4 September 2016
14.00 – 16.00 Choreographed reading circle with Caroline Byström
17.00 – 20.00 We happen things #3 – a meeting. The performance/meeting are initiated and curated by Manon Santkin, Moa Franzén and Tove Salmgren.
Free admission, no booking required
A choreographed reading circle is an investigation into how methods for dance can meet methods for group readings.
We propose that reading together can be to dance together, and how we dance is structured by a choreographer every session. The choreographers choose text, methods and format for the experiment according to their own artistic interests. Taking part in a choreographed reading circle involves asking yourself what an event like this is and can be. We all participate with our curiosity, our eyes, our bodies, our voices and our thoughts. Everybody who wants to join is welcome, no preparation is needed. It is always possible to participate as a spectator/listener/witness or as reader/dancer.
The circles are held in Swedish or English. Participants are welcome to use the language they are most comfortable with. We help to translate when needed.
A different artist is invited every session, with the commission to answer with their eyes, their ears, their hands or thought to the reading circle, with a material that can be printed on paper. The invited artist participates on the same conditions as other participants; as spectator/listener/witness or as reader/dancer. The document that the artist creates will be published at the following Sunday Circle. Barkman is invited to document the third reading cirlce.
Caroline Byström was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1984. She grew up in Sweden and lives in Stockholm since 2012 where she works as a dancer, choreographer and museum host. Rather than developing a coherent artistry she works on developing and exploring a new approach in each project which takes its expression in various forms. In the spring Byström is studying writing at Stockholm University and there encounters, for her, new forms of text, which she thinks will have an influence upon the circle she will lead at Köttinspektionen. Byström is educated in dance and choreography in Copenhagen, Salzburg, Gießen and at the Master’s program in Choreography at DOCH.
During childhood in a paper-mill town, Barkman suffered, growing up as tongueless as his surroundings as trees were chopped down to make pulp. Sheets of paper were taken elsewhere to be filled with sentences. Long after leaving his hometown, Barkman obtained a master’s degree in Literature and Archival Science from Znjevdijerr University, and a bachelor’s in art history and text encryption. Tasked with various forms of text sorting. In recent years, engaged in dubious burial and excavation of various types of literature. At night, with meticulous regularity, at a place in the forest nobody has yet been able to specify the exact coordinates of. The ritual bears strong streaks of equal parts planting and burial.
For this 3rd edition of We Happen Things, Moa Franzen, Tove Salmgren and Manon Santkin invite Francine Agbodjalou and Kajsa Wadhia to perform with them a relay of scores that will make them move and talk together. They will use three scores as motor for the performance: Tove Salmgren’s Objects and Speech, Manon Santkin’s Unexplained dances and Moa Franzén’s prɑpər spitʃ.
Going through loops of repetition, variation, recognition and displacements, the five artists will bring their individual practices and perspectives on stage and perform an uncanny cohabitation of differing views on performance, language, properness, dance and probably life.
The scores problematize questions of power, subjectivity and criticality, using “choreography” and “performance” as alibi to explore the relation between language and movement, directing special attention to the speaking body and to speech as practice, form, communication and politics.
We Happen Things #3 – a meeting is a reflexive project initiated and curated by Manon Santkin, Moa Franzén and Tove Salmgren, that invites to (self)reflection around (artistic) practices; as performer, artist or audience.
The performance/meeting will start 17.00 and go on with open doors for the audience, in the foyer there will be snacks/coffee and tea during the evening.
Moa Franzén – prɑpər ˈspiːtʃ
prɑpər ˈspiːtʃ departs from the idea and practice of “proper speech” and how the linguistic norms and laws that it abides under has its roots in ideology and the idea of civilized discourse (as opposed to the “primitive” sounds of the “sub-human”). The piece takes an interest in the relation between speech and body, how the mouth is schooled by incorporating the practice of proper speech, how the movements of the mouth is tied to the plays of power, and how the learning of proper speech is a way to exercise power over the bodies of the speakers by making them incorporate and internalize a linguistic and grammatical structure.
The score discusses and defines what proper speech is and what it demands. Being written in phonetics, it is also an instruction, spelling out the correct way to utter and pronounce the words.
By problematizing what kind of practice speech is – ideologically as well as movement-wise – it makes room for a faultering speech.
Tove Salmgren – Objects and Speech
In Objects and Speech trust is recognized as something lost in the communities we make happen. It’s a score that questions what authorship and ownership do (concepts understood as products of an individualistic and alienated time). As a ritual, a process and a performance, it suggest ways to distribute trust, it wants to try generosity and our ability to trust as a fundament of being together.
