October 18, 2015
Stina Nyberg: I am going to sit here, is the phone recording?
Adriano Jensen: Yes lots of movement on the screen, it looks very good. I tend to get restless. I will probably be sitting and then move around.
S: Then you might have to carry it around.
A: I will speak loud then.
[tea pouring]
S: So, what do we start with?
A: Well, in your presentation with Samlingen [Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Stina Nyberg, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch], I wrote down, “The Magical Act of Naming, when is naming useful and when not?” I find several words there exciting, but let’s start with naming, naming in relation to dance.
S: Yeah.
[silence]
A: Okay, we cheated a little bit before. You said something about that you relate naming to dance?
S: When we talked about it in Samlingen, the magical act of naming, then I guess we related it quite a lot to ourselves. Because we are a feminist collective, because we are a group of women, there are certain categories that we every now and then inscribe ourselves into. The magical act of naming refers to when is it useful to say Yes we are women and when is it useful not to? When are other categories, groupings or other strategic, I don’t know, “coming togethers” more important? Also, now when you said it, I thought about naming in relation to postdance. One week before the conference, we met up with Danjel Andersson (one of the organizers of the Postdance conference) to ask him what postdance really was. Because we were invited to have this keynote at the conference and we didn’t know what the name referred to. We were like what what what is it? Can we have a meeting with you so you can explain it to us? And when we met, it was quite clear that he also didn’t really know what it was, or described it as something that is already going on. He somehow thought it was useful to give it a word, so he made up this name: postdance. He also said that he felt that it was a really bad name, but that it would do something to have a name, that we would gather people around, to figure out what that name would be, what is that thing, what does it refer to, is it a useful term somehow?
A: I wonder though if we were really trying to find out what postdance is. To me it felt more like naming something, we don’t know what is and assuming that it’s there, not necessarily to figure out or pinpoint what it is, but in order for us to have to think. Working with dance, I find this an interesting model. Like to think about dance as something which is around, to name it and assume that it’s there, while withdrawing from pinpointing or capturing it. Maybe more how to… hmm… how to work from it.
S: But is that a little bit like giving something, whatever… something that we are already doing a name but then not trying to further define it?
A: Yeah I guess so. Though not like quitting on it. There is this, maybe its totally a detour but it comes to mind now, there is this Lithuanian curator who, I think, said once, :“the artworks are their own best curators.” Simon [Asencio] and I, were quite intrigued by this, and we thought what does this mean or what are the implications? The idea of listening to the artworks came up. This expanded from the parts of a dancepiece: phrases, concepts, light design, dramaturgy etc, to our current work with Galerie, listening to artworks of other artists. Of course, we dont claim to know the essence, nature, will etc of an artwork. But the fiction still has function.. Starting out abstract, but it came to mind.
S: It’s good that you make so many gestures.
A: It’s very gestural and hard to record. Like how to think responsibility in relation to dance and postdance for that sake? One way to go about that idea would be to think through sex, feels more concrete to me. Sex, it is something that we name. We assume that it’s there. How could we think responsibility in relation to sex? Like if I think, that I am responsible for myself, it seems quite limited what can happen. If I am responsible for the other, I will always have to know already what is good for the other. If I am responsible for the sex then I somehow have to know already what good sex is. But what if it’s from the sex or, transported back to dance, what if it’s from the dance? What kinds of responsibilities are possible then? I relate that to the notion of listening. That was a little detour, but I wonder if it was something like that, that was going on. That we were there not to figure out what postdance is, not to be responsible for the thing, but to be with this thing, responsible from postdance and from the conference. What happened for me was that there was a lot of information, tensions and intensities, and those didn’t give me questions that I could take out of the conference and address. They, rather, produced a need to do and to think, thinking from rather than about.
S: Somehow I am very positive to having been at the conference, like I also said before, I think it was a great experience. I got this feeling of a scene that cares about what they do. They care about what is important for other people; that those things can be important in the world, whatever you think that is. I was super happy that it was not only people well rehearsed in how to be in a panel there, but also people who do not usually sit in these panels. But, of course, it also made the panels a bit shaky. Dialogue is a practice in itself.
