This essay is one part of my Bachelor's degree project, the other part being the work LOOPAR that was premiered in January of 2021 at Stockholm University of the Arts. The text expands and articulates the thinking processes and conversations in relation to the work. The aim of the text is to acknowledge and reflect the thoughts around the work with other people, dancers, and thinkers, and to scrutinize the main questions of the work: How can we think of repetition in relation to subject formation? And how does repetition and looping construct and affect world making? The essay begins by introducing the main concepts of the work such as 'performativity’, ’subject’, ‘storytelling’, ‘branding’, ‘repetition’ and ‘looping’. In the text, loops can be seen as actions, habits, repeated thinking processes, understandings of norms or different kinds of interactions, which change and transform our perception and understanding constantly about ourselves and the world we live in through persistent repetition. The essay observes how our experiences of ourselves and the world are affected by multiple contexts and felt-sensed experiences and interactions. It further explores the potentialities to decentralize the focus of the individualistic point of views of world making and it moves towards relational ways of thinking. The main references and conversation partners to many of the topics discussed in the essay are Argentine feminist philosopher and activist María Lugones, American professor of Feminist studies, Philosophy and History of Consciousness with a Ph.D. in Physics Karen Barad, and American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. Further the essay reflects the work and methods used in praxis in relation to the thinking processes introduced in the text. At the end the essay asks the two following questions: How we can practice active consciousness and responsibility towards a subject’s positionality and interactions in dancing? And how can dancing together and alone be understood as entangled and overlapped? 

Within the frame of an MA, we know from the start that there will be a specific ending; we call it final project, degree project or final presentation and this essay is meant to accompany the journey of the degree project.

In my case, I want to mention and reflect upon that for me the MA has been a framework for developing and experiencing different types of projects. So not only the project of presenting work at the end of the final semester but long term projects with a broader sense of choreography. Projects that includes social relations and are community based like P0$$€ dance and reading group a weekly extra-scholarly dance and reading group that shares texts and dance material, in a spontaneous and laid-back way, hosted by a different practitioner each time. The invitation from END FEST where I proposed to do a P0$$€ session in a public swimming pool. The future project of proposing slime workshops at cultural centers and youth-clubs, which comes from the experience and the research on the work that will be presented as the degree project called FIEBRE.

These projects are important for me to highlight because the way I work with choreography is not only about creating final products.

How can Dance keep evolve and expand as an art form and at the same time, be attainable in itscontent to general audience?There are many ways to answer this question.I attempt answering this unsolvable question in one way through my practical presentation bychoosing to make a dance piece in which tents are the dancers\ In which tents are dancing.As it usually happens in artistic processes, the questions and problems reshape themselvesaround the artistic material that is developed along the way.In this case another question aroused in the research process: How can a tent dance?I see these two questions as the two edges of my researchprocess spectrum.The first question addresses a large-scale problem in relationto Dance as an art form in our society and the second one triesto be the concrete manifestation of the first through practice.Another way to observe these two questions is to see the firstquestion as a theory-based question, taking underconsideration the time, place and filed in which it is being questioned. The second question canbe seen as a practice-based question which emerges from the physical explorations of the artisticprocess.In this essay I will attempt to bring these two questions closer together through sharing andanalyzing the creation process in the field and context in which I amacting\working\creating\choreographing\dancing. 

This is me. And this is me as a dancer. This is the best costume in the world. The best light in the world, the best prop in the world.

This is the best dance step in the world.

This is me. But this is not real. This is just you looking at me dancing. You are looking at me, me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me (dancing). You are honored to be here. I'm honored that you came. Looking at me dancing while I'm looking at you, honored that you came to look at this dance. It's an honor for you looking at this dance, even if it's not for real. In real life this is just something you look at. But right now. Wow. This is amazing. And you love it.

POWER

PRESENCE

TRIGGER

LIVE

I

dici là(from here to there): the expression marks a distance, a gap to be bridged, from one place to another, from one moment to another. A ford, in time and in space: a passage, which opens onto uncertainty

II

the freedom that is given me and that I sense as I move

III

advenio

advenio advenire adveni adventum

[AD+VENIO] to come (to), arrive (at), reach; to come on purpose; to come from outside, be imported; (of ships) to arrive, put in; (of other things) to reach, be brought, come into hands of; (of physical conditions) to set in, arise, develop, supervene; (of dates or times) to come, arrive, to come (in time); […] advenientes ad angulos noctis: reaching to the very corners of the night

IV

I HAVE NEVER KNOWN A CLOSENESS LIKE THAT

V

… where line becomes existence

VI

(p.14) on the other side

This performance is a world-making of intimate space and boundedness. The dancers dwell in the smaller subtle movements of couple dancing, the silent negotiations, the tight embrace and the significance of the hands. They work with materials such as tactile contact, rhythmic footwork, pulsing, affectivity, animation, mood, pleasure, imagination, and voice. They pay attention to the emergent figures of the dancing rather than recognition of pre-established categories of the political or ethics. 

This performance is part of a larger practice and study in social and folk dance. I’m interested in the dancing that one has lived with and that one lives. I am currently focusing on the vernacular of African American jazz and in particular the lindy hop, swing and blues dancing. Engaging in these dances has made me attend to and negotiate the schisms between self and other, culture and art, ownership and theft, and the visibility or hiddenness of race in dance.   

