Dialogue #2 with Anna Lena – Dancing with living design (e43)

With thanks to Anna Lenna for a second great chat – check out our first chat here.

Here is Anna Lena’s summary of our exchange from here:

Dan, founder of Living Design Process from Australia and I are speaking about empty houses in the countryside and how performance art speaks to spontaneous design processes.

In our conversation we are strolling through the landscapes of our recent experiences and touch on the conundrum of empty yet unavailable houses in Balaguier and the question how to enliven rural abandoned areas. Could some of these empty places host young people who are drawn to bring life and land-based experiments to the countryside? Especially in times of confinement, many summer house owners cannot come – how to begin a dialogue with house owners that could host other activities in their empty places?

Dan shares how many of the people he works with are asking deep fundamental questions as part of the Covid time. Questions rise anew, like: “What am I doing with my life or/and with my land?”. In one of his projects Dan works on this question with two performance artists and found that the spirit of alive improvisation is something that deeply resembles his design processes. In the conversation we explore how the process of creating place and dance are resembling each other in their open-ended, responsive nature. Performance arts as well as living design are practices of “being present and alive and in the moment, listening deeply and letting each next move emerge in real time”, as Dan says.

Here’s a link to Lierlou and the Village – the name of the project Anna-Lena is part of. And here’s the actual village:

Finally, here’s is a link to that exchange with Han that Dan mentions regarding the dance and design process connection.