Within Practice 2024

About
Blog
Archive
- Sv
- En

Coming up

Within Practice 2024

Cullberg (SE), Jeanine Durning (US), Mette Edvardsen (NO), Shirley Harthey Ubilla (SE), Stina Nyberg (SE), Andrew Tay (CA)

30 september-5 october

MDT, Stockholm University of the Arts, Dansens Hus

Within Practice 2022

Samlingen, Bambam Frost, Liz Kinoshita, Alma Söderberg, Andros Zins-Browne and Tiran Willemse, and more... See full program now!

13-18 June 2022

MDT, SKH & Skeppsholmen

Within Practice 2020

Kristin Ryg Helgebostad, Jennifer Lacey, INSISTER SPACE, Michikazu Matsune, Rani Nair, Will Rawls, Björn Säfsten

5–10 October 2020

Stockholm University of the Arts, MDT & höjden

Local Practice 2019

Gunilla Heilborn, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Samlingen

26–27 April 2019

DC Sthlm & MDT

Within Practice 2018

Caroline Byström, Alice Chauchat, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Chrysa Parkinson, Salvador Sanchis, Arkadi Zaides, Yvonne Rainer’s »Trio A«

8–14 October 2018

About

Within Practice is a festival for contemporary dance practices. The festival showcases the work of dancers and choreographers through various formats such as workshops, an evening of practice-sharing, conversations, panel discussions, and practice presentations. Join us and immerse yourself in the "whys" and "hows" - in the essence of dance-making!

The festival focuses on practice and practices from the perspective of the practitioners. The concept of practice(s) is widely used within dance and choreography today; some might even say it is overused. However, the idea of practice can provide an opportunity to move beyond the projectification of art and instead emphasize other long-term approaches. Practice can offer a way of generating choreography and movement - to train/repeat (to practice). By providing a space for practicing we aim to highlight the inherently experimental and persistent qualities and value of practices and continue to build a community among practitioners in line with discussions on what contemporary practices can be today.

Within Practice was founded by artistic director Björn Säfsten in 2015. Our first edition took place in 2016. You can find info on all previous editions here!

Blog

11 November, 202411 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

Review for Ravel by Eleanor Bauer, 16 October 2024

Photographer: Sima Korenivski

October 5th: Jeanine Durning, Elverket Dansenshus

During Within Practice 2024, the festival collaborated with Ravel. Ravel is an online publication for choreographic reviews, or reviews on choreography. Ravel invites people from the field of dance and choreography to write alongside and with works as a way of accompanying them and their makers. The project reflects on the fixity offered by traditions of (e)valuation and review writing, and in turn, considers it a choreographic format in itself. For Within Practice 2024, 6 artists each joined a different workshop throughout the week, writing alongside and in response to workshops and practice presentations by Shirley Harthey Ubilla, Mette Edvardsen, Andrew Tay, Jeanine Durning, Stina Nyberg and Cullberg. Ravel is initiated by Amalia Kasakove, a Stockholm based artist working in the gutter between animation and choreography with works that bend into the forms of performances, stop-motion animation, comics and curatorial proposals Jeanine Durning Within Practice workshop, 1-3 October 2024

Review for Ravel by Eleanor Bauer, 16 October 2024

Nonstopping. The practice is called nonstopping because it makes direct felt-sense to anyone who hears it. It could be called keeping-going, but it’s not. Nonstopping is a negation of stasis, a project against paralysis. “There is a lot of shit going on,” says Jeanine during the workshop introduction, “sometimes it’s hard to go to the studio and do stuff.” And from this point forward there is an outside in this room, the larger lifeworld each of us carries and sometimes ignores is made present. “There are so many external and internal circumstances that can conspire against creativity… How can questions be motivators instead of paralyzers? You’re gonna want to stop. Find out how to continue.”

Someone walks into the room at the start of the workshop and leaves just a few minutes later. They came to pick something up that they’d left in the studio prior. “Leaving – so soon?” Jeanine says, in a dry but somewhat theatrical tone that is both funny and sad. It feels sincere, even if we all recognize it as a well-timed improvised joke, and laugh. This double tenor of gravity and humor marks a lot of what Jeanine does and says. I can see it as a framework for complexity to unfold within her work, but I also see it as one of the many possible strategies for relentless continuity in nonstopping: how to be both light enough and serious enough to carry on. Too much gravity could weigh anyone down and make them want to stop, and too much lightness could feel like nothing matters and make them want to stop. When the person who came and left leaves, she says, “We’ll be using that door later on. But not now.”

Another framing tension that supports nonstopping is speed; the tension between fast and slow, or, how to move fast enough to maintain the necessary momentum to keep going and how to move slow enough to track. It sounds simple, and in language it is, but it holds up a framework for attention, for attending to what we’re doing, for tending what we’re doing, which in practice is actually quite complex. The idea of tracking is about awareness of action, to which Jeanine also says, “don’t move faster than you can feel.”

We are asked to be aware of location, as in, where we are in the room. “Where you are is also where you are not,” says Jeanine. In this very T.S. Eliot style paradox lies another framing tension to help resist stagnation. I could be aware of where I am in the room in relation to everything else and have a sense of space and composition while sitting still, but as soon as I am reminded that where I am is where I am not, the whole space is charged and I have to escape where I am before the negative space collapses around me.

The door is finally introduced. If you need to refresh your desire, refresh your concentration, get unstuck, restart to be able to go on, you can simply leave through the door and come back. And sometimes we do. The hard part is not considering the entrance or exit any more special than any other movement; not to come in and declare here I am and I’m starting again now but to start before you are ready even if you left to come back in order to be ready. I’m dropping quotation marks and punctuation here in order to make that sense of nonstopping more felt. The door is there but it’s not an escape, it’s just another trick to keep going. And it works because there is an outside of this room even if I choose to be in it.

Accepting the material that arises might be the hardest thing of all. When everything that arises has a past and makes an impression in the now, I experience recognition that perhaps includes boredom of my habits; I experience taste that perhaps includes distaste; I have an opinion that perhaps includes regret or embarrassment. I want to get stuck just so that I havean actual problem to solve that makes me move to become unstuck, I kick around objects or push up against the walls just to feel something besides my own dancing in its own echo chamber. But there is a deeper implication to accepting the material that arises, and that is in Jeanine’s consideration of nonstopping as choreographic.