 I’ve been focusing on the ongoing negotiation in these couple dances, which is made up of nuanced yet direct shifts of initiating, listening, responding, supporting, resisting or breaking away while continuing to dance together. Social dancing has been a way for me to practice what Audre Lorde describes as ‘the erotic as power’ because it is a scene where the capacities for joy and pleasure are underlined and encouraged in an explicit way, which I value.

Vulnerability Manifesto is a research where I ask, what does it mean for me to usevulnerability as material for artistic work. In this research, I deal with problems that occur inthe process of materialising emotions, through my interest of transforming emotions into aconcrete material.I will try to answer to a question: How can vulnerability be used as a material for performancewithout it becoming a representation or fake? If I claim that I do honest work withoutrepresentation of vulnerability, or acting/faking, what does that mean practically?The main topic in this research is vulnerability. Vulnerability as a word, emotion and as amaterial for performance. I will critically look upon my process with vulnerability, boththrough my own expectations, and with references from the field of contemporary dance. Todo this, I have chosen Yvonne Rainer’s biography Feelings Are Facts- a life (2013) and AnnaGrip’s physical practice.As a working method, I create a physical practice that later on becomes a performance titled“my heart will go on”. In this process, I deal with questions such as, what is a 21centuryachievement society, and what is my position in it? I will also deal with my personalexhaustion and burnout, and use them as a tool in the process of making this research.Vulnerability Manifesto is an empowering personal research. It’s a personal revolution, and aprocess towards accepting sensitiveness, fear, shame and judgment. It’s self-centred, yetuniversal. 

If we are being-of-the-world, how can we ever avoid participation? From this question Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_ action) unfolds. It invites to engage in an ongoing continuum of entanglements, where the moment of connection is unavoidable. This invitation demands that we are attentive to our mutual co-constitutiveness, that we take responsibility for what gets excluded as well as what comes to matter.

Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) introduces, purposes and explores a specific format, the live dissertation, an academic instance that demands performative responses during the public defense. It is a dissertation in choreography written through space-time-language-matter with and for human and more-than-human bodies, and other discursive-material becomings. By this Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) recognizes the force of what Karen Barad conceptualized as ethico-onto-epistemologocial engtanglements through intra-action. It engages a posthumanist and agential-realist reworking of the notion of performativity, in which all bodies (not only human bodies) come to matter through the world’s performativity—its iterative intra-activity. In this framework, knowledge is made as a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart—a process by which cuts enact violence but also open up and rework agential conditions of possibility.

During Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_ action) diffractive choreographic methods and techniques, which had been developed through diverse intra-active studies—actions, collaborations, and works that span throughout 2010-2016, were re-activated, applied, manifested, and experienced. These practices were made present through specific agential forces that enacted them—such as breath, text, touch, voice, vegetation, spatial proximity, motion, distance, asphalt, material walls and material voids (the reactor hole), pain, and disgust. These practices also enacted processes of queering causality, agency and relationality, and dislocating authority, while (my / the / our) human and more-than-human body / bodies pursued embodied affinities, and a state of becoming-with. Through these re-activated intra-active studies Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) examines and articulates choreography and performance as ever-present negotiations of vulnerability, intimacy, force, and power as enactments that are of-the-world.

As part of the choreographic practice Sugar Rush Productions | Maria Åkesson together with Tsomak Oga, Sooz Romero, and Debora Vega were video documenting Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action). This documentation together with other remains (as a non-representative residue) will be made available after the defense here: dissertationthroughaction.space

In this essay, I document and reflect on a process of creating a twenty-minute performance called That Time I Swam in a Storage Room (2021), with dreams as its source material. The essay is written in the form of a series of log-book-like entries, which offer an insight into how the work developed throughout each week during the nine-week working period. The process described in this essay, is centred around individual explorations, through reading and try-outs, as well as studio-sessions together with a four-person working group consisting of Ane Carlsen, Anton Hedevang, Jane Sievänen and Heta Asikainen. In the essay, I give an account of how the explorations are executed; by using tools and methods derived from Dadaists and Surrealist art movements, such as the cut-up technique and automatic writing. Fragments of methods from other thinkers and psychoanalysts are also applied in order to harvest dream-images and further work with the content of the dreams, such as Sigmund Freud’s dream interpretation and Carl Jung’s active imagination. The essay ends with reflections on the process of creating the performance.

To struggle in the uncomfortable.

How to find paths from the views / ideas / statements / thoughts to be shaped into artistic expression? How do I proceed to work actively with the ideas from the starting point, while the work continuously find itself in a process and develop into a area of action?

How to find a subject/the subject or questions/the questions that I think I'm searching for. Subjects that are hard to define, point out. Working with the unknown. crossing the limits. To stay in the challenge when I want to leave. To stay and take the chance to understand the feeling of resistance. To become aware about myself and my routines, my prejudices, lack of connection with myself. My own ego that is working with self-fulfilment and in need of confirmation, versus the ego in shape of relieving the conscience through a conclusion of something bigger than the own ego.

E R I C is a choreographic work1that treats some areas such as eroticism and meaning,generating multiples others around them.E R I C is the gay future husband of Ariel, the little mermaid.E R I C is a playing field.E R I C is written with E, with R, with I, with C.E R I C is an invitation for flirting.E R I C is a dance.2E R I C is a rhythm box.E R I C is usually loud.E R I C is a good person.These pages contain:The two main interests E R I C has been working around.Three separate writings related to E R I C.E R I C’s choreographic references.A choreographed map around E R I C’s choreographic context.Three visual “imaginariums”3build by and from E R I C.