It was funny, in the panel talk, the last one on the last day, when they were talking about ecology and economy, Siegmar [Zacharias] talked about how we were reenacting a conference. That this is not actually a conference, but it’s somehow a reenactment of a conference. She said something like we were performing in the face of a conference. We were all pretending to have a conference, also because of its conventional setup: a keynote and a panel talk. I thought that we could also have done it differently. Do you want a chocolate by the way?
A: Yes!
S: I think they all have whisky in them.
A: Awesome.
[eating]
A: Is it a way of relating to a convention or to an event, that you can relate to your work?
S: What do you mean?
A: The reenactment of the conference, or the pretending of being in a conference and what that is as a situation. I wonder if that relates to how you think of your own work or your own interest in making dance. If it does, if it doesn’t… we can always cut it out.
S: I think it would be more interesting to have rethought how the conference could look like, if it now was like a reenactment of a traditional conference. I am not sure it would have had to be that kind of conference. I relate it to the Practice symposium that I was involved in arranging in 2012 together with Petra Sabisch, Zoë Poluch and Uri Turkenich. We insisted on naming it a symposium. We were also in the Swedish art grants committee’s house, so its setup is kind of formal. We had two parallel panels, but the difference then I think was that the different panels… So, there were two parallel programs you could choose if you did the one or the other during the day, and within them the actual events were practices, or to be practiced with an audience. It was a symposium of practices but it was also practicing a symposium. The first day’s program was exactly the same as the second day’s program. You could also practice while doing exactly the same practice two days in a row–you would practice the going to a symposium. And then in, and maybe this come back a little bit to the magical act of naming, but I find it important that it had this classical name: symposium. Like gathering up and that it wasn’t a workshop, but that it was a practice symposium, a symposium of practices. This situation was a conference which I think could have been thought in different ways. Since it did invite people who were not necessarily usually on panels like these, it would have been nice if it would have been possible to think it through with them. If we want to talk to someone who does not want to talk in this way about their work, how can we do it? Because I really want to hear what these artists have to say, I think they are amazing and I was a bit disappointed when it felt like they were stopped by the format of the panel talk.
A: Yeah. being an event that announces that it wants to create a situation of thinking together, and with a big variety of formats, the format seemed pretty limited and the situation produced for thinking together as well. There were a lot of voices I missed being heard, and somehow also too many voices. What I find interesting about this, was how different frustrations like boredom, with endless time spent on biographies, or a lot of cutting off so thoughts couldn’t develop, made an event that I couldn’t agree with. The event doesn’t allow me to agree with its politics, because they are kind of a mishmash. Not like this was an amazing format, and we can all go home and think about how awesome this format was, and how important it was that we supported this great format. Rather, it produced a kind of noise, for me at least, both in terms of content and format. Potentially a noise more generative for other kinds of thinking, than if the format would have been very agreeable.
S: It’s too fast but not furious.
A: Yeah!
S: But it’s true I talked to Marijana [Cvetkovic] a afterwards, and she had a strong desire to make a Postdance conference in the region of former Yugoslavia with the same issues but completely different circumstances. And that’s an example of how these situations work generative as well. Yes, but this way, and then you want to do it again. That is a good thing about it. I start to think again about the magical act of naming. I guess that might be performativity in the real sense of the word–through naming something something it becomes that something.
A: Like look over there, and then somewhere else something is happening here. In a way the event did that.
S: It’s funny when we had the talk with Samlingen, I saw people sitting with the notebooks and not making notes.
A: I wrote quite a paragraph there, sometimes it was also the speed of the conference, grasping content in the midair, not getting the full connection, but surfing a wave of information. Often my notes would spark other thoughts and go somewhere else. The entanglements came up the last day. Siegmar [Zacharias] was talking about a project she was doing, how they were trying to relate to their human and inhuman collaborators–not sure which word she used, co-workers?–as having their own agency, and talking about these entanglements, and how the concepts they would use, and the materials they would use, would also use them back. This was a situation of entanglement. I wonder about dance in relation to that, what kind of entanglements one can think about in relation to dance, a dance, the dance or dancing as Zoë [Poluch] said. And on the last day the question of different moments of inscription came up. Like the piece is one inscription of the work, but there also can be many others.