In a small booklet also titled nonstopping, Jeanine writes in dialogue with Hillary Clark:

“What is the practice? What is the procedure that I’m working on? What is the

operation? What’s the mechanism of this thing? I’m trying to understand the

choreographic from this perspective rather than the choreographic as a sequence of

collected materials or curated materials that are then represented later.

What is the correlation between practice and performance? In a way it was a

revelation to understand the choreographic from this perspective.”

We are put in pairs and instructed to take turns nonstop talking for ten minutes while the listener attends primarily to the structure of the thinking rather than the content. Jeanine speaks about articulation without accuracy when it comes to nonstop talking – one doesn’t have to say exactly what they think or feel or get bogged down with finding the right words or telling the truth. The focus is on the continuity of articulation itself. It can feel psychoanalytic at times watching this river of content spill forth and soft-wondering in my inner Steve Urkel voice, “did I do that?” Yet the deeper discovery is not in what I’ve said but in the underlying structures of thought that point to the choreographer inside the nonstopper: the way of navigating, turning corners, circling around, connecting, bouncing off of and/or moving through stuff.

“Nonstopping is a survival technique,” Jeanine tells us, “but also practical.” The pragmatic

nature of the practice itself creates ripples of wider poetic resonance, because of the openness in relation to content as met with rigorous presence. Openness and rigor: another framing tension. It occurred to me at one point that nonstopping is like meditation but harder. Again in dialogue with Hillary Clarke, Jeanine writes: “It’s an ongoing life process that isn’t just about dance or performance or even always getting into the studio to practice but it’s become more about a way of living or a philosophy that has a practical methodology to it.”

After the workshop I tell Jeanine she has a masterful way of facilitating this practice, she says thanks, it’s taken several years and several workshops to figure out. It’s been a process of finding out how little can be said before getting going. “What are the minimal conditions to be ready?” is one of the first questions she asks us, and she reminds us to “start before you are ready,” almost every time we begin a practice.

In the nonstopping booklet I read that nonstopping came about around 2008 through pieces such as inging which was nonstop talking and later on To Being (2012) which was nonstop moving, and carried on to also include nonstop writing. Other pieces that held nonstopping have been This Shape, We Are In (2015), dark matter (2017), here, before (2019), Last Shelter (2021), and untitled (2023). Even these dates are a simplification, marking perhaps the first public presentation or the start of research, but the processes bleed and bled into one another through varied research residencies, performances, or iterations, and above all the ongoingness of Jeanine’s own nonstopping, which is not just about going to the studio and setting a timer, but the steady nonstopping of her questioning, caring, observant, absorbent modybind that refuses to settle, refuses to settle for less, refuses to settle on a final point.After her practice presentation, also during Within Practice, Jeanine reads a long list of thank you’s, ranging from the presenters and curators who have sustained her practice over the years to the Within Practice team of curators, producers, and assistants who made her week in Stockholm possible, to the Dansenshus technican Johannes Fäst who custom-built a black wooden theatrical cube for her presentation. The depth of her appreciation for every detail of circumstance that conspires to make her practice possible underlines her constant awareness of the circumstances beyond her control that threaten to halt it.

—

Eleanor Bauer

Eleanor Bauer is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of dance, writing, choreography, music, and image. Her work is a synthesis of embodied intelligences, a practice of making sense with the senses. From solos and talk shows to large ensemble pieces and films, her versatile works ranging in scale, media, and genre have toured internationally to critical acclaim.

Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bauer holds a BFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2003), is a graduate of the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels (2006), and completed her PhD in Performative and Media-Based Practices with a Specialization in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (2022).

Bauer established the Brussels-based company GoodMove vzw in 2007, through which she produced performances and collaborations until 2020. During this time her works toured internationally to critical acclaim in prominent festivals and theaters primarily in Europe. She was artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013-2016. She has been commissioned as a choreographer by, among others, Cullberg in Stockholm, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Corpus at the Royal Danish Theater, Nora in London, and several universities.

Bauer has worked as a performer with Matthew Barney, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Tino Sehgal, Trisha Brown, Every Ocean Hughes, David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, Ictus music ensemble, The Knife, and Fever Ray, among others.

Bauer has extensive teaching experience in both academic and public/professional contexts. As an insatiable researcher, Bauer teaches, writes, lectures, and co-creates contexts for exchange of knowledge in the arts. Together with Ellen Söderhult and Alice Chauchat, she co-founded the open-source format for exchange of practices in the performing arts called Nobody’s Business in 2015, which has since been adapted by practitioners and organizers worldwide. Other past and ongoing educational, performative, and discursive projects include BAUER HOUR, PROTO TALKS, Doctor Dance, and A class for a cause, as well as two podcasts: How Dance Thinks from 2018, and Sleeping Giant Dreams in 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts.Website: www.eleanorbauer.info

11 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

MaShirley “Within practice”

Photographer: José Figueroa

October 5th: Shirley Harthey Ubilla, Elverket Dansenshus

MaShirley “Within practice”

“Hey superbutch, I can see your body moving And it’s driving me crazy
And I didn’t have the slightest idea
Until I saw you dancing (yeah)

And when you walk up on the dance floor
Nobody cannot ignore the way you move your body, girl (just move) And everything so unexpected, the way you right and left it
So you can keep on shaking it (let’s go)”

– Shakira, hips don’t lie

Once upon a time there were stories of superman written where a man that was “super” and a woman that needed to be helped followed by an action scene that is dramatic and loud. CUT CUT CUT, Loud music, bang, man 1 hits man 2, so much blood, then happy end. But for what? For whom? How did he really change anything in the aftermath? This is such an outdated way of speaking of heroes I would say, because at this very moment, I am telling you that new heroes have arrived, now, today, bringing with them hope and sparks of a future stardust from a world we are still so far away from. Those sparks reveal the immense journey that is in front of us, announcing radical shifts that let the world become a place of ancestral knowledge, multiple voices, kinships, softness and dancing. It has started to shift and I want to tell you about one of those heroes, a superbutch who uses their power to shake and shiver hips and norms. Their name is Shirley aka Marimachi aka the next Shakira aka another Dj Mendez (…) People kept on calling them different names and all are a part of them, all are living within.

