research residencies: An interview with András Engelmann

Interview with András Engelmann from the Hungary-based collective on the research residencies.

Your two years of research residencies are completed. Before each residency, the encompassing collective provided you with thematic starters to provoke and stimulate specific topics of research. How do you evaluate this process?

In theory, I could find this way of working nurturing. Taking the starters as a game with its own set of rules, in an experimental bubble. My main issue with the setup was the little time frame of one week for each topic. Which in reality was not even a full week, because Monday went by understanding the tier and planning the rest of the days, and by noon on Friday we already had to be done with the requested contribution. This meant roughly 3 and a half days, with the preparation for the contribution included. Especially at the beginning of the program it felt rushed, when we were still in search of a common language among the seven of us. A longer time frame would also inspire less superficial, more deeper work. Beside the time difficulty, it was very heartwarming and interesting to get to know my collective buddies better. Get a glimpse of other’s practices, way of thinking about certain topics. For sure it was not an easy job to bring this enormous project alive, so a big bow to the developers!

Is there a specific starter/topic of residency that has had a strong impact on your way of creation? Which one and how? 

I have two. One was about movement creation, what started my brain running, how many ways there are of creating simply just “naked” movements. I have plans with this for the future, for theoretic purposes. The other starter was about time. Hear the concept of “how to rehearse without knowing the exact time, and just do things until we feel like it”. We tried it during our week, but of course there are a lot more in it.

Your diverse artistic collective has been working together for two years now. How has your cooperation been developing? 

Smoothly. Although the real questions are still waiting to be answered. During the creation a lot more will come to light, because until now we were in an experimental bubble, without real risks and strong artistic urgencies.

One of the main goals of the residencies, as well as the iCoDaCo project as such, is broad sharing and fostering artistic cooperation and mutual inspiration across Europe. How did you manage to communicate with other collectives and how did artistic practices of other partners influence your own work?  

This part was not really working for me unfortunately… Initially, I thought the Saturday meetings will be about exchanging between the collectives, but somehow it never turned out truly like that. I always felt that I would be happy just to listen to the others and to share, how the week went, what we/they did during. Yes, we had the optional Wednesday zoom for checking in, but nobody really attended. I guess to take out those couple of hours would have been too much for the tight schedule we had. All in all I feel sorry for this, I hoped we would keep more in touch.

How will you implement newly developed methodologies, tools, inspirations, or approaches into the iCoDaCo dance co-creation?

This is still the music of the future, we will see.