Collaborative theater in Bogotá: BCB students travel to Colombia for international workshop “Performance and Digital Culture”

Earlier this year, students from Prof. Dr. Nina Tecklenburg’s OSUN Network Collaborative Course “Performance and Digital Culture” embarked on a week-long collaborative performance project at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, culminating in a presentation of their work titled "Why dig up graves?" which premiered to local and online audiences on January 19. The video trailer can be viewed on YouTube.

“This was truly an outstanding project based on international collaboration and global learning amongst students,” says Tecklenburg. Over the course of the fall 2023 semester, students at the participating universities studied with a faculty member at their home institution, while also engaging in collaborative online sessions with other students and faculty around the world. The course culminated in 11 students joining together in Bogotá to create a collaborative performance piece, building on the skills in digital culture and artistic approaches they studied throughout the semester.

The performance was created over the course of one week with the aim of promoting artistic collaboration, global learning, teamwork, and intercultural competency among students from diverse backgrounds. Tecklenburg, along with BCB students Sanskriti Shrestha ‘26 and Jude Fieldman ‘26, were joined by peers from Universidad de Los Andes, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, Central European University, Al-Quds Bard College, and Bard College Annandale. 

Jude, from the United States, described the project as being “very focused on what [we] as students and theater practitioners want to do, and I think it’s a special opportunity to be guided through that journey and coached without being told how to do it.” Sanskriti, from Nepal, says that Bogotá was “an amazing place to not just travel but also study, because we [used] the whole city.”

The OSUN Network Collaborative Course that made this project possible was first initiated by Tecklenburg, together with Dr. Ramona Mosse, almost three years ago. Realizing this unique project was a “truly convincing way of bringing students from different cultures together and supporting them in learning from and with each other by means of collaborative art making,” Tecklenburg explains. The performance project in Bogotá was mentored by Carmen Gil Vrolijk, Pedro Salazar, Juan Luna, Renzo Rospigliosi (Bogotá), Myer Taub (Johannesburg), and Nina Tecklenburg (Berlin) and was supported by OSUN. 

By: Sophia Paudel, Bard College Berlin Communications

Post Date: 06-17-2024