A SUPERBUTCH? You may ask.
Yes, a superbutch! They exist! I mean, I myself have never believed that this could be real, but as I have seen them flying up in the sky of Stockholm with leather gear to keep a grip on the city of white people, I can confirm that they exist!
Everyday they land on different occasions remembering that being radically yourself means to have wounds from previous fights. Their superpower protects them in healing through dancing. No wonder that they are wearing gear around their vagina, because once the hip starts to circulate in figuring eights, time zones start to quiver.
Is the world vibrating or was it actually my butt that kept on joining the shake? This hip dance can oscillate you to different places and times: suddenly you get teleported to be one of the backstage dancers from Beyonce or you end up being the actual front leader from Rage Against the Machine. …I tell you things have happened. Things that happened while the hip was moving that are beyond written language and cannot be documented in the exact same way as when you experienced it. The hip, vagina, butt as a magical portal to other worlds, is a superpower which the superbutch is aware of and is even sharing generously with others. Shirley aka the next Shakira have the strength to channel their latina ancestors in any possible place listening to their body. This is the reason why they have so many names, because you are never alone with them but moreover their ancestors are always in the room with us as well. These ancestors are in a constant dialogue with the superbutch, supporting them, discussing, grounding and exchanging. There is this fascinating aura around them, built through softness and badass strength that has inspired me the most. Marimachi or Shirley are part of a movement that I think is so crucial in this dance world: to question the common norm by radically existing and unapologetically practicing queer and non-white aesthetics. A movement joined by the ones who do not fit. Who proudly do not fit in the norm. DANCE is their superpower, when they are dancing, it is like a ritual of becoming another gender, playing an oppressor, switching from humor to tragic. I wonder who is healing while observing the superbutch in their power dance. It is like a collective experience, healing through dancing. Healing through witnessing a dance.

I have to take a pause here.

Take a step back and read through it all again. Well, now I am thinking, I mean I wonder: Is this really a fairytale? Or would I lie to you, dear reader, by choosing this fairytale form of “once upon a time” in the beginning? Following along you might have noticed that this is actually real. It may have happened once upon a time but it also has happened here at “within practice” approximately two weeks ago.

Being in the dance for a reason and having it as a way to have a voice in a society formed through norms, to give space for grief, for pain, for joy in changing perspectives.

This end will be messy, I might not end how I have started but I felt deeply touched by Shirley’s workshop and practice presentation. Dear Shirley, you are a big inspiration for me to keep on remembering that strength lies in being soft with yourself while unapologetically existing in this not so soft world. Hannah Krebs is a dance artist working within storytelling, flirting through a dancing body, set material, world building and serious playfulness. Their solos reveal an urgency for fractures, working with techniques of semi- fictional world buildings from a feminist and critical perspective. Within the craft of dance, Hannah is creating scenarios to insert and widening the cracks as a joint effort to help imagining a radically different world. Using written language, spoken word, strange karaoke and dance as a portal. As a dancer they are working with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Chikako Kaido, Ellen Söderhult and Judit Förster amongst others.

—

Hannah Krebs

Hannah Krebs is a dance artist working within storytelling, flirting through a dancing body, set material, world building and serious playfulness. Their solos reveal an urgency for fractures, working with techniques of semi- fictional world buildings from a feminist and critical perspective. Within the craft of dance, Hannah is creating scenarios to insert and widening the cracks as a joint effort to help imagining a radically different world. Using written language, spoken word, strange karaoke and dance as a portal. As a dancer they are working with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Chikako Kaido, Ellen Söderhult and Judit Förster amongst others.

11 November, 202411 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

Welcome

Photographer: Sima Korenivski

October 4th: Cullberg, MDT

Welcome…

hello, welcome…

this text/ reflection/ story/ review/ food critique (?)/dinner party thank you note written by me, Molly Engblom

about

a workshop, practice presentation, collective effort, collection of practices hosted by Freddy Houndekindo, Eleanor Campbell and Mohamed Y. Shika invited as dancers from the Cullberg company to share their practices at the dance festival Within practice 2024. They are invited as Cullberg dancers and at the same time as themselves, with their own histories, preferences and practices. They come as a group of Cullberg dancers meaning they come with partly shared references and experiences, still with three different understandings of their time in the company. They come as colleagues in the company and with the knowledge of working in a group for a long time. They come with the experience of diving into different practices from their positions as dancers, but also with experiences of practices they met or developed outside of the company. All of that boiled down to a workshop of 3×3 hours + a practice presentation of 30-45 minutes which I took part of in the fall of 2024. I have been invited by Ravel to respond to their proposal and my experience of it.

Now…

come on in…

For a bite and twist (that’s never seen all their is)

anyway..

Menu:

Starters:

A host, a house

Mains:

Line and not a line Architectural reconfigurations Maker, reproducer, scripter, interpreter

Kinesthetic empathy dances hosting Tools from Deborah Hay Labour

What is hosting

Humming line humming circle Homunculus man hand dance Rhythms in space

and more

Dessert:

Digestifs and goodbyes

For starter.. host and house

This is not how it started but I have to begin somewhere.

On some sort of path..

Oh, the strange and scattered paths we walk along in our lives leading up to the houses we enter.

I wanna tell you about a house, a host and a dinner party.

Guys, it’s not an ordinary dinner party. Yet it’s yet another dinner party

at the house of practice

and I am being served (!)

The house of practice is a mobile house, a shapeshifter, a trickster. At times so boring, slutty, naive and sulky, critical and twisted. At times I’m like: put on those sexy little glasses and teach me something.. (and it does). Windows open wide like eyes, open to the outside; eyes that could break into a thousand pieces, break a heart, reflect the sun and moon and the red, red car lights. Or at times with the windows closed, eyelids down, gazing inwards, inwards.

I’ve been there many times before. We all have. This time the house is a ferry on a wild, wild ocean.

The host always brings the house alive. To host is to open your house and invite someone into how to use it. Provide tools, codes, support and agency (to make them feel like home..).
I step onto the ship and spot the host in a corner across from where I stand. It’s Freddy/Shika/Eleanor. It’s a 6-footed, 12-legged, multi-lingual, scattered host and it’s moving closer to greet us. Trillions of cells welcoming us. An epic spider with multiple heads weaving a web.