The doctoral project choreo | graphy is an inquiry into the relationship between thinking through dance and thinking through written language, taking the notion of choreography literally as dancing-writing. Respecting that different media afford different thought processes, ideas, and concepts to be reached, this practice-based artistic research project has unfolded within artistic processes and experiments to explore and develop the relationship between dancing-thinking and writing-thinking. Investigating the media-specificity of thought in dancing together (khoreia) as it relates to the media-specificity of thought in writing (graphia), this project experiments with their relation in a way that serves both art forms and respects their differences, while challenging historical hierarchies between embodied sense-experience and the written word. Cycling through three areas of inquiry, the project asks 1. how dance thinks, 2. how dance writes, and 3. how a (re)considered relationship between dancing and writing might inform choreographic practice. Following these three areas of inquiry, the project’s contributions to artistic research are summarized as follows: articulating what is particular to dance-thought (how dance thinks), practicing and devising procedures for dancing-writing (how dance writes), and pursuing forms of exposition which invite observers to think with and through dance by applying the aforementioned insights to artistic creation (choreo | graphic outcomes). The separation of the word choreography into choreo | graphy signals the project’s intention to open space for consideration and reinvention of the poetics of choreographic practice and discourse. 

Nora the Many is part of Eleanor Bauer's doctorial artistic research project choreo | graphy, a pracitce-based investigation into the relationship between choreo- (from khoreia) as dancing together, and -graphy (from graphia) as writing, pursuing poetically and structurally adequate translations between the two. Created in primary collaboration with the London-based dance collective Nora (Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley and Stephanie McMann) with contributions from dancing-writing groups gathered by Bauer's research, Nora the Many invites the reader into a collectively authored universe of characters and events generated by methods of translating experiences of dancing together into writing. The images, logics, felt-senses and life-worlds brought about by dancing have been documented in writing and woven into a narrative, coining a new genre called Sensual Journalism. Swirling between fiction and reality, sensation and imagination, this choreo | graphic novel is a written X-position of how dance thinks.

The point of this research was for me to find a place between dance and choreography, whereI could allow myself to make my own work and do not feel tamed in common structures andunderstandings of dance and choreography. At this point is hard to say whether the results, Icame up with during the working period, are definitive or temporary in relation to my creativeprocess.In my piece, which I created as a part of this project, my goal was to blur line between danceand choreography - to make a dance piece without choreographing. Here comes final questionsfor you, reader, and for them who had a chance to see my piece “Synthesia“, which I askedmyself as well.Was I successful in making a dance without choreographing?Was this research successful?Do we need a choreography to dance?Do we need dance in choreography?Should we split dance and choreography?Is it even important to problematize relation between dance and choreography???My research project brought some answers, which are personal and subjective, connected tomy artistic work and I do not feel that I want to repeat them more then I have already stated inmy essay. Maybe or maybe not you will answer my questions differently and I encourage youto do so! The beauty of art is that you can have a billion individuals observing the same artwork and they all have a billion different opinions.

// F - E- G //

// F - E- G // is the title of my independent degree project, for the Master program New Performative Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts.

The project was intended as a means for  presenting and understanding my artistic practice and its various aspects. It was a public presentation in the university’s theatre hall. The format chosen was a 50 minute solo performance with a 10 minute participatory section at the beginning of the show. I was the performer, as well as the music and recordings' editor, text writer, and project coordinator in collaboration with SKH's producer and staff.

My aim with the project was to fit together the various themes and practices that I had been exploring during the two years of the course: a somatic sci-fi based practice, clown technique, the use of voice, the relationship of the performer to the audience, finding honesty and repeatability in performance, the use of chance and randomness in creation and performing, the use of language in guiding others toward physical and personal insights and experiences, what kind of social impact performance art can have, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as a choice of life and, finally,  reconnecting to my ageing dancing body. I call the method chosen to explore these various interests and curiosities a personal-experiential method: the ideas were tried out physically and concretely, over a span of time that allowed for reflection and introspection.

The outcome of the project was rich in personal learnings and challenges, as well as a milestone in my development as an artist and a person. I hope it served as a moment of poetry and enjoyment to those who visited and participated in the performances: that they might recognise themselves in similar situations and feelings and that they might be either relieved or comforted or somehow get the chance to witness their experience through the dramaturgy of the performance.

For more on the project please find an brief expansion on this abstract in the uploaded pdf file.

For a more comprehensive view of my artistic practice during the two years at SKH please visit my Research Catalogue site at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/82db91825a5ca2dcf19ae6b16f28d33a (to navigate the site once exposition is open: hover cursor on the top left of the page for a menu).

A n I n t r o d u c t i o nDear reader,Welcome to When Dancing With Ghosts. Throughout this paper there are four chapters,eachintroduced with a title and idea that has been present and essential throughout this project.When I say project I refer to my Degree Project, which is part of a Bachelor in danceperformance at a Swedish University, called Doch, and Unairts. It is essential to mention thatthis paper exist next to a second part of this project that from now on will be referred to as thepractical part, or work.The first chapter named Caring For Dance, is a reflection on how care in this project has beenan approach for the dancer to tune to a tactile experience of attention, and other reflectionaround a relation between the dancer and the dance. In the second chapter, Body As AnArchive, I’ll introduce my work and interest for the body as a messy source and traces, andpotential for dances. It gives insight into how I work with film documentations to meet andscrutinize dances that has been, and further how I worked on (re)doing dances from a(particular) archive. Encountering Ghosts, as the third chapter, invites ghost as material fordancing, and give some insight in how I use them to generate dances. Last chapter, for thispaper, Some notes from a solo dancer echoes how the solo as a format has been recurrent,dealt with, and questioned in a longer period time than this project. It also holds the Loveletters archive, which contains a collection of written material from my processual notebookover the last three months when working with this project.I didn’t start this project to answer a specific question, yet there has been many appearing, andthey are still here to support potentials, dreams, and not yet imaginable futures. Nevertheless,throughout this paper I hope to give some insight into my dance practice that for now circlesaround the questionWhere does the dance goes, when dancing with ghosts?

