Photographer: Sima Korenivski
October 3rd: Stina Nyberg, MDT
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
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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.