Camp abstract

Andrea Creutz and Elizabeth Ward

The Rhythm of Now, workshop in four parts

During the Studies Camp, Andrea and Elizabeth will lead somatic study sessions gently allowing experience to unfold. Inspired by D&G’s understanding of the rhizomatic as non-linear growth, we invite you to bring your copy of A Thousand Plateaus, to use in this somatic, body based study. We will open the book, much the way a dice is thrown, as an affirmation of the many aspects of chance. In smaller work groups we will experience the rhythms of the texts, while sharing the moment in an active, affirmative process of becoming. Through daily sessions participants will have the flexibility to adapt the practice on their own terms and will feel how each day offers new and different insights on the readings and ourselves. An aspect of the Rhythm of Now is how we tap into the shared environment, as an active and dynamic milieu, and the sharing of the moment together. Over the sessions collectively created traces of the experience will materialise to be shared during the conference.

The Rhythm of Now is a long-term collaborative art project carried out by Andrea Creutz and Elizabeth Ward. Coming together from the worlds of visual arts and performance they collaborate on art projects that emphasize working from the affective felt bodily senses to expose subjugating structures and proposing alternative temporalities and spaces. 

Initially, they began collaborating alongside artist Liv Strand in 2010 with “Capitalism as we live it” leading workshops that focused on consciousness raising as a learning tool. These workshops took place at Iaspis and at Konsthall C in Stockholm, Flutgraben in Berlin and at the Royal Danish Academy and Astrid Noack’s Atelier in Copenhagen with the support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. CAWLI grew into the Rhythm of Now througha residency at Malongen, where Andrea and Elizabeth worked with preschoolers and their teachers on a project that aimed to highlight children and pedagogues as mutual constructors of culture and knowledge. Since then The Rhythm of Now  has existed as a frame to continue meeting, thinking, and acting together.

Andrea Creutz is a visual artist and educator based in Stockholm. Her practice is at the intersection between art and pedagogy with collective learning and spatial processes in focus. She has worked within several transdisciplinary groups and collaborations (e.g. Women down the Pub,  Let us Speak Now,  Swop Projects) that have joined forces to create spaces for action on various social, political and aesthetic concerns. 

Elizabeth Ward is a choreographer and performer working in the field of experimental dance and currently living in Vienna. She likes to think of the collective histories of dance lineages accumulated in a dancer’s muscle memory as a living archaeology. In the last year she has worked on an artistic research project Trillium and the Patient Labor of Dance (supported by the City of Vienna) that looks at intergenerational and cross geographical knowledge transfer in dance.