Guy Cools und Elena Morena Weber
Foto: Pawel Wyszomirski
Guy Cools is a dance playwright, dance critic and programme director. After completing his thesis on the relationship between dance and writing at Ghent University (Belgium), he remained at the university to continue his postdoctoral studies. Between 1990 and 2002, he was responsible for the dance programme at Vooruit Arts Centre in Ghent and designed the programmes for several international festivals, conferences and research labs including the 3rd Modul Dance Conference: Ethics in Aesthetics? For an ecology of both the environment and the body for the European Dance House network in 2012 and the Ways of Seeing Rhythm ChoreoLab for Reso at the Dampfzentrale in Bern in 2015. As a dance playwright, he has worked with Jean Abreu (UK), Koen Augustijnen (BE), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Alexander Gottfarb (AT), Lia Haraki (CY), Christopher House (CA), Akram Khan (UK), Joshua Monten (CH), Arno Schuitemaker (NL) and Stephanie Thiersch (DE) amongst others. Guy Cools is known for his work as a choreography and playwriting mentor. From 2013 to 2015, he supported the Dance and Playwriting project in Switzerland. Then, between 2018 and 2020, he worked as a mentor at the Biennale Dance College in Venice. In 2019, he was an Atlas training mentor at the ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna. He now teaches at various higher education institutions and art schools throughout Europe and Canada. Alongside the Canadian choreographer Lin Snelling, he has developed an improvised performance practice known as Rewriting Distance which focusses on integrating, movement, voice and writing. Guy Cools currently resides in Vienna.
Foto: Demian Bern
Elena Morena Weber lives in Zurich and works in the performing arts on an international level. She works as a Dancer, Performer, Actor, Choreographer and Assistant Choreographer. During 2018, Weber was a scholarship holder at Akademie Schloss Solitude. In her artistic work, Elena connects her fascination with the themes of belonging and memory with a particular interest in unconventional formats and audience interaction. By creating interdisciplinary crossroads and using a variety of media, she examines methods for developing performative spaces. Working as a Teacher and Movement Coach in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and China, Elena endeavours to share her expertise not only with professionals but also with amateur dancers and hopes to create inclusive and intergenerational environments within the performing arts.
Projekt
Inspired by processes in nature and humans’ contradictory relationship to the ecosystem, I extend my artistic investigation with the topics of cultural and individual memory, deepening focal points of my choreographic work. A collection of outcomes will be framed within a hybrid catalogue: the BESTIARIUM.
In an interplay between individual research and interdisciplinary artistic exchange I aim to reshape the simultaneity of creating, performing and mediating that is characteristic to my practice. The in-depth exchange facilitated by the Double Mentoring program sustains this process and opens a precious space for reflection on and articulation of hybrid methods of creation.