International Festival of Learning (IFL.2)

Welcome to IFL.2!
Dance, silence, restoration, dismantling, gathering, health, revelry, image-making, ritual and the poetic are all words that swirl in our conversations as we put together this second edition of IFL.

This edition celebrates both the notion of community and ID’s growing community; the curatorial propositions are wide and varied, inviting criss-crossings, alchemical sparks and unlikely leaps, celebrating all that can and might happen through dance. 

The idea of ritual, and ways of harnessing a sense of belonging, reverberates across the festival, and is signalled by our opening night with Timing is Divine, a solo drumming performance by Vida Vojić. Furthering this theme of belonging, we are delighted to be working with Netherlands-based collective Building Conversation to explore how the future is based – literally – on how we talk with each other.

With A Gathering we get durational, with micro-happenings, conversations and performances across a day and night at Siobhan Davies Studios. Starting with a conversation about how we generate belonging through collective action, A Gathering includes an installation by Christopher Matthews about queerness and aging, winter readings and rituals by an international collective, and a ‘watch party’ of streamed performance created live, remotely, by five improvisers in five countries. Things ramp up a bit after dinner and drinks, with an invocation from THE BAND THAT DANCES (the band formerly known as The Yonis); it will be nearly Christmas after all.

Another thread woven into this edition is Dance, Intimacy and the Civic, continuing ID’s exploration into how body-based practices meet with and have relevance to wider contexts. Two talks address this in different ways via our partnership with Sadler’s Wells and Roehampton University, while a lab led by Miranda Tufnell, Filipa Pereira Stubbs and Cai Tomos holds a space for dance and healthcare practitioners to work together. Here the aim is to address and articulate the evolving landscape of dance in health, and to reflect on ways that poetic, artistic, and clinical perspectives can intertwine.

Working across a range of media including performance, Harold Offeh will be leading a lab in image-making and subverting historical narratives. A sense of history is also at the heart of Open Desk, a one-to-one performance encounter with Galit Criden at Goldsmiths Women’s Art Library which considers their collection through a matriarchal lens. And in Indian Dance: Articulations/ Tensions/ Negotiations, a durational practice between Shivaangee Agrawal, Mandeep Raikhy and guests will be platformed online across continents. This experimental space will invite contributions, provocations and questions about Indian dance in our current worlds and how tradition, politics, artefacts and embodiment intersect.

The festival culminates in three days of collectively glorious restorative dancing with Annie Pui Ling Lok, co-presented with Siobhan Davies Studios, our base for the festival and ID’s ongoing year-round partner.

We can’t wait to share all of this with you. Without you it is not a festival! Join us!

Heni & Nikki, co-directors