“I am looking at my body outside the patriarchal gaze. Of course, that is not possible. But who is interested in the possible?” - Kathy Acker re-imagined.

Felicia Bichard, best known as burlesque performer Fräulein Frauke, invites you to her final presentation exhibition of her Master studies at Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola, New Performative Practice program.During the past two years Felicia has delved into, and explored, “the sexual woman on stage” within her own practice of burlesque and related art forms and through academia.In this end presentation: an exhibition at contemporary art space and dance studio ccap Körsbärsvägen, she will show works (some in process) and welcomes dialogue and conversation around the topics.

Works on display:In View of the Viewer - video installation and liveThe Stripping Scholar - audio work in form of a podcastFelicia & Frauke – short film+ smaller works on display Panel discussion with invited guests Salli-Sofia Ritola Doctoral Researcher, Jonas Eklund PhD and Mary Ann Anderson MA.

Collaborator and photograph JP Bichard´Felicia & Frauke´: documentary by Greta Fazzi, Mila Van Gelder, Yassmin Abdelfattah, Lucía Diaz LosantosSpecial Thanks to Martin Harvgreaves, Chrysa Parkinson, Tove Salmgren, NPP 23 class, Aurora Brännström, Jonas Eklund, Marnie Scarlet, Fifi von Tassel, Chris Harder, Ester Marin Bergsmark, Mary Ann Andersen, Linn-Hilda Lamberg, Sigrid Sjöholm, Salli-Sofia Ritola and everyone paricipating in In View of the Viewer

Soup night special with Alice and Amanda / We As A Thing / Tell Me Your Fantasy

ABSTRACT

We As A Thing is a project that focuses on female experiences around desire, intimacy and fantasy. The project is an experiment with ideas of the self as well as a play of infinite boundaries between bodies, materials and temporalities. Tangling through a multiplicity of possible articulations and re-articulations, fantasy acts as a potentially subversive force. From within the physical experience of the female body – from her skin and blood – the project interweaves bodies of knowledge and desire, whilst in dialogue with conceptions of the feminized body and the narratives of those who inhabit them.

The presentation of my practice will manifest in a shared performance night with fellow NPP student Alice MacKenzie, where the performance We As A Thing – made in collaboration with Ellinor Ljungkvist – will be one part, a participatory workshop-evening of conversation and collective knitting named Tell Me Your Fantasy and the booklet, We As A Thing,that will be available at the encounters.

Alongside, I convey an ongoing interest in and exploration of collective formats and sustainable ways of working with others – where participation in itself acts as a collaborative strategy.

The different materials in the presentations emanate from a series of one on one conversations that I have had with women and non binary persons during the past two years. The dialogical texts in the booklet, are responses to that multitude of voices and are attending thoughts on sexual fantasies, power structures, distress, resistance and possible futures.

How can a text be presented so that it keeps its integrity as text and at the same time is a material that performs on multiple senses? 

Working with this question brings far-cry-perspectives and offbeat tactics from my practices into relation, creating a space for myself to take stock of my intentions. Materiality, movement, performative writing, translationality; by tenting with these practices, a space is proposed for these tryings and doings to be explored and to interact with one another. A space to hand over, or even find and formulate, a question not yet known. 

The project’s aim is to direct attention to impulses, memories, temporalities, dreams. And to explore what (kind of) language game the text camp site sparks. Gräv där du står (dig where you stand) is the method; pointing towards individual realities, hoping to evoke responses in others. Reading, listening, relating every day events. Joining eye, hand and thought. 

Sol Le Witt encourages Eva Hesse to stop fearing and just do, also Sol tells Eva make your own world. Perhaps disobedient to Don’t produce anything, but loyal to Don’t try to please, as Paul B. Preciado puts it in ‘Pack up your things’. ‘Spring numerus’ is a very different kind of camping than Tracey Emin’s, but still, it also has to do with intimacy and attentiveness. 

To be attentif, attentive, is to have a wait-and-see-attitude to what one’s looking at, and: Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it, Simone Weil writes. Existing in a time of distractions, building a tent is a think-with-the-hands attempt, an action that responds to (that) reality.            

This essay accompanies the creation of the choreographic work entitled "Tropic of Capricorn - a Swedish piece" that I am creating together with Hanna Edh, Estelle Gautier and Julie Menut as guest performers and which will premiera at Kulturhuset Stockholm, on the 20th of May 2016. It summarizes the processes of thinking and making that I engaged in during this year. It is meant to trace the evolution of my concerns, the methodologies I adopted and the strategies I found to be able to share my artistic research.

A fundamental source of information for this project has been my participation in dance classes the last years. The contradictions and conflicts of moving in-between practices, where teachers share their very different experiences and knowledge from dancing, has been foodfor thought. 