Now, we could linger on this thought: What is this web? Crawled up in the corners of the ship. A complex structure consisting of millions of knowledge threads made by many different weavers. The web is collective and can never be owned, only shared and developed. The multi headed spider is weaving onto the already existing web. Their role is to make the specific part of the web they are weaving approachable. See, we all wanna get in there and weave our webs together. This specific web seems full of plasticity and porousness. It’s a structure that invites and holds. On the wavy sea.

The spider says : Take a stroll around the room and say hello to each other.
The spider melts out into the group and with it the distribution of attention; my attention tips from side to side as the ship starts rocking slowly. The spider holds the space together. It’s confusing. It’s tilted and scattered. It’s a mix of intentions and desires. I love it.
The spider (Shika) says: Inviting someone in is more than just opening a door.
Anchors away, yet another farewell to what was before.

Mains

cruiseship buffe style

Look into the palm of your hand. The lines have been there since you first started grabbing. Since your forever, which by now we all know is not the start of it all.

My hands, resting on the cruiseship floor, a little sweaty against the cold surface. In this house our hands wiggle along the ground growing bigger and bigger by every sensation. My hands crawling down the walls, rain down a window pane, spattering rain on the ceiling. Hands on each other to build sculptures. Someone placing their skull in my hand. The weight of it. The temperature. I’m holding it. It’s work. Someone aiming for my shoulder passing my face. A mark of a nail on my lower lip. A red wound opening up like a flower. It’s gonna stay there for days. This is how it is. Forever marked (by each other). For better/for worse.

Have a taste of everything, linger by the things you like. Eat your heart out and then ignite.

Then: I’m all over the place. Hands wiggling across the buffé, into pots and pans. This is also not how it started but I am so full. It’s a huge buffé and not enough time. I wanna try it all. I am constantly chewing on something new. I need time to digest, I need a nap, I need some rest. Different courses after each other, with lovely precision and taste. I need a break. I can still taste the dish I just had in my body as I enter the next. The ocean wiggles of excitement and pleasure, shaking it’s wobbly belly. The net shivers. The ship rocks side to side. I loose track of where I am, sinking down, becoming water, pipes. There is never enough time. Then: stillness

I breathe in the fresh evening breeze and look around. Do a little dance. I hear someone say out loud: Time is in your hands. It’s the spider (Eleanor).
I hear someone sing a song from the past (it’s Deborah Hay).

Deborah sings: I feel complete.. I’ve lost all control…

Dessert
( a digestif and a goodbye)

This is not how it ends but I have to end somewhere.

The spider host in a pile
Legs, feet, languages, cells
on their own yet belonging,
Sounding the names of their colleagues, one after the other For every name the host grows bigger
(it’s got a 100 hands resting on each other)
For every name I hear, a different name appears (in my memory) For every hand another hand
For every practice another practice
For every dance yet another dance
Ship rocking side to side

The spider (Freddy) says: I dont have one practice. I am made of practices. I am practices. Mic drop.

Dinner party thank you card

thanks to,
Freddy, Shika, Eleanor, everyone else who participated in the workshop, Ravel and Within

practice, the practices that build us, the hosts and the houses, the webs and the spiders, and all the others

Cheers to
taking decisions in relation to someone else’s proposal.
(It’s work)
To trying on different costumes and changing them from within.
(It’s work.)
To taking responsibility for the material; to develop material; to develop sensitivities to learn material developed by others.
(It’s work)
To questioning, criticizing, following, responding, proposing, reacting, trying, doing, doing, doing.
(It’s work.)
To practicing relations between bodies, space, time.
(It’s work.)
To referencing referencing referencing. To echoing practices and people.
(It’s work.)
To weaveíng knowledge together, to transmitting knowledge,
(It’s work)
To holding dear the sensorial, relational and attentive, to considering it intellect.

—

Molly Engblom

molly engblom is an artist working with dance, choreography, place and poetry. She is based in Stockholm. Her work moves within the poetic flicker of everydayness – through a mix of chats, dogs, myths, nail salons, abandoned charter beaches, power plays and dusks, she explores intimacy and femininity under and beyond capitalism. molly works with the distortion of the simplistic and saleable; the eeriness of perfect surfaces and images and the fire burning underneath them. Since 2019 she holds a BFA in dance performance from Stockholm University of the Arts. At the moment, molly is studying the course Tusen kulturhus at the Royal institute of art (KKH) and Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus. Since 2024 she is chair of the board at höjden: an interdisciplinary artist-run house in Östberga.

11 November, 202411 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

Confessions from a copycat

Photographer: Sima Korenivski

October 4th: Andrew Tay, MDT

Confessions from a copycat

After three days of afternoon workshops and a one-hour-long stage presentation, I am left with a loose sketch of Andrew Tay’s practice as an artist, performer and curator. Among all the material I have been introduced to, my experience of his catwalk practice echoes the loudest in my memory.

We’re in MDT’s studio and begin the practice by walking. Andrew instructs us to slightly change something in the walk’s mechanics, to steadily increase each weight shift, to delay or to bend until the rhythm shifts and the appearance of the walk changes. We are on a runway, following each other in a line along the room’s longest wall, then crossing the space diagonally.

Whilst we started by attending to the physical execution of the walk, we are now asked to notice the images and representations that its patterns bring about. We continue walking several rounds, sliding on this scale where our focus shifts between physical sensation and image, and sometimes starting by directly stepping 100% into a known character, world or situation.

The practice comes from Andrew’s group piece Make banana cry, which he made together with Stephen Thompson. He tells us about how they used the walking practice to mess with the audience’s perception of the performers, as they worked with Asian stereotypes in Western culture. However, he says, gesturing toward the group of workshop participants, the majority being white, this topic won’t be our focus here.

The piece was also staged as an ongoing runway, just like we practice it in the workshop. Seated along the aisles, the audience was wearing scented, purple plastic bags on their feet as if they were boots. In a true fashion week manner the audience, especially the front row, was part of the setup, with their outfits and gazes on display. For each walk, the performers reappeared differently, in a new costume, with a new set of accessories, and through a new movement pattern.

