ACADEMY #1: MAKE FRIENDS – SHARE KNOWLEDGE

Location and Opening Hours:
30.5. and 1.6., 10:00–13:00: FFT Düsseldorf
31.5., 10:00–17:00: FFT Düsseldorf
1.6., 14:00–17:00: TMD Theatermuseum Hofgartenhaus Düsseldorf

Portable Archive is an attempt to transpose a theatre performance into an archive that can be reactivated by visitors. Using a range of "filtered" and newly materialised elements from the Futur3 production '1934 – Stimmen' (2020) the project seeks to reconstruct documents and fragments of this piece. The archive aims to immerse visitors in the structure of the theatre work, its questions, contexts and images. Observing the reciprocal effects between the archive and the theatre production is intended to facilitate a re-activation of constitutive elements of theatre-making. Visits to the archive are conducted in dialogue - ideally two at a time.

Location: FFT Düsseldorf
Language: German

With the ACADEMY host Anne Schneider, the ACADEMY leaders and FESTIVALFRIENDS

Location: FFT Düsseldorf
Languages: German and English.
The workshop will be conducted in English.

Talk with Anne Schulz and Anne Schneider
In 2021, in a three-day workshop 'Exercises in Social Intimacy', theatre practitioners, dancers, researchers and students from South Africa, Switzerland, Belarus, the United Kingdom and Germany met - both online and offline. After a year of the Covid pandemic, it was still almost impossible to make theatre. Because breathing the same air was too much of a risk. Gathering together in the theatre was too intimate. In the workshop the participants concentrated on this essential but often previously overlooked intimacy of the theatre and saw it as a strength. Despite conforming strictly to the rules of social distancing, they used the tools of performance art to make contact with each other. They persuaded strangers to hug each other through plastic film, stroked people with sticks 1.5 metres long and danced together on Zoom.

Workshop: Exercises in Social Intimacy – revisited
With: Sibylle Peters, Clara Vaughan, Ansuman Biswas, Phanuel Antwi
In this year's workshop the participants look back and ask: Are we doing theatre differently - now that we've got it back again? Are we still aware of how intimate it is to breathe the same air and to sit side by side with each other? Do we know we should value this intimacy? Has the time of distancing possibly brought us closer?

Location: FFT Düsseldorf
Language: German

Talk with Sandra Umathum and Anne Schneider
Artists in the independent theatre often find and generate their material in and with people from non-artistic contexts. Starting from this observation, the ACADEMY 2018 was based on the principle of the "uncertain encounter." At its heart lay the question of how meeting and working with people from non-artistic fields of life could unsettle established aesthetic approaches and inspire new ones. In 2024 this focus willl be expanded to include what was omitted then: to uncertain encounters between human and more-than-human entities.

Workshop: How to do things with slime
With Philomena Theuretzbacher, Doris Uhlich, Sandra Umathum
This workshop is about slime. Slime is a substance that causes ambivalent reactions. That is neither definitely solid nor liquid. That holds organisms together and creates connections. Inviting you to the workshop are: the dancer and choreographer Doris Uhlich, whose pieces 'Gootopia' and 'Gootopia – The Treatment' feature slime as a material and as a performer, the theatre scholar and dramaturg Sandra Umathum and the slime expert Philomena Theuretzbacher. Together with the participants they try out a range of ways of making contact with slime and explore its various different qualities.
Participants are recommended to bring clothing with them that can tolerate (washable) stains.

Location: FFT Düsseldorf
Language: German

Talk with Jascha Sommer and Anne Schneider
In previous years Impulse ACADEMIES have repeatedly focussed on working conditions in the independent performing arts. And there have been some improvements: minimum fees have increased the income of many freelancers, it has become entirely natural to discuss and argue about working conditions, and associations and trade unions adopt a more confident approach to cultural politicians. However, the situation of many freelancers and full-time employees in the sector remains precarious – and even more tense in times when money is short and there is a need to balance the books. Urgently necessary budget increases have not happened or been cancelled, minimum fees and hourly rates are being undermined by undocumented overtime, and, for many workers, anything more than minimal provision for their old age is barely possible.

Work better!?
Working conditions in the independent performing arts
Lectures and table talks by and with Anica Happich, Christoph Rech and Katja Sonnemann
After associations, trade unions and research projects have primarily studied the situation of artists, 'Work better!?' expands its focus to look at the independent theatre system as a whole: what is the financial situation of the theatres and their workers? What do the latest developments in cultural policy mean for the numerous freelancers who are not artists, e.g.

Location: TMD Theatermuseum Hofgartenhaus Düsseldorf
Language: German

Talk with Daniel Richter and Anne Schneider
What might a future archive of the independent performing arts look like? And how might that archive be designed in order not only to conserve the past but also to make it present in sensual form? These are the questions that the Impulse Theater Festival asked in 2021. In an open laboratory process together with academics, performing and visual artists, we explored the future of the Impulse archive at the intersection of theatre, archiving and digital art. Time to take stock. Which different archiving strategies and methods came out of this? Which collection narratives have emerged? What willl the first steps for our own archive look like?

Our Way to the Archive
Archiving workshop with Barbara Jennerwein, Wilma Renfordt, Steffen Wedepohl (Digital Archive of the Independent Performing Arts)
Do you want to preserve your work and the stories and memories associated with it and allow others to see it? But you don't know how to do it, or even where to start? In this workshop the participants willl run through the first steps of archiving together. Everyone willl bring something along with them that they would like to archive: from their own artistic practice or that of others, or something that was part of a process; an object, a document or a data file. Together we will talk about these objects and what they mean and then start to record them in the Digital Archive of the Independent Performing Arts. For this, all participants will need to bring a laptop of their own.

What's missing? – And now?
with Sascha Förster (Director of TMD Theatermuseum Hofgartenhaus Düsseldorf) and Dominik Müller (Curator NRW Festival Archive)
The Impulse Archive forms an essential pillar in the NRW Festival Archive that is currently being set up at the TMD Theatermuseum Hofgartenhaus Düsseldorf. Together we will view materials from selected years of the festival. With you we willl try to pin down what happened and identify gaps where there nothing remains. Do you think certain objects are missing from the collections? Is there no room for your memories? Join us in creating a speculative archiving and documentation workshop: how can gaps be avoided in future? How can we develop documentary tools for curatorial processes that are not evidenced by objects alone? How can personal experience, including that of audiences, be preserved?