İDANS - a young festival with an innovative strategy

Young arts festivals do not only cater to the demands of an already existing community but also take on the challenge of developing their audience, interweaving present interests with aspirations for the future.

They succeed in this by introducing their audience to a scope of artistic productions both local and international, by enabling them to have access into the artistic vocabulary and encouraging them to take a critical stance. Only a festival which achieves to become the catalyst for developing a new community, which creates an audience competent enough to start a dialogue with itself, becomes a long-lasting one.

iDANS Festival

Istanbul has one such exemplary young festival, iDANS Istanbul International Contemporary Dance Festival, which engages in innovative strategies to create its audience and develop a new dance community. They just announced the theme of their next date to take place in October 2011; At Work. The iDANS festival was launched by Bimeras Cultural Foundation in 2007 as the first and only large scale international contemporary dance and performance event not only in Istanbul but in Turkey.

Up until now it hosted many local and international performances, installations as well as dance works, various workshops and lectures in different venues and places in Istanbul appealing not only to the artists or scholars but to everyone interested in dance and performance.

Different themes

Each edition of the iDANS festival - which operates also as a curatorial project - is organized and conceived around a particular theme which in addition to exposing the audience to various productions also contributes significantly to the field of contemporary performance theoretically and conceptually. The theme of the first edition which took place in September 2007 was Solo?, followed by Dance on Time! in May 2009, Laughing ↔ Crying in October 2009 dedicated to the memory of Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham and the theme of its latest edition in October 2010 was The New CosmopoliDANS.

iKEDİ, Watch&Win, Critical Endeavor

What set apart the latest edition of iDANS festival was that it introduced a social creativity project iKEDİ (“Kedi” means cat in Turkish) running under the slogan “We are Istanbulites” where in collaboration with the artists Roger Titley and Airan Berg local residents created large and small scale puppets of Istanbul’s street animals in designated neighborhoods. The project has been revisited since March 2011 and each month children from different schools continue  making puppets. In October iKEDİ puppets will once again take over the streets of Istanbul. Besides engaging in a social creativity project, last year’s festival also employed a strategy for encouraging people’s interest in dance and performance as they introduced the “watch & win” program where the audience got refunded for their tickets in proportion to the performances they attended. This also made the festival accessible to university students on a tight budget. Participating in Jardin d’Europe’s Critical Endeavor 2010, an educational program for emerging dance and performance journalists, last iDANS hosted many seminars and lectures. The upcoming iDANS will host a version of Critical Endeavor with participants only from Turkey which will contribute extensively to the local development of performance writing and criticism. This festival will not only bring dance to Istanbul but under the heading of BiDANS Guest Works it will also participate in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Turkish Gastarbeiter’s immigration to Germany with stage performances and discussions in Berlin.

 Credits
Photo 1- Xavier-Le-Roy, Sacre-du-Printemps by Vincent Cavaroc
Photo 2- Mustafa Kaplan by Marie Topp