As I watch my peers walking in the workshop I recognize certain movement qualities and means of performance that produced the specific relationality of Make banana cry, which I saw in Stockholm in the spring of 2023. And as I walk the runway over and over again, I experience this specificity in my own body. The pacing steps transport me from the studio in MDT’s basement to the main stage and right into my memory of the performance. This time I’m not in the audience, I’m one of the performers! Or more precisely, it seems like I walked myself into dancer Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, who especially caught my eye last year. I walk, and I become her. I catch myself in a lip-syncing-in-front-of-the-mirror moment. I feel myself through her image.

Back in the studio, we gather to reflect upon the session. Slightly embarrassed about my fangirl fantasy, I keep quiet about where my mind went, but the more I think about it, the more crucial it seems. The use of the runway, a format that both glorifies and objectifies its models, underlines how a theater also works in this way. And I am interested in how it was my experience of embodying the task that highlighted this aspect of the piece to me.

I remember a workshop with Jennifer Lacey during the last year of my BA studies in dance and choreography. It was a couple of weeks after my class had presented our individual graduation projects. Jennifer gave us the task to perform each other’s work in front of its maker and this resulted in fifteen short group pieces. The exercise multiplied the significant moments in each performance and mirrored our own work back to us in new shapes. I think all of us got confronted with the new aspects that each reenactment taught us about our own projects. The exercise also made visible how it matters which bodies perform what material. As an example I particularly remember a work originally performed by two cis-men performing a macho scenario in a locker room, which was read as a drag show when a group of women performed it in the workshop. The exercise sometimes balanced on the edge of parody, and therefore trust and sensitivity were important in order to care for each other in it. Perhaps such an exercise was only possible because our group spent years learning to trust and care for each other’s work and process. I’m wondering about how and if such practices can be practiced outside of institutions. With the short work periods and flickering responsibility in the freelance field, can we practice performance through mimicking?

My colleague and friend Sophie Germanier told me about Echo Club, a study circle hosted by the venue Gessnerallee in Zürich, led by artist Jo Baan. The study group went to see performances together and some days later, they met to reflect on the piece they saw through practicing performance. In one session, they were writing scores based on what they had seen, in order to then perform them for each other. As the piece they had seen prior to this session was dealing with representations of black masculinity, they quickly foresaw the problems that a potential reenactment by a white person would entail. In general, reenacting a piece about someone else’s identity does pose a series of problems. This is perhaps the delicate matter of reenactment and my friend told me about the discussions that followed. Agreeing to not recreate the image of the performance, they instead approached it through breaking down the different choreographic strategies and wrote scores for muscle tonus and gestures. Instead of copying the image, they copied the doing.

What does it mean to be within practice? I see the proposal of the festival as a way of creating discourse around dance and choreography that does not solely rely on verbal conversation and theoretical frameworks. Embodied knowledge is crucial for how dancers understand their work, and, at least for me, also important to how I read, digest and make sense of what’s in front of me when seated in the audience.

I am interested in the bodily experience of practicing dance and how this can shift our perception of what we see on stage.

I think that exercises for copying and reenactment, like the ones I’ve mentioned in this text, can be useful to gain such an experience. They have taught me about both performing and choreographing by pointing to the relations between the doing of a practice and the images produced. I’m playing with the thought of how copying what we see can be an ongoing procedure within the freelance field, to engage in such a discourse around artists’ work and what’s presented at the venues. What formats and ethics would be required for this? And, if this particular experience is an important aspect for accessing the potential in dance works, how do we invite audiences that are not already practitioners into it?

—

Stina Ehn

Stina Ehn is a dance artist based in Stockholm. With an interest in the relations between image and materiality, her work experiments with how dance and language inform one another, often working in close collaboration with other artists. Her choreographic work has been presented at venues and festivals such as Weld in Stockholm, Dance Nucleus in Singapore, HAUT and Dance Cooperative in Copenhagen, Revolve Performance Art Days and Köttinspektionen in Uppsala, DanseRom Bergen and Kiezkapelle Berlin. Stina holds a BFA in dance and choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She’s a member of the artist-driven house höjde in Stockholm where she’s part of arranging the performance event Kafé Mix.

11 November, 202411 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

Ravel– response to Stina Nyberg, Within Practice Elise Mae Nuding

Photographer: Sima Korenivski

October 3rd: Stina Nyberg, MDT

Ravel– response to Stina Nyberg, Within Practice Elise Mae Nuding October 2024

I am a crunchy autumn leaf; your touch has made me so. My flesh cracks and crinkles as your hands send me whirlwinding through space. I climb into your castle, more polar bear than pillow. Touch melds. I forget whether it is you or I who are the balloon, but rubbing hands conjure up static surfaces. I lose clarity about where my touch ends and yours begins. Fantastical hybrids emerge—ship sails billow into balloons and lollipop-flavoured french fries give us a taste of the nuances of touch. Experimental fingers ask questions that we together try to answer. Clumsily.

****************

I am forced to admit that I do not know how to touch you in the way you ask me to. It is a non-verbal admission. But in admitting this I get to grips (literally) with another meaning of the word.

[admit: to allow to enter; to allow the possibility of]

What do we allow to be possible through this touch? What do we want to allow the possibility of?

****************

Language touches. I see your lips move and I hear what you say. I believe that I understand what you mean (although I ought to keep in mind the possibility that I do not). I imagine that I can feel the vibrations from your words moving through the air, passing through my membranes. Language touches (me). But although the soundwaves do resonate, in the end I am touched by words not because they are vibrations but rather because they are more than the sum of their sounds and syllables. By which I mean they offer a rich complexity of meanings, associations, images, and sensory affects—what I like to call kaleidoscopic unfoldings of language.

Language touches?

A bit flustered, I babble some kind of reply-non-reply. Your quizzical look tells me that you are not sure if you understand what I mean. Or at least that you have your own thoughts about it.

