Submerge Festival
The yearly SUBMERGE festival celebrates choreography and artistic solidarity. The festival consists of workshops taught as precursors to performances. The workshops function as “re-creative” labs where artists guide participants into the crafting of their work. Artists share the creative processes, movement techniques, choreographic/improvisational methods and conceptual journeys that contributed to the creation of the work. Each workshop culminates with a formal performance of the piece investigated in the lab.
The idea behind the SUBMERGE Festival — to dive into, examine and share the creative process behind a particular performance work — grew out of a need to foster more solidarity in the ways that artists exchange and experience each other’s work. Artistic Director Marcela Giesche said of her inspiration for the festival,
“Years ago I took a workshop with a choreographer whose work I did not like at all. After the workshop, I saw another piece by this choreographer and I was shocked at how moved I was by the work. Having been part of the artist’s creative process profoundly changed my experience of the performance, and greatly influenced my approach to artistic exchange and creative process”
SUBMERGE strives to reimagine the festival structure and whenever possible offers participation in the choreographic labs free of cost to local professionals. The hope is to discourage unnecessary travel while simultaneously fostering a non-hierarchical platform of exchange between the invited artists and the participants.
