Timothy Nouzak - Common-Works

"How can collectivity attain a different dimension through means of collective listening and sensing?“

As part of his graduation project at P.A.R.T.S. STUDIOS, Timothy Nouzak will be hosting an edition of his ongoing research project Common-Works at STUK.

In this practice he focuses on exploring the intersection between culture, identity, norm and narrative and poses the question, how collectivity can be rediscovered through means of collective listening and collective sensing. Timothy mainly works with collective, semi-improvised movement practices that tend to organize happenings in space but leave freedom for the performers' interpretation. His interest lies in bodily movements, what they speak for and how their meaning is enacted through each performers' embodied history and memory.

Earlier editions of Common-Works have been organised in Taipei (Taipei Artist Village), Senegal (P.A.R.T.S. / Jant-Bi), Amsterdam (Veem House for Performance / BAU Amsterdam / Brakke Grond) and in Munich (Tanztendenz / Schwere Reiter). During these editions Timothy set the focus on creating a safe, social space in order to then develop theoretical as well as practice-based strategies on how to communally share knowledge in order to then formulate alternative structures of representation in relation to the performing body.

Each edition of Common-Works can be seen as a ‘common ground’, a safe space, where a group of performers come together to share, experiment and perform in order to find, on the bases of the ideas and concepts that circulated throughout the past editions of the score, a new possible access on what the next edition might be.

Timothy Nouzak B.A., from Vienna, Austria (AT) and Houston, Texas (US) is a young performance maker based in Brussels (BE). He started out with classical ballet at the Vienna State Opera Ballet School. At the age of 16, he had the opportunity to start his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in "Contemporary and Classical Dance" at the Music and Arts University of Vienna, where he graduated at the age of 19. Since 2016, he is based in Brussels, Belgium and currently enrolled in a post-graduate research programme called STUDIOS – designed for young makers at P.A.R.T.S. – Performing Arts Research and Training Studios under the direction of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Timothy works around the question, how signifier (re-) present themselves in movement, how collectivity can be rediscovered through means of collective listening and collective sensing and how our social environment is enacted through shared physical memories by setting the focus on the development of collective movement practices that happen in the frame of semi-improvised movement scores.