We are pleased to invite you to a lecture and conversation with Jeroen Peeters as part of the series Arts, Pessimism, and the Role of Dance in Times of Crisis, organized by Jens Richard Giersdorf and Lília Mestre, Contemporary Dance Department Concordia University. 

How do artists work? How do they speak about their practice? As a researcher in the arts, these questions have guided me over the years in documenting the ‘languages of making’ and developing discourse from practice. How do artists or writers read their own work as it emerges in the studio? If we approach a process of artistic creation as an ‘ecology of attention’, then what attitudes, gestures and ways of doing come into view? How do we read practices or attend to other people’s traces of labour? What other modes of attention, practices and literacies might thrive in there? Bandergewilden is a growing library of practices and vocabulary to address them – witnessing, tracing, practising alongside, inhabiting, belingering, being with, writing along, leaning, gleaning, drifting, listing.

Invited to speak on contemporary dance in times of crisis, Jeroen Peeters is interested in its experimentation with imaginary bodies and speculative practices. How does this allow us to reflect on the resistance and resilience of practices, on the alternative literacies they spawn, on their limits and crises that strain them, on their promise and exchange with the world beyond the performing arts? Practices matter to world-making: when we attempt to narrate ourselves in the ‘fourth person’ and inhabit unfamiliar worlds, practices and relations, who or what are we then becoming?

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Jeroen Peeters

Jeroen Peeters is an essay­ist, dramaturg and performer based in Brussels who works across the media of wri­ting, not-wri­ting, per­for­mance and publi­ca­ti­on. He resear­ches mat­ters such as eco­lo­gies of atten­ti­on, mate­ri­al liter­a­cy, rea­der­ship, com­mo­ning and cul­tu­ral rewil­ding. 

Peeters has published widely on contemporary dance and performance, art theory and philosophy, including a book on spectatorship in contemporary dance, Through the Back: Situating Vision between Moving Bodies (2014). Interested in documenting the ‘languages of making’, Peeters set up several dialogical projects with artists in the field of contemporary dance, which resulted for instance in a book in collaboration with Meg Stuart, Are we here yet? (2010). Recent publications include Bookmarks of sorts (2021) and And then it got legs: Notes on dan­ce dra­ma­tur­gy (2022). In 2025 he defended his PhD in the arts at Hasselt University on Conceptual Landscapes: Readership in the Expanded Field.

Recent performance works include The elusive eloquence of dozing off (2018) and A Table (2024). Peeters regularly engages in artistic collaborations with among others Jack Hauser, Sabina Holzer, Sara Manente, Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, David Weber-Krebs and Jozef Wouters. Together with Mette Edvardsen he runs the publishing house Varamo Press.

Lília Mestre (Moderator)

Assistant Professor Contemporary Dance Department Concordia University