EMANCIPATORY POTENTIALS OF WORKSHOP CULTURE

As many authors in this issue point out, tension is already inscribed in the very concept of the workshop. The English term workshop combines the meanings of work and commerce, and historically moves from craft-based production toward political and pedagogical practices. As Kai van Eikels emphasises in the introductory historical overview, the term originally referred to a site of manufactural production, and only towards the end of the 19th century did it acquire more explicit political dimensions in the context of liberation movements. In the contemporary post-Fordist economy, linked to the knowledge economy and immaterial labour, the workshop increasingly no longer denotes a site of production but rather a site of experience, learning, and consumption.

Within this cultural-historical framework, the various transformations of the workshop format reveal two parallel tendencies (politicisation and marketisation) which converge in the countercultural movements of the 1960s. At that time, workshops became spaces of collective practice, non-hierarchical learning, and experimentation with social forms beyond established institutional frameworks. At the same time, some contemporary critics argue that their emphasis on individual liberation contributed to the later psychologisation and expansion of the so-called self-help industry.

The contributions in this issue address this tension from different perspectives. Bojana Cvejić highlights the emancipatory potential of contemporary workshop culture and theorises it through the concept of “transindividuation”, while Sabeth Buchmann draws attention to the links between workshop practices, cybernetic thinking, and logics of self-regulation. Konstantina Georgelou analyses workshops in the context of arts education, where they often intersect with mechanisms of selection and unpaid labour, and Anne Schuh examines the format of sharing practices, which seeks to establish more egalitarian forms of exchange while simultaneously raising questions about implicit norms and criteria.

In a conversation with Kai van Eikels, artist Aernout Mik problematises the intertwining of workshop, corporate, and religious cultures, highlighting their shared embeddedness in the production of collective affectivity. His installation Speaking in tongues points to the ambivalence of such formats, which can simultaneously enable communal experiences and reproduce individualised forms of participation. Perhaps, however, collective forms of participation are enabled by shared aesthetic contexts, as suggested by the authors of a collective critical contribution developed under the mentorship of Bojana Cvejić at last year’s contemporary dance biennial Gibanica. As one of the authors writes, it was possible, based on the performances seen, to discern that younger creators “do not operate with a shared aesthetic framework that would support them in experimenting with expressive forms and tools through which they could address their generation”.

A special place in the issue is also occupied by conversations and reflective texts by artists that illuminate the workshop as a space of artistic experience. In the dialogue between Xavier Le Roy and Yvonne Rainer, generational differences and diverse contexts of workshop practice are revealed, while Diedrich Diederichsen, through personal memories of his first music workshop in the 1980s in West Berlin, reflects on the relationship between following instructions and one’s own impulses in an improvisational context.

I hope this issue will contribute to a broader discussion on the role of workshops in contemporary dance and also open up questions about precarious working conditions and the changing understanding of work more broadly. Contemporary dance can ultimately be understood as a society in miniature — a space where social relations are not only reflected but actively questioned and reshaped through shared bodily practice.

Jaka Bombač

KAI VAN EIKELS

Where, if Not in a Workshop? On the Politics and Economics of Practicing Infrastructure

BOJANA CVEJIĆ

Scores, Feelings: Or Whence Workshops Transindividuate

SABETH BUCHMANN

Working On/In Workshops

KONSTANTINA GEORGELOU

Postwork Imaginaries: The Workshop in Art Education

ANNE SCHUH

Sharing Practice, Formatting Dance

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Growing Up in Musical Workshops: Giving in to Momentary Urges

XAVIER LE ROY in YVONNE RAINER

How Do You Come Into the Situation Then?

AERNOUT MIK in KAI VAN EIKELS

Business Workshops and the Holy Ghost

ANA LETUNIĆ, ANA PINTER, ELENA NOVAKOVITS, GREGOR SIROTIĆ MARUŠIĆ, IGOR BURIĆ, KAROLINA BUGAJAK, MARINA SRNKA, NEFELI GIOTI

Meandering Critically Through Gibanica: Notes from a Critique Workshop