Spider
TRAVELLING ARTISTIC EVENTS

> OCT. 2011

Presentation Program They said Call for candidates choreography wokshops

NETWORKED EVENT 
PERFORMANCES, DANCE, WORKSHOPS

SPIDER 
TRAVELLING ARTISTIC EVENTS  
LJUBLJANA, ZAGREB, ATHENS & LYON

Les Subsistances welcome and offer a place to meet Spider, a nomadic, independent laboratory or an eclectic cooperative of young European artists building a network. Dancers, choreographers, musicians, visual artists and authors from four countries engage in activities based on their respective works and share their personal research in order to observe, discuss, and compare ideas. Spider enables different artistic practices to intermingle.

  For further information: www.spiderontheedge.org

We conceived of Spider as a travelling artistic event, a nomadic, independent laboratory, an eclectic conglomerate of artists who, carried along by the idea of something in common, build a network, a maze of artistic thoughts and actions within Europe. The issue is not artistic movement per se but, through attachments and reattachments on the fly, to interweave aesthetic relationships. Though dedicated first and foremost to contemporary dance, Spider aims to be a place where different artistic practices intermingle.  

Our goal is to offer a meeting place where artists can engage in activities based on their own works and, within the context of the Spider event, demolish the partitions between each artist’s individual research to spend a moment together observing, discussing and comparing ideas. The Spider artists (dancers, choreographers, musicians, visual artists and authors) are therefore both actors in an event and responsible for making this network function.  

A result of our various economic needs, Spider was also conceived as a cooperative, a framework for collectivizing means, a prototype for artistic exchange and for the production and distribution of our works, which can be reproduced, adapted or reinvented by us or by other structures in other cities or countries without copyright.  Sharing gives us a type of autonomy that allows us to choose which of our works we present at the host sites. Recovery of “culture” by the artists and for the artists seems essential to us to open up the possibilities for seeing distribution in another way.  

We therefore wanted a daring and unprecedented program, with a decidedly up-to-date, active viewpoint. Decidedly up to date because the works presented are deeply embedded in the problems of perception in today’s world, underscoring the weaknesses and revealing the approximations and anomalies. 
Decidedly active because highly subversive, infused with a political consciousness to act without a goal, without producing subsistence or good, but trying to reappropriate life and art. Active also because Spider takes the shape of a festival where the artists and the public meet through the works, workshops and discussions offered.
The Spider laboratory wants to get closer to the public, without using the term “cultural sensitivity” but by generously offering our savoir-faire to the people in the cities that host us, without differentiation, from the neophyte to the professional.  We think that by combining solid event organization with the quality of the workshops (exchanges) offered by the choreographers and dancers with particular artistic approaches (manner of presenting the works), Spider can become a unique artistic event".

Matej Kejzar and the Loge 22 Collective, initiators of the Spider project.

Les Subsistances
Laboratoire international
de création artistique / Lyon
Cirque - Théâtre - Danse
8 bis quai St Vincent - 69001 Lyon
+33 (0)4 78 39 10 02