This essay is about knowledge in the experience and the doing in a dancing practice. A research about how knowledge about the body through the experience can be used in a contemporary dance context. The purpose with this essay is to develop a deeper understanding in the experience and possibilities of the body in a teaching and artistic practice. The question that I use in this research are: How can I increase my knowledge about the body through experience in a contemporary dance context? How can I communicate the developed knowledge to my future students?

For this research I´m going to use introspection as the method to gather research, in this method I will be my own research object. I will also use the concept the three different rooms that are a part of my contemporary dance context as a method for this research.

The result for the research is a developed and deepend knowledge in how I can use the three different rooms and my bodily senses in my teaching and artistic practice. Also a new knowledge in how I can construct a teaching enviroment that strengthen the use of the senses in a teaching situation.

Title: WITH

Artist / student: Sofie Burgoyne

Duration: 45 minutes – 1 hour

This encounter embodies an act of study, as Erin Manning refers to it “an act that delights

in the activation of the as-yet-unthought”. It offers up artistic materials generated and

accumulated over a yearlong artistic enquiry as a landscape to wade through, collectively

and in-time. In doing so, this encounter hopes for a patient experimentation where a

curation of the materials can occur, through the affect of the relation that is in touch with

them.

The encounter is made up of presence, time, flesh, action, memory, care, gesture,

pandemic, sensation, distance, relation and fiction. It makes up an inter-human relation

that produces a live and performative, artistic and dramaturgical methodology and event.

In turning to fragments of artistic material and the affect of a relation, it could be

considered a task-based-study in what Edouard Glissant called “consenting to not be a

single being”.

Questions that the encounter brings into being but does not necessarily seek a fixed

answer for, include: What kind of performer / audience relations emerge from framing

moments of presentation as moments of “collective study”? By rehearsing in-time,

embodied relations where response and responsibility, trust and collectivity and being in

and out of sync are reckoned with, how are we (those participating) practicing thought-inmotion and change? How can the force of form in this encounter remain emergent?

This study examines active discourses and their affects on the availability/admission to the dance education at the Swedish upper secondary school. Discourse analysis and an intersectional interpretation of attributes such as physicality, social class and ethnicity constitute the studies theoretical and methodological basis. The analysis focuses on educational policy documents and interviews. Qualitative interviews have been conducted, the group consisting of principals, teachers and members of the Swedish National Agency for Education, all connected to the upper secondary school. The educational policy documents and interview material help emphasize certain discourses and facilitates analysis of the discourses. The result of the study shows that auditions affect the dance education programs´s availability in prevailing/consolidate homogenous groups. Auditions and school profiles are questionable as they value a certain type of knowledge and experience.

I understand "artistic" as describing a way of doing, of understanding, of seeing that entails many possible paths, such as the political, the empirical, the experiential, the philosophical, the sensorial, the somatic, the phenomenological.... Life, daily routine, art practice and currently also death constitute an amalgam where I coexist.

I respectfully overlap conversations, readings, talks, letters, maps, movement explorations, drawings, and other layers of information to configure or re-configure a performative scape for considering and investigating what senses we may convene as entry points to reality.

Lately I am digging into the sense of sight. Sight, vision(s), eyes...What is visible and invisible?And when eyes also touch?

My belief in proximity as essential to any of these practices is stronger than ever.

Caring for the simplest acts and observing what our essential needs are ways to stay in close proximity.

Preparing the table to eat with friends.

To take part at this speculative table I would invite

Laura F. Gibellini and Annika Boholm as two of my closest acompañantes.Mar Rodriguez Valverde and Roberto Martínez as translators of what I would be trying to say,

Josep María Esquirol as a special guest.

How can these different perspectives come into dialogue?

In this practice I work to envision a conversation in which astronomy and quantum physics could simultaneously coexist with discourses in astrology, spiritual beliefs, and astral charts while a somatic dance of flesh, atoms, stars and orbiting planets is happening inside an oracle we have previously contemplated.

In between the past and the future.

I have worked with improvisation on stage and I call it Choreography in real time. With the experiences from performances, workshops, interviews and books I wrote three åtndamentals:

l. Take choices in the moment, not before or after.

2. Enjoy yourself on stage.

3. Be conscious about space, sounds, your body, your feelings and your thoughts.

The Fundamentals led me to the Question:

How do different tasks in improvisation relate to my fundamentals in Choreography in real time?

I have been improvising by using five different tasks:

Tasks given in the moment

Rules for my movements

Improvisation with a fixed choreography

Music

To imagine pictures and props

I realized that to use rules for my movements and to physically and mentally surprise myself helps me to take decisions in the moment. It is difficult for me to be conscious about the space when I am focused on a rule, and it is easier if I imagine pictures and props. My consciousness about my thoughts can be in the way of my movements, to be able to communicate with the audience I have to be openminded by letting go of my drive to strategize and become vulnerable. The method that works for me right now is when I do not structure my performance but I have the tasks as tools for me to use whenever I want.

Continuous access to dance studios during the MA inspired me to unpack my relationship to spaces of that nature. By inviting people to be with me in a restrictive room designated for play/movement, and particularly ballet, how can I shape the conventions through which my body is seen in relation to existing discourses about bodies and subjects? Experimenting with ballet forms and encounters with contemporary art, my presentation speculates on how the studio as a social and political environment constitutes bodies as well as a way of looking at bodies as sites of encrypted knowledge. The invitation is to be inside encrypted knowledge, to come in to a social and political place – the studio – a place where I work, and where others work, to consider how one arranges ones’ self in relation to space; real, virtual or speculative. The performance proposes a mode of imagination that suspends the desire to know exactly where things (generally speaking) belong. That opening, like a pause, is a performative situation where I question the place of labor in relation to the imperative for the dancer’s body to be progressive. This work offers insights into my artistic reflection on aesthetics, which involves practices of teaching movement, performing, drawing, filming, editing, framing, composition and technique. 

