Friday 27 of October 18.00 – 22.30
18.00 – 18.45 To release the body/Hello to the senses, Cecilia Roos will guide us through a short physical workshop. No preknowledge is required (and no special clothes are needed).
19.00 Release party/mingle for The Publication. Drinks and snacks will be served.
19.45 – 20.15 Release Ceremony with The Blob. We will be offered to drop a variation of things/objects/materials from different levels. Participate in dropping things, or see other people dropping things.
20.30 – 21.30 The Blob starts a band. From the manifesto the Blob has written, a band will start and have its first session.
21.30 Mingle with the Band.
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Sunday 29 of October 14.00 – 16.00
First rehearsal/session with the Band, hosted by The Blob. No preknowledge is required. Join if you would like to play music and read poems, or listen to others doing it.
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Welcome to join all the activities or parts of them. When its participatory its always also an option to be a witness. The two days are also free standing.
Free admission / No booking required (both 27th and 29th of October)
Welcome to The Blobs Release Ceremony at Köttinspektionen Friday 27th of October!
The Blob starts a band! / The Blob Releaseparty for The Publication
Köttinspektionen Dans has invited The Blob to organize a release party for The Publication; a collection of five individual posters made up of written materials by the choreographers/artists Frida Sandström, Zoë Poluch, Moa Franzén, Maria Stiernborg and Barkman Bark, with graphic design by Jonas Williamsson. The Publication is part of a chain reaction of artistic practices and happenings at Köttinspektionen, and now the baton have reached The Blob. (More about The Publication further down).
The Blob adopted the mission to host a release party through the understanding: “To let go of something is to start something”, and will therefore take the opportunity to start a band while launching The Publication – together with everyone that would like to join. For the band’s appearance, The Blob has written a manifesto that constitutes a container and a framework for the band.
Everybody can join
As a band member, one can be an observer – to attend but not so active
Inbetween the songs we communicate without words, but words can be used inside of the songs
Band members can bring instruments, and what an instrument is, is not decided
There will be gigs/concerts
The band makes songs and music but what songs and music are, is not decided
The whole room is part of the song
Each band member can initiate a song, and the initiator of a song will end the song
Everyone has to back up a song that has been initiated (may be with their presence, mind, feelings or with instruments)
One does not need to show up to all rehearsals to be a band member
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Sunday 29 of October 14.00 – 16.00
First session/rehearsal with the Band, hosted by The Blob
We are invited by the Blob to join the band, everyone is welcome. The band will depart from a MANIFESTO, written by The Blob. During this session we will play/rehearse songs, accordingly to the manifesto, and in between the songs we will read poems from “Hackers” by Aase Berg. No preknowledge is required. Join if you would like to play music and read poems, or listen to others doing it.
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The Publication – a chain reaction of artistic practices and happenings
The Publication is an initiative by Köttinspektionen Dance (Kajsa Wadhia and Tove Salmgren) to invite artists to “document artistically” one of the occasions in a serie of choreographed reading circles that took place during 2016, at Köttinspektionen in Uppsala. The interest was to follow and stretch the materials that dance and choreography offer us, with less focus on its originality and origin and more on how it finds, moves, connects, undress and possibly compost us into an eternal cycle.
The choreographed reading circles were experimental sessions proposed and led by five different choreographers posing the questions: What kind of choreography is reading? Can the recognisable format of a reading circle enable a playful meeting between people with and without prior knowledge within the dance discourse, a meeting in between theory and practice; between what is said and done? The invited artists documenting these circles were instructed to participate in the same way as other participants; as spectator/listener/witness or as reader/dancer. Their commission was 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 idea with artistic documentation was to try out the notion of documentation from a strictly subjective horizon, and to allow for the materials produced at Köttinspektionen to be reactivated and merge into new materials, immaterial and material. These are now put together and part of The Publication, a collection of five individual posters made up of the artists documentations. The posters present texts/images by Frida Sandström, Zoë Poluch, Moa Franzén, Maria Stiernborg and Barkman Bark, with graphic design by Jonas Williamsson.
At the Release Party everyone gets a free copy of the publication/ the posters
Köttinspektionen Dans is a platform for experimental dance and performance in Uppsala, directed by choreographers Tove Salmgren and Kajsa Wadhia. Köttinspektionen is an artist-run venue that is shared between and co-directed by Köttinspektionen Dans, the artist collective HAKA and Teater C.
Cecilia Roos is a Professor in Dance within the area of Artistic Practices and Vice-Rector for Research at the Stockholm University of the Arts. She has worked as a dancer and rehearser with, among others, Tilde Björfors, John Caird, Cristina Caprioli, Jefta van Dinther, Mats Ek, Ina Christel Johannessen, Per Jonsson, Reich/Szyber, Twyla Tharp, Margaretha Åsberg. Her research is based on the dancer’s practice and the role it plays in performative processes.
The Blob is an elastic boneless organisational body/alter ego/artist inititiating, curating and producing art and culture with a special interest in dance and choreography. It creates forms and projects that stand alone or have the ability to “blobbing on” to different structures through collaboration/partnerships. The core basis of The Blob is to create spaces for working together and to elaborate around ways of organising and presenting art. The Blob is run by Anna Efraimsson or Anna Efraimsson is run by The Blob in collaboration with artists, researchers, organisations, and institutions in Sweden and internationally. The name “The Blob” is inspired by two elastic bodies: The childrens book character Barbapapa and the 1950s horror film, The Blob. Like Barbapapa, the organization is flexible and a problem-solver. But also like the frightful slim, The Blob has an inherent criticism, with its own agenda and integrity to counteract the contemporary political ideas around the flexible cultural entrepreneur. The Blob works with analyzing power structures and strives to use the intersectional perspectives, which means that The Blob as a name is also a statement, it is a formless body that can change sex and identity.
This time The Blob has been assisted by Anna Efraimsson and Tove Salmgren.
Anna Efraimsson works as a curator, producer, lecturer and dramaturge and runs The Blob since 2014. She is a senior lecturer in choreography with a specialization in curatorial practices at DOCH – School for Dance and Circus in Stockholm. She studied at Stockholm University’s Cultural Studies program, Études théatrales at Sorbonne in Paris, and at Icpp, Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, USA. Efraimsson has previously worked at The Kitchen, Kulturhuset, Moderna Dansteatern, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Dance Program, and Mossutställningar. Efraimsson is also one of the founders of the feminist network W.I.S.P. together with Sandra Medina, Tove Sahlin and Johanna Skobe, as well as initiator of the International performing arts festival Perfect Performance together with Danjel Andersson.
Tove Salmgren 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. 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.