S: I remember Andros [Zins-Browne] talked about how he thought about his work as a world. How can we think about work as a world? I thought was a good way of thinking about work as all those parts that get entangled within the work. Siegmar also mentioned it. I somehow experienced that they were quite clear that they didn’t want to talk about economy, but then they talked about economy for a long time. At some point she also mentioned how economy is one part, one entanglement within the ecology of what we do. If you think about ecology in relation to a work process, maybe it makes the process extend beyond the rehearsal period. The process as a much longer work. The work is so many knowledges or products or relations that get produced during this time or not even get produced but exists there or just happen. In a way it can be a bit of a relief as well, to get away from the fetish of the product or the piece.
I don’t know, for me it relates to continuity. I sometimes feel a desire to have more continuity in my work where things would fall into each other or unfold after each other. I do certain things which leads to other things. These things are all part of my work outside and inside of the “project horizon” that Bojana Kunst writes about. A quest for continuity. And then at some point I felt like that quest risks turning all of my actions and doings and beings and relations into work. Suddenly, this conversation is work, but also the conversation we had when we had the beer is work. Suddenly what I listen to at night is work. So everything gets subsumed under being work. In the very last conversation of the conference Manon [Santkin] wanted to talk about the economy of what we do. I get a bit afraid when we starting naming all of our activities in economic terms. Why would we want to do that? Of course there is an economy, but I would rather think of that economy as one part of the larger ecology of the larger world than to start naming things through economy and all I do as work. Thus I have for example been very keen on getting a hobby. I am part of this swim team, I just came from swim training now, and there something that makes me just NOT want to do a piece about swimming. I just want to be part of this club and go swimming every now and then.
A: I know the feeling.. These questions make me think of Valentina Desideris’ Fake Therapy as another way of thinking circulation of a practice. Then I don’t know if that’s more circle of life or circulation of currency. It has been circulating in workshops and people’s homes, living rooms and school and art fairs even. Hmm… but about circulation. I feel that, like, if this is work, or when we have a beer is work, then it’s also because there is a certain inscription going on, or there is a circulation, there is an affective production. We produce experiences for each other and I guess this is why people say that so many aspects of our lives are becoming work. I don’t know but I guess it also has to do with the way that affective production is a big and growing part of how a lot of economies work, and obliviously also ours. This is scary, I also think so, but I also wonder how the awareness could change, hmm… how to do this? So, on one hand, it’s scary because we are always at work. On the other hand, it’s exciting because then we see that there are different possibilities for work to circulate, and there are possibilities for different kinds of work. For example, Valentina’s practice I think is interesting because this is something that she has been putting out there, but it has had a life outside her and it has shaped lives. Aso the work of Krõõt Juurak seems to trigger rumor or confusion, often without people having to see the work. So, these are different kinds of ways that works can circulate and perform affectively. I wonder if we can just, if one can postulate that…
[laughter]
A: …that there are many kinds of ways that works circulate, and that they can perform, what that does then to our work in the theatre, and to our understanding of what happens when we encounter dance. How? What is that? I don’t know yet, but there are some questions there, that were stimulated by this conference. And it’s scary, but at the same time it’s scary because it’s indeed shaping life, producing experience, it’s inscribing in bodies and minds. There is a kind of manipulation or violence. On the other hand, it’s maybe also the only way we have of interacting, it’s also to have experiences or to produce experiences with each other. So there is this kind of weird double. Do you follow me? Does it make any sense?
S: Yes, a bit. But maybe I am very slow.
A: Maybe I am also a little bit overtired and then I, sometimes the mind goes to funny places.
S: It does sometimes. But go, I think you are on to something, just say it again I say.
