Collectivity and Criticism: (Fragments of) Conversations on Post-dance

Post-dance first unfolded as a conference in MDT in Stockholm, 14-16 October, 2015, created by Danjel Andersson, Andre Lepecki and Gabriel Smeds, and was followed by a multi-authored publication co-edited by Andersson, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg (March 2017) that sought to delineate post-dance as a mode of thinking about an expanded contemporary dance and choreographic practice. This experiment in collective criticism thinks through and around post-dance as a critical moment in contemporary dance practice. Authored by Writingshop, a long-term collaborative project between four European critics examining the processes, modes and politics of contemporary, collective critical practice, it intersperses multi-authored notes from and on post-dance with a timeline. This timeline is an edited transcript of the conversation that gave rise to the notes, taking place in a side-chat, on a live Google document. At the same time, whilst this has been a process of selection, there has been little editorial intervention into the chat, in order to preserve its chronology and dynamics, and acknowledge the challenges of us arriving in this document together, from four different places, with different forms of access and points of entry into language.