The first part
Wednesday 30 of March
At the time we initiated our collective Praticable, we wanted to find ways to give visibility to the working context we were creating. We thought that we could achieve this by transposing the principle of the foreband in music to our dance context. In music, it is a quite common practice that a newcomer, a less famous singer or band plays before the concert of a more renowned one. In that context, it can give visibility to artists who haven't yet a place in the market, as well as it can help an artist to reach a broader audience. The fame of the main artist of the evening is what allows this to happen. Of course, fame was not for us something we could rely on and our purpose was not exactly the same as in music. But we thought that we could take advantage of the concept of the foreband in many different ways.
We decided to set the following rule for the presentation of pieces made in the frame of Praticable: when a piece signed by one or several participants to the collective is programed by a theater, we program ourselves a first part to it, which consist in a short piece, an excerpt of a piece or a work in progress by another participant. The duration of this first part goes up to 20 minutes. To present a first part together with the piece that is programed gives us the opportunity to inform the audience about the organization of the whole project, to contextualize each work by showing more approaches to the notion of body practice as a choreographic tool (this notion is central to what Praticable is). It allows us to use our networks to share the opportunities of each of us and to distribute proposals that are either in-progress or shorter than the usual formats promoted on the performance market.
To give visibility to our working context seemed important to do since our collective is not corresponding to a classical definition of it. Otherwise, what is Praticable would remain obscure from the outside. Indeed, we are not signing pieces collectively but instead, part of what one can call the resAt the time we initiated our collective Praticable, we wanted to find ways to give visibility to the working context we were creating. We thought that we could achieve this by transposing the principle of the foreband in music to our dance context. In music, it is a quite common practice that a newcomer, a less famous singer or band plays before the concert of a more renowned one. In that context, it can give visibility to artists who haven't yet a place in the market, as well as it can help an artist to reach a broader audience. The fame of the main artist of the evening is what allows this to happen. Of course, fame was not for us something we could rely on and our purpose was not exactly the same as in music. But we thought that we could take advantage of the concept of the foreband in many different ways.
We decided to set the following rule for the presentation of pieces made in the frame of Praticable: when a piece signed by one or several participants to the collective is programed by a theater, we program ourselves a first part to it, which consist in a short piece, an excerpt of a piece or a work in progress by another participant. The duration of this first part goes up to 20 minutes. To present a first part together with the piece that is programed gives us the opportunity to inform the audience about the organization of the whole project, to contextualize each work by showing more approaches to the notion of body practice as a choreographic tool (this notion is central to what Praticable is). It allows us to use our networks to share the opportunities of each of us and to distribute proposals that are either in-progress or shorter than the usual formats promoted on the performance market.
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Praticable proposes a specific model of working together between artists in the field of dance and choreography: it is a horizontal work structure, based on the sharing of body practices, which brings together research, learning processes, creation, production and distribution, multiplying circulations between them. This structure is the basis for the creation of performances that are signed by one or more participants of the project. These performances are grounded, in one way or another, in the exploration of body practices to approach representation. Praticable was created in 2005 by Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad and Odile Seitz.