****************

You navigate my sediments, subjecting me to intense pressure and compression. Soon I will navigate yours, carefully at first and then more recklessly as we dig ourselves in deeper. Compression: to press together. To press, together. As your weight presses me down, I recognise the sense of confusion that arises when pleasure and pain collide. It is an emotional confusion, arising from caution and tinged with (rational) fear. But my flesh doesn’t care for these niceties and leans into it, greedily. Sweating, shaking. Stable bedrock becomes unstable ground and repercussions of the moving terrain ripple through my structure, causing me to restructure. To respond. Oscillating between survival and collaboration, we discover that they are sometimes the same thing. Except when they are not, and I am forced to let you fall unceremoniously into the water. Squish, squash, splash. You re-emerge, clinging to my contours, hanging in the balance between desperation and care.1

****************

Hours later, impressions remain. It is as if the material states of my body have been destabilised and set in motion, with thick, viscous layers mobilising under the surface. Pressure creating heat, heat shifting state, new textures forming. Hard and soft at the same time. Not quite liquid or solid. But activated. Unstuck. The density of my flesh is altered. Imprints remain in memory foam flesh, enduring. Intryck, avtryck.

****************
Pink heart post-it notes map out the space through memory.

1 Thanks to F for their articulation o what arose as a combination of desperation and care.

—

Elise Mae Nuding

Elise Mae Nuding is an artist-researcher working with dance, choreography, and writing. Her practice-based research has a transdisciplinary orientation, and current areas of exploration include somatic-linguistic entanglements, improvisation practices, and Contact Improvisation. She is curious about the slippages between artistic and pedagogic practices, and teaches internationally in contexts spanning higher education, professional training, and a variety of other settings. Most recently, she held the position of lecturer in dance at the University of Gothenburg between 2022-24.

As you practice presenting, I think about the impressions a practice might leave on a body over time. I think about the impressions a language might leave on a body over time. I think about the impressions that a body might leave on a practice, or a language, over time. I think about differing durations of such processes– the lifetime of a human, the lifetime of a geological formation, the lifetime of a language.

As you practice presenting, I think, not for the first time, how many ‘p’ words permeate our niche field– practice, process, product, performance, project, present(ation), participation, presence. Did I mention practice?

As you present your practice, I let my still-molten flesh give in to gravity while the post-it note beside me declares: YOU ARE STRONG.

11 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE *

Photographer: Sima Korenivski

October 3rd: Mette Edvardsen, MDT

Hello everyone. I am so late with the deadline for this that you may never see it. I know for a fact I am not the only person struggling with mood, concentration and sense of purpose in this very violent moment. It is challenging to continue to believe in the power of a nuanced body and in the proposition that dancing is a powerful strategy to escape the discomfort and brutality of the symbolic while still being bound together. JL

CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE *

A partial report of the experience of a workshop of three days and a performance of 45 minutes, transmitted by the artist Mette Edvardsen.

Ingredients:

Mette
The floor circle (convention of many kinds of dance communities, used to be with each other to learn) 23 people who are definitely dancers but not in the same way(s)
Time
Ekphrasis as an activity not a subject. ( look it up)
Language
Mette
Time (a different sort)
Some kind of love

Notebook (transcribed in italics, commented in regular old ) Monday

1.
The circle has 23 parts . There are many versions of sweaters. The socks tend towards the thin and ankle length.

2.
CIRCLE: an oval with a bulge on its lower right side if we are oriented towards the circle enabler ( Mette E)

3.
All the socks hug the contours of the feet, making their shapes personality filled, desirable and communicative.

4.
Mette speaks into the waiting group and says: “there seems to be a theme around feet.”

Ok, so the above actually happened in the time of writing that is presented. 1,2,3,4. I was busy describing the group in my notebook, Mette began to lead by naming what I, and perhaps others were busy seeing.

M. proposes the notion of Ekphrasis as a place to work. Simply defined, this is the describing of a work of art to make it appear elsewhere than where it is. We will do magic in a circle, transporting things without ever moving.

I know Mette, a little bit, but for a long time. I have only seen two of her works (big fan). This spooky beginning confirms for me that the transmission of whatever her ‘work’ is, it passes through a materiality that is atmospheric. I am not sure how she does it. She is clear and spare with her interventions, both as workshop leader and as a choreographer. However the material in/at work is less graspable: the what-ever substance generated by conscious poetic embodiment. Mette works this energetic material that is a byproduct of a commitment to detailed , witnessed embodiment ( let’s say dancing).

Still Monday

Bambi sweater, deep-forest-pond-moss green, three flowers approaching Bambi’s belly from the waistline. Expensive?

is ‘open’ akin to Resistant when ‘open’ is an incomplete description?

We describe our mornings by writing them down and reading them. This is what we have in common:

The snooze button, soy milk, frozen spinach, meds, other bodies, feet, coffee, dog, thermos, dream, PHONE, weather, snooze button, snooze button, wisdom tooth cleaning, peanut butter, porridge, banana, liminal state, soy milk

Tuesday

1.
Lists, I think on the subway, something about lists and listing re describing

2.
I come into studio 11 and Mette has brought a pile of books, the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

is among them.

The Pillow Book is a work that has accompanied me in several projects and still does. It is a book of lists and descriptions in the form of literature that is pretending not to be literature. Possibly because this was written a bit early for literature, in the 1st century. And Sei is a woman. Here are some of her lists: Things That Fall From the Sky; Things That Should Be Large; Things Worth Seeing; Squalid Things.

The books that Mette has brought into the room work on everyone through their very book-ness. We gloss over them, discuss them and sit in their presence. We eventually read aloud, around the circle ( mais oui), but this is not the only way the texts/ books/ art objects are acting on us.

D asks: how far can you go into the details of a description, ie how long can it last before digression? Digressions= the mixing of the object/thing described and the describer.
….

I THINK: the doing of transmission does not hold all of the body of the transmitted thing but the rest of this body may be captured anyway by the receiver of the transmission, with or without direct perception.

But as soon as I write this Mette says, again, that the Ekphrasis becomes independent of either transmitter or receiver.

The “independent object” of the ekphresis can be activated without the creator.

Somehow, this is not the same as what I think, or maybe it is. The objects of transmission that I have made (do make do make do make do make do make) are deliberately shoddy carriers, full of holes so we notice the circulation of sense and sensation. During Mette’s presentation at MDT I am grateful, admirative and just greedy for what she gives: a precise series of constructions that are aerated in a different way than leaving gaping holes, a sophisticated engineering of perception and use of time as a material.

