conference about to begin

Sitting here in the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, where the choreography conference is about to begin. Larger turnout than I had imagined.

For the afternoon/evening we will move to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, where I also did my interview last night (it will be posted with the other materials in couple of weeks).

As you may have heard, Barcelona was interesting yesterday, perhaps the most violent location in Spain’s general strike (which was for yesterday only). I was trapped in one establishment as the owner put a steel cover over his windows, but was released a few minutes later after the violence had passed. Later, I saw the big bonfire in front of the stock exchange. Numerous black flags were waving on the streets last night.

Today seems calm, by contrast.

I only knew two people at this conference ahead of time (Goran Pristaš and Mårten Spångberg) but just met about 5 more.

It will be too obtrusive to live-blog this particular event, but I may check in later in the day and say how it’s going. The title of the conference is “Choreography as Extended Practice,” and the idea is to move choreography beyond the sphere of dance in the strict sense (which is good, because I know very little about dance in the strict sense) to discuss any designed sequences of movement at all. The conclusions of my paper surprised and disturbed me.