Photographer: Sima Korenivski
October 4th: Cullberg, 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
Welcome…
hello, welcome…
to
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.