A: I guess am interested in and I wonder if there is a possibility in relation to the awareness of affective labor, to think about how dance could circulate otherwise. I don’t know what it means really, but maybe it’s not that I just watch a dance and take it apart, but it’s also that a dance comes into me. It inscribes itself in me, and that inscription generates stuff. In that sense it’s both a kind of manipulation and violence because it’s writing into my body. But it’s also a generative opportunity, in the sense that, what is nice about these sorts of circulation, is that I don’t need to think that I know what this dance is. I don’t need to look through it, because it is coming anyway.
S: It makes me think of the end of one panel talk, where André Lepecki was trying to round up in a neat little sum up wondering where dance is happening and after he’d done that, Zoë kind of took the mike again and said, “maybe we have been looking in the wrong direction?” It made me think about that regardless of how we are seeing the changes of dance and dancing, the dancing is always going on. So, we are not the one who owns the right of the magical act of naming. We are not the ones defining what dancing is. Because there is a lot of other people defining it who wouldn’t give a shit about this conference at all. That for me is a positive thing.
A: Totally, but do you think that dance give a shit?
S: You mean if I would think of dance as an agent in itself?
A: Yeah, like how Siegmar was talking about it. Not necessarily in itself, but as an agent.
S: I don’t know. I don’t know if dance care what I think of dance either.
[silence]
S: Should we round it up?
A: Yeah, well it’s getting more..
S: We are getting warm, I know.
A: Yes, also feel like we can cut out a few parts if we want to spare the… Do you need to go somewhere or do something?
S: No, it’s fine. I was more thinking about the transcriber person.
A: Okay, there we were about things and dancing. We came from circulation. Wasn’t it in the beginning they talked about, this, I guess Dance-ing, has I guess mostly been passed on body to body, as an oral transmission.
S: Through dancing together?
A: Through dancing together basically, and is there something there? I wonder… hmm… I don’t really see the dancing or the dance. I think it’s also more interesting to think about dance-ing as Zoe said, than THE dance, as THE agent. But still there is some agency in it. We never just do one thing, and things we do are also entangled with things we have seen, things we learned and so on. In that sense maybe it’s not a thing that is circulated like in a factory, from one machine to another, from one body to another. But it is still a thing that is, it’s a body, that is shaped by a world, that is dancing, and this dancing is happening in entanglements. Great term for this situation—entanglements with many powers, maybe more than agents, or forces. Ah forces. Damn feels so tacky somehow. Anyways, what I find interesting there, is that we can see something which is at work both in like how fake therapy has been moving around in the world and how watching a dance in a theatre can move me and move through me. I find this interesting because honestly I was a bit scared when Mette Ingvartsen was explaining her piece. I don’t know, were you there then?
S: Yeah.
A: This relation to dance which is like, this maybe rude but, it felt a little bit like an Ikea manual. This does that, this is there because of that, so that it will do that to you, or… Hmm, diplomacy. There is a relation to dance which carries a lot of for, a relation where it’s an object, which apparently she can look through. There is no opacity in the object, it seems to be very transparent to her, the work and it apparently should also be transparent to me. So everything that it can do is already there. I am going to see the piece next week and I am curious if I will see the things that she told me that its about.
S: Yeah, it’s totally spoiler alert.
A: Totally. But then in the other instance, if we talk about entanglements or other kinds of circulation, then there is at least a possibility of opacity. Maybe we don’t want to call it a thing, because maybe we don’t really know what kind of thing it is. It’s also shifting shape according to each body. But I think I would still stick to circulation, to something that is circulating. There is an opacity there that offers an opportunity for it to generate something in relation to “me.” It inscribes itself with me, in my body, so there is more a kind of relation of dancing with the dance. Or watching with the dance. But I agree with you that there is something less exciting about going fully for the agency of the dance. There is something in a territory there in-between insisting on the inging of Zoe and the agency of the dance.