Wednesday

I start getting bored and Imagine describing my pants ( no voice, only haptic hands) and then letting that be inhabited by dance. I can do this without disturbing the circle.

She (Mette) lets the conversation go-she is not stressed by its length. What is it like to ‘do’ this? What is it like to do this kind of holding.

Delay. Suspension. Gap. Stay in the place of bringing something before it becomes something.

This workshop is the suspended gap between arriving at a workshop and the doing of a workshop. The main material is the meta-material of Mette’s curiosity and the specific perception of time and space it transmits. She claims it’s not a method, but it is definitely a technique.

Mette: ‘It’s not so usual to be in a room like this, with 23 opinions.’

The way we can stay in this conversation is by using the experience we all have in respecting the Complexity of Doing: doing the body through not–useful movements that are both more and less concrete than the words we use to describe them. We are speaking in depth and detail but the speech is not the same as the thing we are speaking of, and we know it.

This is what happened during Mette’s workshop: 23 people sat in a circle for three days and had a conversation about the act of description, paying attention to and giving all our creative tools to the service of bringing ‘something else’ into the room. This conversation mostly avoided distraction or ass cramps.

( bored bored bored bored bored. It happens it happens it happens it happens it happens)

This discussion included points of view that did not seek to be agreement with each other but in communion with each other. Everyone brought their language to the table between us. None of us were naming directly the thing of which we were speaking . We all knew and know that the work we were doing . The making of something detailed and temporary ( let say a dance) that exceeds language and also prompts it. Everyone said what they meant and the meaning gathered beyond the inadequate or too specific ways we use to describe our body thoughts.

The tension between languaging and dancing is a specific materiality which some dance artists work as material, some work with the body as that material, some ignore it and some are in thrall to it.

I feel ( love) that Mette touches this material directly with her hands, with her tongue as a hand, with her voice as a hand, with her attunement as a hand, her body as a hand. The sculpture she makes, in workshop or on stage proposes a way of attending, a specific calibration of the substance of time. I am not quite sure how she does it. Probably with a longer deadline I could un-mystery it but I am very happy not to. Instead I will attend to Mette and her work as a possibility of transmission, to me and whoever is there to receive it. My western style intellect ( ideally disembodied from everything but the body of a word) could then play with it and that is fun. But it’s not where the transmission lies.

There is a dense activation being in the force field of Mette’s work, in engaging in what is necessary for those of us attending. The attention we give in response to how she holds the space is the very material she needs to hold the space. It’s a mobius loop. Cutting it to smaller parts makes it something else. Let’s leave it there then

End of Wednesday
Chrysa says: “Alice had the most perfect beautiful holes in her socks”

LOOP LOOP LOOP LOOP LOOP

*This incantation of five is directly lifted from Mette’s work. I have never seen it but in the work shop Mette used this repetition as a concrete method that was contextualized slowly over time but immediately usable and useful.

—

Jennifer Lacey

Jennifer Lacey is a dance artist raised in New York City. Based in Paris for over 20 years she is currently an assistant Professor at Stockholm University of the arts where she directs the MA program in choreography.

29 June, 202211 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

WITHIN PRACTICE – 18.06.2022

trompoppies:blackmilk: tiran willemse

“Black male melancholia”
– tiran willemse

It is dark. Four spotlights beat the ground and form a pulse, a rhythm, a beat. Spotlights searching. In the dark.
A shadow appears. At the corner of the room. It moves softly. Hides, is constantly on the go, and still very still.
This is how I read the opening of Tiran Willemse’s trompoppies:blackmilk.

A smaller stage is placed in the back of the larger stage room where the performance takes place. In front of it there are a lot of microphones. A line of spotlights creates a hallway from the audience to the smaller scene. Smoke, darkness and lightshows creates an intense and enchanting atmosphere in the room.

Willemse moves in relation to the light, the room and the atmosphere. With, and without rap music. Sometimes he disappears (due to smoke, darkness or placing). In one part of the performance, he repeats “Now you see me. Now you don’t”.

He gives the movements connected to black masculinity a new context, and places them in relation to femininity, performativity, wanting to be see, running, hiding, and a want for being invisible.

There is a part of the show where he just keeps running, holding up the tempo, the strength, the image. I do not know for how long he ran, I do not know if he was running from or towards something, or if he just ran and ran without getting anywhere.

Willemse’s trompoppies:blackmilk captures black masculinity in a number of ways, out of levels of interpretation, of forms. He creates a space for the melancholy, the pride, the strength and the will to keep running. The show keeps reinventing itself, keeps creating perspectives and depth. It never gets too long, or too slow. It keeps giving.

Vår Maria Granados-Langeland

29 June, 202211 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

WITHIN PRACTICE – 17.06.2022

Practice presentations: Andros Zins-Browne & Alma Söderberg

Andros Zins-Browne presented the results from his four days of workshops at the festival. Five bodies, who had all been at Andros’ workshops, showed their investigation in and interpretation of memes and gifs. The choreography was improvised and embodied how the memes and gifs operate, spreading quickly in a huge crowd, but resonates differently from reader to reader, or from context to context. They are repetitive, but still their meaning evolves. What happens with the meaning of a movement if it never stops evolving, and if the interpretation of it is different from body to body?

Alma Söderberg sat on a chair.
Through talking/singing/noising while dancing
(still sitting on a chair)
she presented her current practice in a raw and honest way
after giving birth the pelvis floor might be somewhat uncontrollable
which is the reason of a dancer’s attachment to a chair
The practice presentation showed how a dancer can adapt, how the dance evolves due to its circumstances, and how these circumstances can in fact lead to a new artistic expression

Vår Maria Granados-Langeland

17 June, 202211 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

WITHIN PRACTICE – 16.06.2022

Practice presentations + contemplative concert: BamBam Frost, Liz Kinoshita + Eli Keszler

The evening started off with two practice presentations, 40 minutes each, followed by a 30 minute break before Eli Keszler finished the evening with a drum-concert.

