditorium
Free entrance, reservation required via this link
Organisation: PARTS, in collaboration with Kaaitheater and Wiels


PREVIOUS PUBLIC LECTURES 2019-23

28 March 2023 - Public Talk by Alva Noë ‘Perception as a relationship’
Free entrance - no reservations - 7pm - P.A.R.T.S.

‘We achieve the world, and each other. To perceive is to accomplish intimacy, or to aim at that. Perception is a loving attitude, and love an epistemic one. In this talk I will explore these ideas, some of which are counterintuitive, and show how they grow out of the proposition that perception is something we do, not something that happens in us, or to us.’

Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT 2004), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (FSG 2009), Varieties of Presence (Harvard 2012), Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (FSG, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (OUP 2019), and Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford 2022). His newest book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us Human (Princeton) is due out in June 2023. Alva is a Professor of Philosophy, and chair of the Department of Philosophy, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2018 recipient of the Judd Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. From 2011 until 2017 he was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s science and culture blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture. He is currently an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin.
In 2023, Alva Noë also taught a seminar in the Master program STUDIOS.

24 November 2022 - "And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy"
Book launch by Jeroen Peeters, with Jonathan Burrows and Sara Manente

Free entrance - no reservations - 7pm - P.A.R.T.S.

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, in "And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy", Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking. How do you set up conditions for the work to come about? How do you create a shared ground for exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense? The book is written from practice and reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with various dance-makers.

"And then it got legs" is published by Varamo Press. Dance-making and dramaturgy thrive on embodied knowledge, oral transmission and a culture of commoning. This spirit guides the presentation too: choreographers Jonathan Burrows and Sara Manente will respond to the book with oral annotations, followed by a conversation with Jeroen Peeters.
You can purchase the book at the event.
More on the book >>

8 November 2022 - Where is contemporary Dance? The public sphere and transnationalism

Lecture by Funmi Adewole
Watch the lecture here.
Dr ‘Funmi Adewole’s talk is part dance history, dance theory and part provocation. She defines contemporary dance as an artistic practice of the public sphere and argues that this perspective demands that we re-focus the lens through which we see it. She reflects on moments in the evolution of contemporary dance as a practice in Britain, recent scholarship such as the article When is contemporary dance? (2017) by dance scholar SanSan Kwan and recent experiences in the field including interactions with the international cohort of students at PARTS. Her argument that is Contemporary dance has evolved in ways that has shifted it from a Euro-American practice to a rhizomic transnational one.

11 October 2022 - "Investigating mangrove ecosystems through biology, art and history"
On Tuesday October 11th we organized a public lecture with Farid Dadough-Guebas, who has also thought a seminar in the Studios program at PARTS.
More info here >>

April 2022 - ‘For they not know what they dance?' -
a farewell lecture.
Rudi Laermans is one of the very few people who has been involved as a teacher in PARTS since the very start of the school in 1995. He has taught sociology and theory to 13 generations of students.
More info here >>

An edited version of the text of the lecture has been published on the website of Etcetera >>

September 2021 - Live streamed interviews with Theo Van Rompay
On Sunday September 26th, Rosas and PARTS celebrated the retirement of Theo Van Rompay, co-founder of the school who worked as deputy director for more than 25 years. As part of the celebrations, Theo was interviewed by journalist Anna Luyten, theatre maker and political activist Dominique Willaert and choreographer Jonathan Burrows.

October 2020 - Philosopher Ben Woodard gave a seminar about the concept of the Anthropocene and the questions that this raises.
Watch the lecture here.

September 2020 - Vinciane Despret in conversation with Bojana Cvejic 'About birds and other animals' can be seen here.

February 2020 - Watch a semi-public lecture with David Hernandez here.

November 2019 - Watch the public lectures with Stephen Zepke “Towards an Aesthetics of the future” here and Thomas Talawa Presto “The Black body as an archive & what you are trained not to see” here.