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Live Arts Workshop (LAW) and PARTOUT
Khoj International Artists' Association has been a primary intercontinental partner for the Live Arts Workshop (LAW) series since 2018. The Live Arts Workshop (LAW) project is a series of collaborative professional exchange workshops that harnesses the international network of Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council around the development of new work in the live arts field and new circuits for the presentation of that work. The workshop series is built on the existing works and approaches of structures active in this field in each region where Pro Helvetia is present and active, Switzerland included.
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About this programme
The project originally developed out of discussions between the Johannesburg and New Delhi offices of Pro Helvetia and Jay Pather of the Institute for the Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2017. The first edition of the project was convened in Cape Town in March/April 2019 with specialist practitioners and programming partners from New Delhi (Khoj), Cape Town (ICA), Maputo (Culturarte), Basel (Kaserne), Lugano (FIT), Cairo (Mohamed Abdelkarim), Shanghai (Zhao Chuan) and Sao Paulo (Explode!). The Cape Town iteration in 2018 involved an intensive workshop programme delivered to more than twenty participants from across Southern Africa drawn from a wide variety of disciplinary fields across the arts, sciences and humanities, culminating in a marathon day of performances and presentations from participants.
Two subsequent editions of the Live Art Workshops project were more or less confirmed for 2020, with Khoj in New Delhi hosting an edition in April and PANCH (Switzerland) hosting an edition of the project together with Kaserne Basel and Arsenic in Lausanne in October. However, given the ongoing global health crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic through the year, the April 2020 edition at Khoj stood cancelled. The Switzerland edition of LAW was successfully programmed as/via PARTOUT from 2-11 October 2020.
PARTOUT – Platform for International Performance Art, is a project of PANCH (Performance Art Network Switzerland) in collaboration with Arsenic Lausanne and Kaserne Basel. It invites around 30 performers from national, international and intercontinental contexts to Switzerland for 10 days of performances, experimental sharings and discussions. The starting point is PANCH’s interest in strengthening its own network and connecting with different approaches of networking and collective learning formats. This is done through the presentation and reception of performances at two three-day festivals in Lausanne and Basel, and through the presentation and sharing of individual practice and experience in smaller groups in Basel.
PANCH serves as a backdrop for the network within Europe. The two hosting places – Arsenic Lausanne and Kaserne Basel – join their means and efforts to welcome in the intercontinental players. PARTOUT offers the platform for the meeting up of these national, European and intercontinental performance artists.
Under the rubric of LAW, Khoj was invited as a collaborator and a participant for the PARTOUT festival in Switzerland in October 2020.