“What is it about?”… is a common phrase and words often outspoken in relation to a performance/art work. A question and phrase understood as situated in a tradition of knowledge, it seems to rely on expertise and social hierarchies to exist. Objects and Speech meets this tradition with a ritual that aims at something opposite of its traditional purpose; to turn into a multiplicity of specific, irreplaceable and personal questions and dilemmas.
Objects and Speech is a score with many potential materialities and shapes. Language, things and movements, a mean for empowerment and making of new histories. They connect, disconnect, establish and confuses. Structured by a trust in many personal matters, no one more valid then another.
Manon Santkin – Unexplained Dances
Let’s attempt to dive into the worst dualism history has known: splitting the mind and the body. The score of Unexplained Dances sets the body and the mind in two parallel actions, performed simultaneously. The principle couldn’t be more simpler: the body does the dance and the mind reflects about Dance. Through a sequence of simple tasks, a dancer performs a genuine reflection while engaging physically in a dance of their fancy. The attention is split between caring for the movement’s own non-verbal logics and the logics proper to speaking and making sense. Soon enough, the speaking and the moving will feedback on each other. The words and the movements will become one dance and we will lose track of which one originated the other. In a forceful attempt to confront self-reflection, the score of Unexplained Dances produces physical monologues where our attention is taken many places and the gaze wanders around minutely, oblivious of the question of being right or wrong.
Biographies
Francine Agbodjalou is an actor and artist active in Europe. Her practice is multidisciplinary and revolves around the intersection between the unspoken and communicative in different power structures. She is currently studying at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and is working in parallel with a variety of freelance work.
Kajsa Wadhia works in the fields of performance, text and choreography and holds an MA in New Performative Practices from DOCH, Stockholm. She places her artistic practice in the context of an over productive and accelerating society, and responds by turning exhaustion into resistance and anti-climax into fulfillment. Together with Maria Stiernborg, she forms the performance duo The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra, investigating anti-relational aesthetics, slowness, disorganisation and laziness as artistic tools and political resistance. Previously she co-directed and worked with performing arts collective Arena Baubo. She is co-directing Köttinspektionen Dans in Uppsala with Tove Salmgren.
Moa Franzén (b. 1985) is an artist and writer based in Stockholm. Her practice encircles writing and performance and places itself in and between visual arts, choreography and literature. Franzén’s work evolves around the relation between language and violence, rethoric and ideology, body and power, and often uses low valued and contradictory and complex acts and expressions – like silence, absence and stillness – as tools and expressions for agency and resistance, by directing attention to and displacing hegemonic narratives, acts and forms. Franzén has a BA in Visual Arts from The Royal Institute of Art and Kunstakademiet in Bergen, and a MA in Choreography from New Performative Practices at DOCH. She has shown work nationally and internationally, as well as curated a range of performance events and seminars and has been published in a number of publications and magazines. She also works editorially for the literary magazine Kritiker.
Tove Salmgren (b. 1976) works with performance, dance and choreography, as an initiator and collaborator in various artistic contexts and formats. She is active as a dancer, choreographer, curator and educator and has an MA in New Performative Practices from DOCH, Stockholm. Her artistic practice is about activating a critical discourse on subjectivity and power, which often happen through a laboratory mode of adressing hegemonic structures within the field of dance and choreography itself. She is involved in various artistic collaborations such as with The Blob (Anna Efraimsson), where play/institution/critique are being coupled, in the curatorial collaboration We happen things with the artists Manon Santkin and Moa Franzén and together with the artist Kajsa Wadhia she is runnning Köttinspektionen Dans, a platform and venue for experimental dance and choreography in Uppsala, Sweden.
Manon Santkin (b. 1982) is a freelance artist. She works between Brussels and Stockholm. Within the field of the Performing Arts, she operates as a dancer, choreographer, artistic advisor, process assistant and writer. She graduated from P.a.r.t.s. in 2004 and recently finished a Master in News Performative Practices at Doch, part of the University of the Arts in Stockholm. She has been collaborating with choreographers Mette Ingvartsen, Salva Sanchis, Xavier Leroy, Sidney Leoni, Eleanor Bauer, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Daniel Linehan and Leslie Mannès. She also develops projects with sound artist Peter Lenaerts and with designer Nicolas Couturier. Manon regularly takes part in the processes of other artists as a mentor, advisor or dramaturge and sees her role as an interpreter morphing into that of a facilitator of collaborative processes. In her current works Manon revisits the notion of ‘interpretation’ in terms of an ecology of practices and intelligences, self-organization and interactive agencies.
Credits
Concept and scores: Manon Santkin, Moa Franzén and Tove Salmgren. Performers: Manon Santkin, Francine Agbodjalou, Moa Franzén, Kajsa Wadhia and Tove Salmgren. With support by Stockholms stad and in collaboration with MDT Stockholm and Köttinspektionen Dans. Administered by the artist cooperative Interim kultur and Köttinspektionen Dans.
