The Performance Lab is an artist and audience development platform designed to bridge the gaps between training, creative process and audience engagement.

 

While today on the continent there exists a number of programs catering for basic training  and a number of festivals and structures programming work the fundamental processes by which artists develop and work is created remain neglected. The laboratory is neither a basic skills training program, nor an isolated festival event or one-off artistic production exercise. It strives to be an organic process complementary to these different aspects of artistic activity by offering an innovative environment in which experienced and emerging artists can exchange, collaborate, challenge each other, create, engage audiences in the creative process and contribute a new body of innovative work to the general public.

 

It is a crucial measure against stagnation, intended to stimulate creative development, ensure artistic growth and continuity as well as public engagement. It is a strategic investment in the human and intellectual infrastructures for contemporary creation.

 

Under the theme ‘Place of the Spectator – Frames of Engagement’ the first 2 editions of the laboratory (2011 – 2012) provoke participating artists to reconsider the place of the audience within their work and the role of their work in society as frames of engagement in conceiving, producing and presenting artistic work. It poses performance as an innovative space for imagination, interrogation and critical reflection on social process, civic responsibility and interaction.

 

While creating exchange within africa the laboratory also involves international collaboration. Work created and developed during the process is initially be presented in nairobi and ouagadougou and subsequently proposed for tour.

 

Bringing together choreographers, dancers, scenographers, digital image and sound designers from divers backgrounds the project intends to place the body and choreographic work within a broader cross-disciplinary and collaborative contemporary creation context.

 

The Performance Lab Nairobi is part of a 2-year dance development project – ‘Chrysalides’ - on which GaaraProjects is collaborating with Ecole des Sables in senegal and La Termitiére, the centre for choreographic development in burkina faso. A group of participants consisting of experienced dancers and emerging choreographers from different countries in africa have been selected to follow the 3-phase program in toubab dialaw, nairobi and ouagadougou.

 

31 dancer/choreographers from zimbabwe, rdc congo, tchad, togo, mali, benin, rwanda, senegal, ethiopia, south africa, madagascar, cameroon, niger, mauritius, burkina faso, congo, tanzania and kenya will participate in the program.

 

artistic direction, opiyo okach