How do you come into the situation then?

This is the abbreviated transcript of a Zoom conversation that took place on March 26, 2021, on occasion of the conference ‘The Workshop: Investigations Into an Artistic-Political Format’. The conversation happened across various time zones: Yvonne was in New York, Xavier in Hong Kong, while the conference was hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin. In a relaxed and informal tone, Xavier and Yvonne share their thoughts on the workshop as a format of learning and communing. They discuss differences between working with experienced and inexperienced dancers and offer some strategies for working with the latter. While Yvonne is a trained dancer, having attended several dance schools as well as workshops in the 1950s and 1960s, Xavier was trained as a molecular biologist and received most of his dance and choreographic training in various workshop settings. Both are highly experienced in giving and attending workshops, but their different ways of understanding the workshop format seem to stem directly from participating in two different ‘workshop cultures’: the New York workshop culture of the 1960s and the Berlin workshop culture of the 1980s.