In these works, I explore extended ontology as seen through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI) and neurodiversity. My aim has been to give attention to a wider perspective on intelligence as it relates to artistic theory and practice. By focusing on AI, a very different type of intelligence, and working through its point of view, my hope is to open up a wider discussion about intelligence and subsequently human neurodiversity. In the varied products of my artistic practice, I use aesthetic experiences and objects to de-link narrowed assumptions about intelligence. 

The main approach has been to use different types of artificial intelligence as a collaborative partner with a focus on multimodality. This method has allowed me to explore intelligence from both a holistic point of view, and by a reduction to parts. The multimodal aspect of the work is an important component as it in itself extends the traditional categorization and perception of artworks – for example, seeing a choreography expressed as a static sculpture unsettles the assumption that a choreography is only found in a moving body. The multimodal also challenges the neurotypical bias towards language and language centric epistemology. 

My practice has focused on AI and for future work, it would be interesting to explore other types of intelligences as well, their relation to each other and artistic theory and practice.

How could we

organize

as MUSHROOM(-mycelium)

- is the structuring desire of my current delving.

It is fictionalizing the human as something that is able to become something else through taking care.

It is rooted in a broader matrix of questions of WHAT, HOW and WITH WHOM an artist (everybody is an artist, who wants to be an artist) CAN do when mushroomy processes like disintegration and co-dependence appear tangible for very distant bodies at the same time.

How could we

is creating a research on what has been already tried and what practices of shared imagination could emerge at the moment.

It is also acknowledging a common place that defines 'we'. What would we gain and what would we lose by not mentioning the 'we'?

It is also about access or sensibility to technologies of collective intelligence.

It is also about embodiment of the others.

organize

to hope through time

to take agency

to handle, again, take care

to invigorate connections

to bio-mime, -play, -think

as MUSHROOM(-mycelium)

as a not yet known

as an overly complex

as a more than itself

?

The diverging ideas around the allure of mycelial-like organization unveil a visceral surrender to the need of singular approaches, fixed maps or comfortable stories. Possible answers demonstrates a post-disciplinary sensitivity for choreographies of ceaselessness. 

In my quest for different ways of perceiving and relating to something beyond its function, purpose and assumed definition, I aim to escape identification and find new understandings through in-between spaces and decentralized perspectives. In resistance to traditional value systems within product oriented and categorical thinking, I detour my gaze towards a process of ‘becoming’. I practice a quality of presence that allows for what I do to be continuously reformulated and in direct contact with the circumstances. Exposing my practice to different conditions and spaces - studio as well as in-outdoor public spaces- informs me further on the range of what I do while recycling experiences that crystalize in different expressions. Tending towards a malleable understanding of what things can be rather than what they appear to already be, I propose a fluid performative frame that allows me to encounter the accumulated process in real time. The unfolding event, shaped by the tension between known and unknown conditions, materializes in the form of a film-performance, or real-time cinema, where cameras, projection, light, screens, body, objects, and other unexpected, real-time conditions support me in transposing my bodily seeded search of multiple fronts and moving /being moved by space. Working with scale and playing with how framing suspends conventional ways of viewing, I continuously shift the perspective of my surroundings. Displacing or superimposing materials, framed spaces, and temporalities blurs the contouring borders of things and creates liminal spaces that activate potentials for new perceptions and realities.

Concept, realization and performance: Adriana Cubides Supervision and mentoring: Jeanine DurningFilming in-outdoor public spaces:  Fares Qadri, Lena Kienzer, Adriana CubidesFilming in Bogotá: Robinson Cuervo, Francisco PinzónLive sound composition - on Sunday 23 May: Alexandra Nilsson

Support: Fredrik Heimdahl and from the Department of Film and Media at SKH: Max Edkvist, David SmithSpecial thanks: Maria Isabel Segura, Pablo Cubides, Iris Nikolaou, Annika Boholm, Chrysa Parkinson and Thomas Brennan

Hearth    is    the    floor    of    a    fireplace.    It    is    this    solid    ground    that    enables    a    fire    to    burn.    It    holds    the    warmth    and    helps    it    to    spread    all    over    the    house.    A    slow    and    silent    force    that    warms    your    heart    in    the    night,    that    keeps    your    loved    ones    alive    and    healthy.    Hearth    is    heart    and    earth    in    the    same    word.    It    is    the    pleasure    you    have    to    hear    your    friend    singing    and    playing    guitar    next    to    the    bonfire.    Winter    is    a    time    for    stories,    nourishment,    fire    and    love    that    heal.    Hearth    is    a    proposal    for    supporting    just    being.    Be    and    be    collectively.    With    the    help    of    this    flame    that    burns    in    our    belly,    that    burns    in    our    heart,    we    create    a    common    surface,    our    own    base    together.

MOMENT IS WITHIN MOMENTOUS is an invitation to a dancing practice within absurdity. It works in and out of visibility and pushes against the notion of a steady self. At the center of the practice is an interest in how the small throwaway thing is the big thing. How do moments accumulate over time and what do they form that we cannot foresee or control? 