S: Yes, I see it a little bit as two different looks that might not necessarily be contradictory. The dancing, I think, talks about existing power hierarchies and the role of the dancer quite a lot. While the dance as an agency becomes more of a philosophical concept to me. What happens when I don’t think of me talking into this telephone but that the telephone is listening to me? What are those shifts somehow? And in relation to the presentation of Mette, I think she is more interested in transparency than opacity. But I think she is kind of opaque when it comes to the presupposed, the preconditions of her work, which became clear when someone were asking about her choice of working with normatively abled, well trained dancers, most of which are probably self-defined as white. Basically her answer did not really reflect more than that a choice of working with differently abled dancers, or to work with a more diverse group of performers or dancers, would have made it not neutral anymore. That it would have been too politically correct. So from her answer I heard that she had this idea that if bodies look like we traditionally think bodies should look like in Western Europe when they dance on stage, we will read them as neutral. But it presupposes that us who receive the dance are white normative bodies, that would read these performers as “neutral”. For whom is this body neutral? We can recognize what people choose not to talk about and that they, when it comes up, try to put to the side quite fast because that is not what the work is about. But the work is always about that. Even more so if you don’t manage to bring it in how you conceive the work or how you talk about it. So, being transparent can also more or less consciously hide certain things as well. Or just hope that most people in the audience would find it neutral too.
A: Not many entanglements are possible in this work then, because everything is somehow instrumental for conveying a desire or statement, under certain presupposed conditions. I am really curious of your work though. Maybe we can talk a little bit about Splendour if you feel like. I really enjoyed this piece. It’s been a while so I am not sure I can say anything smart about it, but maybe actually I didn’t feel like I could say anything smart about it when I saw it.. Even if there was a transparency, a strong transparency. It’s a piece where as I see it the dancers dance the music. They take the music apart and with different body parts they…
S: …mime the sound basically, doing the sound.
A: This, it happens for quite a while, and we get it very fast. But this didn’t feel instrumental for me to understand anything else than that. I wonder if there is something around this piece that you would want to talk about in relation to how we have talked about the possible agency of the dance and the practicing of the dance-ing.
S: Yeah. I think an important part was how to construct a practice that acknowledged that we get shaped by each other when practicing together and even encourage it. I can experience sometimes in dance practices, somatic practices, movement practices, that they suggest a certain freedom. It’s all “your own body knows the truth”, “you listen to yourself”, “you make your own version”. We are all individuals and then we do the exercise, and I always find myself looking at the others to see how they do it. What’s it supposed to look like or how do I move from my kidneys? What does it actually entail? I think through time, doing these practices together in a group, they make a certain shared understanding of what it looks like. But often we keep on pretending that it’s every individual’s choice. It’s somehow a promise of freedom, but it just looks the same. Everyone expresses freedom in the same way. I was trying to be super strict at the start, so it’s really only doing the sound and you can only do the most direct interpretation. You should never be creative, you should never oppose, you should never contrast, but really try to be literal in translating. With that said we never say anything about what is literal or not. It’s still up to every person to do whatever they find literal no matter how literal I found that or no. So, yeah, I think it was very much from that experience of a kind of expression of freedom that I can find in improvisation and how can we find an actual freedom for everyone performing it, and not whether it has the looks of freedom.
A: So an actual freedom, that is okay with being shaped by each other. That’s beautiful.
S: There is something about going with what happens when we spend a lot of time together, when we start to act the same way or have a shared language or move similarly. We really just said, yeah then we let that happen. If you tend to do the same thing every time, then that’s fine. If you some day don’t do it, fine. It’s an improvisation but an improvisation that does not try to be different or expand what it does. Nor trying to settle. It’s not supposed to sediment to a set situation.
A: Awesome. Maybe that’s a good thing to finish?
S: Oui.
A: Or is there something else you have a desire to talk about or something that has a desire to talk though you?
S: I don’t think so. It would start a new topic again.
A: Yeah, there is a lot to talk about…
S: What this conference made me wonder was if the naming of Postdance is a kind of desire from a generation that has a problem with dance to figure out what the point of dancing is. I think it was in the panel with Cecilia [Bengolea], Francois [Chaignaud], Florentina {Holzinger], Ofelia [Jarl Ortega] and André [Lepecki] where he said that in the 90s it was really not cool to be dancing. And it felt like the rest of the panel were just like, well, that’s your problem – we don’t really have a problem with dancing. If you experience that to dance around is not really valid, then it needs a context, it needs a situation, it needs a why. Then you need to figure out or motivate why dancing is fine.
