KEY NOTE SPEAKERS
Dance/ Body at the Crossroads of Cultures
Rustom Bharucha
Rustom Bharucha is an independent writer, director, and cultural critic based in Kolkata, India. He is the author of several books including Theatre and the World, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular, Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Rajasthan: An Oral History, and Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin.
A leading interlocutor in the area of intercultural performance, both at theoretical and practical levels, he has also conducted a number of workshops with marginalized communities in India, the Philippines, South Africa, and Brazil on issues relating to land and memory, the politics of touch, and cultural diversity.
Attempting to redefine the relationship between culture and development, he has worked on a number of grassroots projects, notably Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan, where he directed a project relating to brooms and their relationship to traditional knowledge, biodiversity, indigenous modes of production, the lives of broom-makers and their social development.
A former advisor of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in the Netherlands, he has served as a consultant for the Arts Council in Ireland on cultural diversity in the arts, as well as for Ford Foundation on its interdisciplinary and multicultural Artography project. Most recently he was the Festival Director of the Inter-Asian Ramayana Festival at Adishakti, Pondicherry, which attempted to explore the plurality of the epic across South and Southeast Asian performance, musical and visual traditions.
He is presently a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Centre/Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany
Guy Cools °1964, Antwerp (BE)
After having trained as a dramaturge, Guy Cools became involved with the new developments in dance in Flanders from the 1980’s, initially as a dance critic and from 1990 onwards as theatre and dance director of Arts Centre Vooruit in Ghent. As vice-president of the Dance Council he contributed to the cultural policy towards dance of the Flemish Community. He curated dance events in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Venice and Montréal.
In 2002, he left Vooruit to dedicate himself fulltime to production dramaturgy with amongst others Koen Augustijnen – Lisi Esteras (Les Ballets C. de la B.), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (B), Anabel Schellekens (B), Lia Haraki (Cyprus), Danièle Desnoyers (Montréal), Akram Khan (London), Christopher House (Toronto Dance Theatre). From April 1st, 2010, he is the house dramaturge for Danshuis Station Zuid, Tilbug, the Netherlands.
With Lin Snelling and Ginelle Chagnon he developed a series of workshops to support the creative process of artists, choreographers in particular. He regularly gives lectures and publishes in Belgium, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Holland and Greece.