The practice we (Guy Cools, Lin Snelling) created is a performance/workshop frame that creates an open space for collaborative learning.  It is called Rewriting Distance.  The form, and our history are outlined below.  We have discovered, and keep discovering, that Rewriting Distance allows for questions, problems, solutions and re-invention as it asks participants to move, speak and write to collectively and individually further the telling of the physical/verbal/and written stories at hand.  The original form has three participants.  A performer, a witness seated in a chair, and an audience seated behind the witness chair.  The practice begins as the performer in an open space with a table and paper for drawing/writing/sculpture-making begins to dance, speak or write.  The witness can join the performer at any point they choose, and the performer can leave the space at any point they choose. The audience moves into the witness chair, when the performer leaves the space and the event unravels in this manner; as each participant moves through the various roles of performer, witness and audience.  The table with paper and pen creates an island inside the open space where people are free to write/draw/read/sculpt. The participants we invite to into Rewriting Distance ask their own questions inside the form.  The form can take on many participants (one to 20) and in larger group settings there are more participants in the beginning audience position who pass through into the performance through the threshold of the witness chair.  It would be a great pleasure to present at your conference.  We could do this in one of two ways, depending on what best serves your conference needs.  We could lead a 3-hour workshop, where we together practice Rewriting Distance or we could offer a lecture presentation where we speak about the development and creation of Rewriting Distance.  This would be accompanied by large photographs by Michael Reinhart, as seen on the Rewriting Distance website.  Please refer to the website for further information. http://rewritingdistance.com/

Thanking you for your time in considering this proposal. Guy Cools, Lin Snelling.

Since 2003, the Belgian dance dramaturg Guy Cools and the Canadian dancer and choreographer Lin Snelling began exploring the interaction between a performer/creator and a dramaturg/witness within a performative context. The original research, called Repeating Distance, defined an improvisational score in which these two positions constantly alternate in a series of solos that both build on each other through a process of contamination and keep their own integrity through a process of integration. The score concludes in a duet each time it is performed. The Repeating Distance practice acknowledges the creative process as a continuous movement between a receptive and an active energy, between perception and action or articulation. It generates a re-appreciation and re-evaluation of the energetic and somatic creative presence of the dance dramaturg as witness inside the performance who, merely by his or her silent perception, influences and stimulates the articulations/actions of the performer/creator. In Repeating Distance the roles of witness/dramaturg and creator/performer stay clearly defined, and this creative distance/dialogue between perception and action, and its repetition/alternation, allows for the ongoing construction of a shared memory bank of movement, images, words, and stories. Since 2012 the Repeating Distance practice has been further elaborated and deepened in Rewriting Distance, in which the creative dialogue between dramaturg/witness and performer/creator was expanded and triangulated with new research topics and the involvement of a diverse group of artists. With a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada we spent 10 weeks from July 2011 to August 2013 performing/teaching Rewriting Distance and involving more than 20 other dance artists in 6 different countries.