In March 2022, following an interim Assembly in Brussels and feedback from the group of attending writers, it was decided that subsequent Assemblies would be curated on a rotating basis by one of the writers in collaboration with Assembly director Oonagh Duckworth. I was the first to undertake this job, since the next Assembly had already been arranged to be hosted by BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen in the frame of Oktoberdans, a festival I first attended in 2018, before going back to Norway numerous times.

This moment of reconsidering the form and structure of the Assembly coincided with a transformational moment for the festival itself. Sven Åge Birkeland, founder of BIT and mastermind behind years of progressive programming, had just passed away. The festival slowed down to reflect on this major change, to honour its founder and consider its future as BIT moves to expanded premises in 2024.

I first met Sven in Plovdiv, Bulgaria at the American Dance Platform several days after Springback Magazine was established in early 2018. Later that year I found myself in Norway, and knocked on BIT’s office door to ask if I could see some shows and write about them. I was given a pass for the whole festival and had the most intense and amazing ten days in one of the most welcoming environments I’ve ever been in. I remember asking Sven how it was that of the group of graduate students who had founded the theatre, he was the only one who had persisted in this job. His answer was simple: he was a single parent, and Norwegian government benefits allowed him to continue doing the job. Sven was always direct, precise and honest, and this line has stayed with me during the years, and echoed as I was thinking about the topics for this year’s Assembly. 

‘Slowing down’ came both from the notes from the last meeting in Brussels (written and organised by my Springback colleague Anna Kozonina) and from a series of conversations with Anette Therese Petersen, a Norwegian critic I first met as a participant in a workshop she co-organised at Oktoberdans in 2018, and who was invited again this year for a panel with PCG (Performing Criticism Globally). We found out we are all currently interested in working conditions, payment, pressures and expectations from publishers (about format and speed), conflicts of interest that might arise when wearing different hats in the same field (being only a critic has become unsustainable in the few places it once had been a possibility). Joining forces for one public panel and one internal brainstorm session was our way of slowing down: do less, and co-operate. 

I proceeded with an online form to the Springback writers to draw information about everyone’s interests and desires, to see how they could be integrated within the festival discourse programme. Writing reviews for the shows, participating in talks and panels, moderating internal brainstorm sessions, doing video documentations, maintaining an Assembly diary or contributing to a dramaturgy seminar – all were options on the table. With that information, I delegated different roles to different people for the internal jobs and proposed people to take part in the public parts of the discourse programme. I focused on having as many people as possible with a paid task – with half of the contributions paid by the festival, the other half from Aerowaves Europe. This redistribution of resources was my main logic in curating the Assembly: instead of adding extras, to explore what was already there in both the programme and the people; instead of inviting external experts for lectures or workshops, to focus on what we as a group have to offer to a festival and to each other. 

I also proposed and brought in the Values of Solidarity: Gamified Workshop Toolkit, a card game developed by Aerowaves partner Anikó Rácz in collaboration with Dorota Ogrodzka and Doreen Toutikian in the frame of the EU project RESHAPE, which I had already been using in physical workshops to explore horizontal working models, distribution of responsibilities, and activation of each member on an equal basis. We played the game, distributed the cards, and chose values that we committed to guard over the next several years of the Springback project. How this practice develops remains to be seen and to a large extent depends on every individual writer in the group and on our collective ways of communication and decision-making. I hope this Assembly has set in motion a mechanism for strengthening transparency and communication in the group and I am looking forward to attending future editions as a participant.