First out was Kinoshita. She never stopped moving, talked and moved at the same time. She accentuated the importance of being safe. For Kinoshita, this means doing a practice in long lasting (professional) relations with her teams, choreographers, dancing partners and companies. She gave us a glimpse of her wide range of material: from the more common musical tap dancing to an avant-garde feeling of an audio-performance and to the more classical expression of dancing too, while following the audio of an instrumental orchestra. Her practice shows not only a wide range of dance expressions, but also how dance suddenly touches other art forms, that the art forms are not separated, but melts into one another. Kinoshita sang in various ways; the names of Islandic volcanos, a mash up of beatboxing and singing. Being all the instruments needed, she sang lyrics in a classical way, and made sound of emotions in a more abstract way. She told us about her practice while still moving, and the telling, the moving, the singing and the dancing melted in to one.

Frost, just as Kinoshita, gives her friends and teams importance, and agency, as a part of her practice. In fact, they were highly present in the room, and in Frost’s line of thoughts during her practice. They exist through fiction, and imaginary skills, which is essential in her practice. Frost explained the practice of rocking – a practice of change, where a movement gradually changes through repetition. The new movements appearing through change was given meaning through associations and fiction. In this way a fictional fantasy world was highly present during the performance presentation. Through American pop cultural references, a show girl kept appearing on stage. Frost kept seeking and embracing pleasure, and let her be, giving the audience the pleasure of entertainment.

The concert with Eli Keszler was a solo-drum-concert, that lasted for approximately 1 hour. There were no words exchanged, and the music played non-stop. The drum set was placed in the middle of the much larger stage room of MDT, and the lightning made a clear shadow of Keszler playing on the walls. Behind him: projections of short videos and photos from everyday life. The music gave life and an atmosphere to reading these pictures: depending on the music the same photos could be melancholic, humoristic or appreciative; almost as a tribute to life. Sitting in silence, surrounded by the ongoing drums, the concert gave space for imagination, relaxation and reflection.

Vår Maria Granados-Langeland

15 June, 202211 November, 2024, Säfsten produktion

WITHIN PRACTICE – 13.06.2022

THE WATER – Sharing session and Panel by Samlingen

A huge, dark blue and glittery fabric is hanging from the ceiling and down under our feet. It simulates water, a waterfall. In the pool of water made by this fabric, there is another, real, inflatable baby-pool, filled with drinks for everyone in the room.

We do a brief 1-minute meditation on the theme “Water and Practice”. Then we share the memories in and to the circle, to Samlingen. The shared memories are written down on a timeline. Quickly “time” became another theme of the event. The atmosphere is pretty relaxed, (personal note/read in: we have gin in our system) we are happy to share and listen, to reflect on water, in both concrete and abstract ways.

The practices shared reflected on moving like water, moving with a feeling of floating, and letting the water in us have agency. Referring to a practice being something you do more than once, the repetition. And reflecting on water as something that gives the feeling of safety, that water is in us, that all water is connected, it connects us, and it connects the world, holding the world together. We come from water, we are in water, and we do always relate to water, water is the one thing that all humans need no matter what. As a matter of fact, water is almost never just water, it is always kind of infected, or in relation to something else. This gives room for a peaceful and ecological point of view when surrounding oneself with the thought of water.

Vår Maria Granados-Langeland

10 June, 202118 June, 2021, Magnus Nordberg

Note by Michikazu Matsune

Sometime during the autumn of 2019, I was contacted by Björn Säfsten who asked if I would be interested in coming to Stockholm to share my practice within the framework of “Within Practice”. My immediate response was: “Of course!”. Little did we know what was about to happen in the spring of 2020 …

Travel restrictions due to COVID-19, and the thought of not being able to travel to Stockholm, made me pivot. I was trying to figure out a way to do distance-based work with the workshop participants, and to be able to provide them with tasks that they could do on their own. So, I developed a concept based on a series of task-cards.

I call this project For Instance – since the tasks can be executed instantly. They enable immediate interpretation, and a variety of possible outcomes. The aim is not to master or finish the work. It stays flexible, adjustable, and open-ended.

I was finally able to travel to Stockholm in the autumn of 2020 and had the opportunity of working directly with the students and participants in the workshop, which made me very happy! The concept will however remain as a shared tool and do-it-yourself-work.

Michikazu Matsune

June 2021

For Instance – Scores is a working method, created like a game that is paired with both performative and choreographic tasks. The workcan be carried out individually or by a group. For Instance consists of approximately 50 cards and the users of this work can perform each idea as is, as well as create and explore their own spontaneous combinations and variations. The process plays with the dynamics that emerge in the gap between ideas and interpretation, expectation and realization. Poetical, absurd, simple, fun, realistic, impossible!

Preparation:
Print the cards.
(Suggested size is A5)

Option 1:
Shuffle the cards and pick one randomly.
Perform the task.

Option 2:
Read the tasks.
Place cards together and create a composition.
Perform the composition.
Variations:
Make variations.
You are also able to add your own tasks.

Download Cards: www.michikazumatsune.info/images/forinstancecards.pdf
Web link: www.michikazumatsune.info/works/forinstancecards.htm

Michikazu Matsune utilizes diverse approaches in his artistic work, ranging between stage-performances, interventions in public spaces, and fabricating artefacts for Performative Action. Matsune’s work, often containing elements of poetic absurdity and a subtle sense of humour, reflects on current themes in our globalized society – in a playful yet critical way. His recent stage-work, including All Together (2018), consists of a trio, joined on stage by Elizabeth Ward and Frans Poelstra. The performance is based on stories of the people who are unable to attend and see the actual performance. In reaction to the COVID-19 crisis, Michikazu Matsune has initiated a project called Performance Homework (2020), which features works by over 25 artists and ideas that can be carried out independently at home. Matsune’s solo-works have toured extensively, to international festivals and institutions. For example Goodbye (2016) which is based on farewell-letters written by various people, and for various reasons. Dance, if you want to enter my country! (2015) is focused on a bizarre, yet true, story of an African-American dancer who was forced to dance at an airport passport control in order to prove that he was a professional dancer. This was to eliminate suspicions directed at him, caused by his Muslim first name.

Matsune has been teaching performance practice since 2012, and has been a guest tutor at Iceland University of the Arts (Master in Performing Arts), University of Agdar in Norway, Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT) / Universität der Künste Berlin, as well as Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. Michikazu Matsune is originally from the seaside town of Kobe and has been based in Vienna since the 1990’s.

www.michikazumatsune.info

Coming up