The art of leading: a novice confessions.

"Future leaders must by far more ask the question, Why should my staff follow me? In order to get paid someone responds. Sure. But that's not enough. Tomorrow's employees must be willing to follow their leaders to perform and feel at their best. And for leaders, it is about to have clear and meaningful goals, credibility and a genuine willingness to achieve something that makes employees want to be on the train. Otherwise the leader is alone." 

"Good managers and good leadership is crucial. [... ] Hence there is a need for an organization just for managers. An organization that promotes the interests of managers and understand the managers role inside and out. Therefore Ledarna exists, Sweden's leader organization. [... ] We work for managers to have agreements and arrangements that are well suited for a managerial role."

"But do we need a leader? Cannot everybody be a leader in a project? Responsibility nurture commitment. Cultivation of leadership culture alienates the leader from who it leads. Or? Leadership culture can induce cynicism and grow suppression techniques. Or? Co-creation and co-determination creates a feeling of equality, and the opposite often a feeling of alienation.

Problem statement: How do I react and then act when I'm both part of and lead an artistic process and what methods it has created?

The main purpose of the essay is to serve as a documentation of my research practice on the movement of the tailbone and its connections to my dancing body. The essay is being written from my personal perspective which springs out of my interest in the importance of using the tailbone whilst dancing. In the first part of the text I have included personal information to the reader about where my interest in the movement of the tailbone arose. One of the methods during the research was to write a process diary as a way to combine a physical practice and writing practice. This process diary is now a big part of this essay. In the essay you as a redear can follow how the research has transformed and changed throughout working time on the project. The second part of the essay reflects on the process of researching the tailbone-ing movement practice and what the practical presentation should look like. In the last pages of the essay you find a choreographic score which is both a documentation of the practice as well as a score to perform it. Working on the essay opens up new possibilties for further research on the importance of the tailbone and the pelvic floor in the dancing body.

Deconstruction of a solo.

I have been working on how to deconstruct a solo. The solo is movement material from Duality Of Content by Kristine Slettevold. As a method I have used three different dramaturgy curves and deconstructed the solo according to them and their demands. I have used time, energy and space as tools for myself to find the different dynamic. My questions were: How can I through the classical dramaturgy curves deconstruct a solo? How can I through exploring them create my own? During my process I have recorded the three solos on DVD to be able to analyse and observe the outcome. After that I have analysed and reflected on what I found interesting in the different curves and then chosen parts. From that I have deconstruct the solo once again using the three dramaturgy curves as inspiration. During the process I learned the dramaturgy curves expression and the differences between them. It is the same movement material but the outcome is dissimilar. The different parts in a solo always stand according to each other, by consciously separating them you then can decide how to rearrange. Through balancing/not balancing the parts I can find my expression in it. I feel I have evolved own methods in how to structure and with dramaturgy curves help change a material.

This is an invitation to an assemblage-in-motion where the translucent and the blurry are explored. Where the body is not discrete, and multiplicity and fuzziness are welcomed.

Stillness will be present along with the traces of a trajectory in space. 

A memory. A cloud. A dim shadow. 

Some sounds. 

A proposal for fleeting, fluttering encounters. 

_______________________________________________

Performers: Darya Efrat, Pedro Pestana and others

Title Slides Design: Aura Lewis

Technical Support: Ronald Salas 

Production: Karin Hauptmann

Rigging Support: Johan Bodin

Special thanks to the NPPs (cohort and staff), SSFFNs, Max Edkvist, Björn Eriksson, Alberto Feliciate Ordóñez, Fredrik Heimdahl, Claudia Heu, Ingela Stefaniak, and Fredrik Wåhlstedt

Ngoma

The aim of this work is to examine the interaction between dance and music and how a symbiotic relation between the two forms of expression can generate in tools useful in both an artistic and didactic context. The work is based on two question formulations. The first one relates to how dance and music can be examined as one and how that can be used in an artistic process in relation to jazz dance. The other question relates to the didactic perspective and how this study can enrich the teaching ofjazz dance in the upper secondary school.

The method for this work was divided into four different parts. The first one was a literature study of the meaning of "ngoma". The second one a self-interview and, in relation to the findings of the first two methods, the third method was a practical improvisation research in the dance studio. The results of the practical work developed into an artistic and choreographic process and resulted in a score. At last, to answer the second question, the result of the process was rewired in a didactic perspective

The art of being artistic/Konsten att vara konstnärlig

The aim för this work is to be critical to the term artistic and to develop methods for how to relate and work with it. It is based on two questions:

In which ways can the term artistic be explored in a dance practice or choreographic process? How can dance teachers in upper secondary school relate to the term artistic in their dance teaching? 

The method is divided in three parts. First, I invited three teachers from University of dance and circus to discuss how they relate to the term artistic. Then I explored what the term artistic meant to me. My experiences were gathered in a journal and then analysed. The data from the analysis where then used in a choreographic process. In the last part of the method I looked at the whole process with didactic perspective and developed methods based on it. 

ma

Questions/Aim:

How to care for the moment as a shared experience to nourish? What language is needed to be able to communicate different kind of knowledges? What times are present? What is the relation between responsibility and chance? What is created out of experiences and history in this moment and in relation to the future?

Presentation:

This is an encounter in time. The dance starts and continues in waves. There is an expanded notion of dance and a need for sustainability. The waves keep on changing, ongoing.

Language is going on: the one that is needed for communicating rhythm, structure, wilderness and oblivion.

