Interview with Jasper van Luijk on working with communities

Jasper van Luijk, artistic director SHIFFT and WP4 leader iCoDaCo 2024-2027

Within the iCoDaCo project, you oversee community development and outreach activities. What purpose do these activities have and what tools did you choose to reach the goals?

I lead WP4, which in practice means the open classes and workshops across the partnership. For SHIFFT it means something that sits in our DNA as a company: we invite people into the spaces where we work and make them part of the process.

The purpose is fairly blunt. iCoDaCo rests on a promise that sounds simple and is hard to keep: work locally, exchange internationally, keep the ecological footprint small. Without community activity that promise collapses into a closed circuit of professionals flying between residencies. The public work is what ties the international exchange to an actual street.

There is a second purpose that matters to me artistically. Makers work differently when they have to say something out loud while the work is still unfinished. It changes the research itself, and I have seen that happen more than once.

The tools I chose:

Rhythm rather than scale. Every iCoDaCo residency at SHIFFT is coupled to our city programme, SHIFFTOPEN. In 2025 that meant 8 open studios and 4 workshops, all attached to residencies. Recurrence is what lets people come back and start recognising faces.

Different doors for different people. Open classes speak to the professional dance community, workshops to people who want to move, open studios and after-talks to people who mainly want to look. Someone who would never buy a ticket will happily spend an hour in a studio watching something get made.

The digital platform, which is now live and shared with the community. Everything the partnership learns, artistically and organisationally, becomes something anyone can open and use.

Careful record-keeping. The people who join us give us their time and their image, and that deserves to be handled properly.

All of it converges in the closing mini-festival in Utrecht, 16 to 18 April 2027, where the whole thing becomes visible in one city at once.

How do you define a “community” in your work, and how do communities and artists enrich each other?

I have stopped using “community” as a polite synonym for target group. A target group is a description of people who happen to share a demographic and do not know each other. A community is a group with a reason to return.

So my working definition: people who share a place, a practice or a question, and who keep showing up.

Around iCoDaCo in Utrecht there are three of those. The professional dance community, colleagues and peers who come to open classes, and who within iCoDaCo turned out to be different artists than the ones who usually answer our open calls. The neighbourhood, Leidsche Rijn, where our new house for dance opens in 2029, a community that existed long before us and will continue without us. And communities of experience, people who share something specific, like the young dancers coming out of urban styles who find their way to our studio.

On enrichment I want to be careful, because the word can suggest we bring something to people who were lacking. What actually happens is more specific than that. During open studios, people tell us what they recognised of themselves in the material, and that is information a choreographer cannot get from a mirror or from a dramaturg. It arrives while the work can still change.

And artists offer something communities are rarely offered: sustained, serious attention on a Tuesday afternoon, with no agenda of fixing anyone.

The thing that can go wrong is well known and worth naming. A company arrives somewhere, collects people’s stories, makes a piece out of them and leaves, and the group that gave the material is left with an evening of theatre and nothing else. The way to avoid it is not complicated. Pay people for what they give. Be explicit about where their material ends up. And return more than once, because a single visit is a project and repeated visits are a relationship.

Contemporary dance is often perceived as an art form for a relatively narrow audience. If someone has never attended a contemporary dance performance because they feel it “isn’t for them,” what would you like to say to them?

First I would take the sentence seriously. “It’s not for me” is usually an accurate reading of signals the field has been sending for decades, through pricing, through the language of programme texts, through buildings that look like they have a dress code. Someone saying that is describing something real about our sector, and I am not going to argue them out of an observation that is basically correct.

Then I would say that the thing you think you lack, you already have. Contemporary dance asks you to read bodies, and you do that all day long. You know within two seconds whether someone walking into a room is angry, whether an embrace was meant, whether the person telling you they are fine is fine. That is the entire skill. There is no vocabulary you failed to learn.

What people are usually afraid of is being tested afterwards. There is no test. You are allowed to be bored for ten minutes, allowed to dislike it, allowed to arrive at an interpretation the choreographer never intended. Your interpretation is where the work actually lives, and nobody is going to correct it.

Practically, my advice is to skip the ticket at first. Come to an open studio or an open class, where the piece is unfinished and someone is standing there saying out loud what is not working yet. It is much easier to walk into a room that is visibly still being built.

Can participatory artistic projects have an impact beyond the performance itself? Have you witnessed long-term effects on the communities you worked with?

Yes, this is exactly where our sector tends to overclaim.

What I see in my own practice, after years of running this alongside the work:

A pattern of entry. Someone joins an open studio or does a workshop, and buys a ticket a season or two later. Our city programme grows in attendance every year, and the growth comes from people who first stepped in sideways. The difficulty is that this only becomes visible across several seasons, while the cycles we report in are one or two years long. The activity itself is not expensive. Showing what it produces, within the timeframe a funder asks about, is the hard part.

Trajectories that shift inside the professional community. Oscar Magnusson came to us as an intern from ArtEZ during Pushing Waves, ended up performing four of the shows himself, and is now one of the dancers I build work around. The iCoDaCo residencies do a version of the same thing at mid-career level: Astrid Boons developed Deep Time through the tier residencies, and Ruben Chi used his residencies to tour along with us and find venues and audiences he did not have before. None of that would have happened without a structure that keeps people in the room longer than one production.

Relationships that outlive the project. Long before we have a building in Leidsche Rijn, we spent 2025 in conversation with Buurtwerkkamer Leidsche Rijn, the Ondernemersfonds, RAUM and NUT about who actually lives in that district and how they reach them. Out of that came contacts with Leidsche Rijn Connectie and DansAtelier 42, and the local advisory council we are now forming. None of it shows up as a performance outcome. It is infrastructure, and it will still be there in 2030.

Where I am less certain is our measurement. Reporting counts attendance, which tells you about reach. Depth is much harder. I know how many people were in the room, and I know considerably less about what remained with them two years on. I would rather say that plainly than manufacture an impact claim.

Finally, what do you hope the legacy of iCoDaCo’s community work will be, for the participating artists, the local communities, and the future of contemporary dance in Europe?

Three hopes, one for each group you named.

For the participating artists, that community work stops being the unpaid appendix bolted onto a residency. We spoke very openly in Riga about the disconnect between producers and artists, and about artists being asked to treat public work as commissioned extra labour. If iCoDaCo leaves behind a shared understanding that this is artistic work, budgeted and paid as such, that would be worth as much as any of the creations. Next to that, the practical residue: the digital platform, the score manual, the decision-making model. Things a colleague can pick up in 2029 without asking anyone’s permission.

For the local communities, that the relationship survives the end of the project. The honest test arrives when iCoDaCo is over and the reason to keep going has to come from somewhere else. For us that question continues with the opening of our new house for dance in Utrecht, where together with iCoDaCo we have laid the basis under our community building strategy for the years after. The people in Leidsche Rijn should have known us for years before we ever move in.

For contemporary dance in Europe, iCoDaCo puts an alternative on the table to the touring logic that most international work still runs on, where a piece is made in one place and then flown everywhere. Working deeply in one place while exchanging knowledge across twelve countries weighs less on the planet, and I am fairly convinced it is a worthwhile and thorough form of producing.

I said in Riga that it took us two years to find genuine ways of collaborating. If that is what a four-year project buys, then the legacy question is really about what comes next, and whether we can build a platform where this continues.

And if none of that survives except a few hundred people in Utrecht who now think of contemporary dance as something happening in their city rather than something happening to it, I would take that as a good outcome.