ImPulsTanz Symposium for Dance and Other Contemporary Practices
LACE #1: Topographies of Touch
JULY 21-23, 2023
In the word topography, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, topo- comes from the Ancient Greek word for place, and -graphy from the root word commonly associated with writing. Unlike choreography, however, where -graphy has traditionally been associated with writing, in sciences like geography, -graphy is what designates this particular science as descriptive. Curious about the distinction in classification between writing and describing, I looked describing up. According to the same dictionary, to describe means to give a detailed account in words of [whatever is being examined or attended to at the time].
This distinction captures something of the qualitative change this symposium is undergoing as it transforms from the IDOCDE Symposium to the ImPulsTanz Symposium in Dance and Other Contemporary Practices. Where writing, in other words, suggests trace-making (documentation), describing suggests discovery (research). This is to say that the ImPulsTanz Symposium is imagined as a practice-based symposium, curated for and by practitioners. The goal of this symposium is to intentionally curate peer-to-peer meetings through and along-side practice, rather than through and by documentation and reporting only.