The landscape becomes part of the dance, a landscape with as many centers as there are beings.

Gentleness, tension and chance are invited to unfold until it is time to end. And maybe echo after. 

Methods:

-a dance-of-the-day and music-of-the-day exchange, where dynamics and relations have been present and specified. Thoughts in the doing that evolve, collaboration that has developed over time.

- automatic writing to see what surfaces in translation from dance to text.

- a working method of doing, reading, seeing, writing and listening, ma is becoming through the sharing, through the distance and closeness that is created with our bodies and minds.

References:

Erin Manning and her idea of relationscape and a body-in-becoming, Edward Glissant’s book “Poetics of relation”, Trinh T. Minh-ha and her film “Forgetting Vietnam”, Marc Augé’s book “Oblivion”, Birgit Åkesson’s book “Spår i luften”, Inger Christensen’s poetry, Agnés Warda’s films.

This essay tries to unfold the concepts and concerns in and with the work I´m doing. As a method for identifying concerns to work with, I`ve been mindmapping and writing a working journal. The text I will have in italics in this essay will be texts from that process. This essay is also an unfolding of this same process of identifying concerns and then working with them.

This is about somebody else.

What is self exposure on stage? How can I expose in a solo?

Using methods like improvisation, brainstorming and reading I put myself in a research of what self-exposure could be, and what it would be - for me. I chose to approach these question by working on the opposite of exposure, hiding. I made research in the studio and outside it on how one could expose by hiding. The other theme that became relevant in my work was the constructions of protection that enable hiding. Playing safe was one way to see hiding and taking a risk to be exposing.

How do I play safe? What is a risk? It is not a true risk to fail in something that doesn't matter to you. In this solo and for me a risk was to make a decision to trust in movement. It was to share my genuine interest and take a risk to fail doing it in a way that gives it relevance. Relevance for me to now share it with you.

I did a solo I want to share with you. This is my self-exposure.

The purpose of the artistic research, Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice, has been to consider choreography and curating in their similarities and differences. Thus, at different phases of the working process, choreography and curating were treated as one and the same artistic practice; while, in other moments, as practices that are distinct from each other.

Curating has been implemented as a ‘taking care’ principle and a relational activity impacting the production, presentation and documentation of choreography. Choreography has undergone a process of self-reincarnations, or rather, of trans-carnations, whereby the entire body of work has been scrutinized and altered. Key figure/body/agent of these trans-carnations has been the horse, or rather, the assemblage of human and horse, women and horses, here called ‘Centauring.’ 

Curating and choreography have been integrated to a scrutiny of the art of riding, specifically, the choreography of dressage. In dressage, the research has identified the rigor needed by the research to both steer and unleash the working process.

The research has been pursued by purely artistic means, within a circumscribed field. Different perspectives and the making use of ramifications and loose ends, has proliferated into a plethora of intra-related works, objects and choreographies within which research result and artistic result coincide. The research har proceeded in consecutive phases. Each phase has developed its own specific artistic methodologies.

The overarching methodology has provided for a clear navigation of undetermined directions and dramaturgies. The concept of ‘One’ has produced and collected both core outcomes and residual manifestations. The exhibitions and the exhibitor have carried, pursued and embodied the works and otherwise choreographies, throughout the research process.

Similarly to how I write dance, my approach to writing this essay will be descriptive, in such a way developed by Simon Hecquet and Sabine Prokhoris in their book Fabriques de la Danse1. Description for them is a way to construct gazes or manners of seeing2 and not merely the communication of a preexisting gaze. In such, it is a mode of giving accounts to another as well as to oneself. In this giving of accounts, my aim is to dissect some of the choreographic apparatuses I have been developing throughout the years, analyse what they do and if they are useful in fulfilling what I want my work to do. This essay will consider my entire body of works and will especially focus on the current work ’d he meant vary a shin’s, a dance trio for Eva Honings, Lena Schattenberg and myself.

This essay is one part of my Bachelor’s degree project, the other part being the dance performance OUR VISIONIS FROM HELL. / 34°10'26.6"N 118°39'50.4"W, which was presented in November 2022 at Stockholm University of the Arts. The work was inspired by certain events around the breakup between musician Kanye West and reality star Kim Kardashian. The text aims to further articulate, explain and discuss the topics of the piece, which were heartbreak, violence and pop culture in the arts, as well as referencing the American writers bell hooks and Susan Sontag and their approach to these issues. The essay also goes into the research, conversations and different thinking processes from and within the work. The text is written as a fictional letter to Kanye West and desires to question and criticize his behavior during the fall of 2022.

This essay follows closely the process of making the work for my degree project. The aim of the text is to reflect as much as possible the entire journey of my thinking and doing, demonstrating how one of the main concepts of the work, metamorphosis, served the final purpose of the project, to build a world for bizarre creatures made of colorful piles of clothes. The methods used were looking for inspiration material online i.e. a performance by Ingri Fiksdal, several drag performers, or a music video by the band Primus, bringing in Posthuman theory and decolonial thinking as well as readings on the grotesque, including writers like Rosi Braidotti, María Lugones, and Sara Cohen Shabot respectively, taking an excessive amount of notes on diary form, and playing dress-up in the studio. The information that surfaced while all the above was combined, is presented in quite a raw form here, not as one smooth text, but as chunks that mirror where my process was at each moment. More so than anything else, this essay demonstrates the messiness of a/my artistic process and acts as a mind map of interests as they get closer to some kind of crystallization.