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.

ma was presented at Skeppsholmen in Stockholm. It was a one-to-one encounter, I met the visitor by the bridge at Skeppsholmen, I shortly presented the expression ma and asked the visitor to choose a number between 1-9, the number gave us a theme to talk about during our collective walk towards the studio, for each visitor I had prepared a list from 1-9 with themes that connected to my process with ma, such as; history - future, memory - oblivion, close - far away, tamed - wild, light - darkness, responsibility - sustainability.

Our collective walk started slowly and in silence until I asked a question about the theme that came from the number the visitor had choosen. We walked towards the studio where I invited the visitor to move or lay down or sit and watch. The room was prepared with see-through walls that had the shape of waves that reflected the light and dimmed the sight, there were also ropes coming out of the wall, a scenography by Johanna Eliasson.

Lise-Lotte Norelius was the composer of the music. The music was divided into three different channels; one with a 26 minutes loop, one with short field recordings that was triggered by a contact microphone, playing one of nine tracks randomly. The third channel had longer field recordings with some of them looping when triggered, also connected to a contact microphone that triggered one of nine tracks randomly.

To finnish ma we walked back to the startingpoint by the bridge on Skeppsholmen, the visitor could choose to walk in silence or to share some thought on our shared moment in time.

During the presentation period 17-28 of May, ma was presented 23 times in real life and twice on zoom the 29th of May.