A: There were a couple of times expressed a frustration or disinterest with what seemed to be percieved like a culture of justifying work through theory, in that panel and also from Jefta [van Dinther], when talking about theory. I wonder if there is something showing up in this which is like this kind of transparency. I am sorry this is not meant to be personal, but this kind of transparency that Mette brought, has limits, in terms of what kind of, what’s a good word there, because I don’t know if it’s even about knowledge production, but maybe what can happen or what kind of relations can be produced.
S: Maybe knowledge without the production part. I remember how Mårten [Spångberg] was talking about how we have been talking about dance as a toolbox, but that it’s rather a knowledge.
A: Yes. It seems that this was what they were saying. That they weren’t concerned with the 90s but that the model of contextualizing through theory is limited. Mårten made quite an awesome talk on that. I don’t dare to say what he said, as I don’t have it in front of me and it was rather dense.
S: You can make it up.
A: We maybe don’t escape choreography but we can reconsider the matter of the dance, or the matter of the dancing, the ing-ing, the material of the dancing. However, gesturing again. I felt an invitation to renegotiate the relation between the matter of the dancing however hard it can be to take it apart and choreography. There seemed to be expressed a strong need for that renegotiation through the conference. It is not enough to make an efficient transmission of a political position through choreographic signs. I felt a care in the conference for the matter of the dance, how it’s related to choreography, but it also how it carries other things than what…
S: …choreography does.
A: Yes.
S: I think that’s a good place to stop.
A: Okay, let’s call it a day.
Stina Nyberg lives in Sweden where she makes and performs choreography. She graduated from the MA in choreography at DOCH in Sweden in 2012. Her choreographic practice is related to the possibility to through conviction and illusion create new systems of logic in order to be able to construct the world differently, and act accordingly. Her departure point is always a feminist approach to the body; its social and political construction and ability to move. Often working in collaboration with others – moving in between independent theatres, state institutions, art galleries and the music scene – she creates a work method specific to every situation, including how we work into what we work with. As a performer she has worked with, among others, Andros Zins-Browne, Sidney Leoni and Mårten Spångberg.
Since 2011 she has presented several works at MDT in Stockholm, made a piece for the Royal Swedish ballet school and has been developing, choreographing and performing in the Shaking the habitual show with the Swedish band The Knife. Together with Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch she forms the group Samlingen – a collaboration between five choreographers that deals with the “history and herstory of dance”. In 2014 she was developing the piece Tones & Bones for the Cullberg Ballet, her latest solo Horrible Mixtures, and Splendour premiered at MDT in Stockholm in December. She is currently working on a contemporary mime about the the healthy body as a model for the healthy society.
Adriano Wilfert Jensen is a choreographer, whose work addresses conditions for and modes of relations. It includes making, curating, representing and dealing choreography, dancing in the works of others, as well as a number of other occupations like a series of cocktail hangouts, dinnerpartiers etc.
Recent works are “Galerie” (2015) – an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks founded and run in collaboration with Simon Asencio, “i-D Indigo Dance Festival”(2014 & 2015), curated and produced in collaboration with Linda Blomqvist, Emma Daniel and Anna Gaiotti, “Museum” (2014), collaboration with Simon Asencio, “Strohhalmen (straws)”(2014), “Debut”(2013), collaboration with Sandra Lolax and Pontus Petterson,“The Protocol”(2013) a group choreography featuring a big and growing group that will never meet all together,“Spending Time With Dinosaurs” (2012) collaboration with Emma Daniel and “grass dog girls” (2012). His work has been presented in France, Estonia, Belgium, The Netherlands, New York, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Adriano has danced for Deborah Hay, Mårten Spangberg, Anne Imhof, Dora Garcia, a.o. He holds a BA in choreography from School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, and received the Danceweb Scholarship 2012 & 2015
