Dog days

So we’ve played our dog show, Hundgöra some times now and will do more of it soon (we did it at Skogen i Gothenburg 25-27 Aug and will do it at Weld 27, 29, 30 Sep + 1 okt in Stockholm).

It’s been such a pleasure and such a challenge. By far the most clowny thing I ever did on a stage, and this in combination with the usual overlap between roles (performer, maker, producer) of free performing arts. We are proud of what we made, but also a bit like: Ok, what a ride this was, and what a great capacity for landing on our feet we have for being dogs.

Me and Britta Kiessling started to lab with this project in June 2021 under the title Illusionism and Dogs/Våra hundar at Köttinspektionen in Uppsala where we had a small residency. We had some vague thoughts about physicalities, power dynamics and the symbol of the dog in works like those of performance collective Signa, authors Amy Hampel, Kerstin Ekman and more. We counted on the result from our exploration becoming somewhat depressive, because that’s our nature. But as we tried things out on the floor, cute, clumsy and comical qualities came out. We started reading Halberstams Queer Art of Failure and looking at cartoons. We called in a real clown, wonderful Virginia Librado Gallego, to teach us to actually look at the audience and show our emotions.

We come from contemporary dance, and our earlier performance history mostly involves doing super specific physical practices, focussing on ourselves or the other performers rather than the audience. Now, we were rhyming, making boyband dances, licking bowl and constructing a two person dog with a mask that has a lot of magic too it – if you’re super aware of the audience’s gaze. Ziggi Willpower built all the amazing masks and costumes. He also became crucial to how we approach the audience, constantly reminding us of both visual and relational aspects of looking at someone.

The show is in Swedish, and is called Hundgöra (“doing dog”, means hard physical labor) nowadays. We’ve played it for an audience from 5 years old and up. The mix of ages really works. Grown-ups tend to focus on the more existential aspects of the material. Because it is, in it’s way, about being vulnerable in love and knowing that we will all die. Kids are very curious about the material aspect of the dances and our relationship to dogs. They usually linger after the show to ask us if we know any real dogs, how the costumes were built, if it is chocolate dough or poo we’re eating in the show, how the microphones work, and so on. The only age group we’ve excluded is toddlers, because there’s something about the big two-person dog-mask that seems to be frightening for some small kids. Our guess is that if you’re not old enough to grasp fiction, a dog that is big as a horse can become quite troubling even if it’s cute in the eyes of an adult.

Creds and description in Swedish:

HUNDGÖRA

För människor och fantasihundar från 5 år och uppåt
Föreställningens längd: ca 45 minuter

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Vi har gjort många hundar i den här föreställningen. Allihop är till er:

Roliga hundar och ledsna hundar. Små och stora hundar. Hundar som stannar, och hundar som sliter sig loss. Hundar som kommer och försvinner, hundar som är hungriga, som är med i popband, fornegyptiska hundgudar och hundar som ger dåliga råd. Rufsiga och tufsiga hundar. Hundar som älskar för mycket eller för lite. Hundar som inte gillar människor så mycket. Hundar som måste hålla sitt eget koppel. Hundar som måste vakta hela natten på dem de bryr sig om. Och hundar som äntligen kan somna när man kliar dem bakom örat. Era hundar, våra hundar, allas inre hundar.

Föreställningen innehåller dans och sång och lite prat, men har ingen historia, bara många olika hundar.

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Av och med: Tova Gerge och Britta Kiessling
Kläder, mask och tredje öga: Ziggi Willpower
Ljus, rum och bild: Ekaterina Lukoshkokva
Ljud: Elize Arvefjord
Clownkonsulent: Virginia Librado Gallego
Grafisk form: HK
Stenben av Smurrgos
Med stöd av: Kulturrådet, Konstnärsnämnden, Stockholms stad
Samproduktion: Nyxxx, Skogen och Weld
Tack till: Zebradans

Sonettknäppen och lite annat

Den har varat i ett år nu, sonettknäppen. Det började med att jag drog mitt gamla skämt om att jag i ett annat liv skulle översätta Shakespeares sonetter. Personen jag var med sa: Varför inte det här livet? Kort därefter hade en tidskrift jag gillar plötsligt tema sonetter. Och nu har jag just gjort min hundranionde tror jag? Det finns hundrafemtiofyra. Det blir säkerligen mer sonettjox i framtiden, men här är i alla fall två ställen där några finns publicerade:

I Pralin
I Astra

Mycket bunden vers blir det, men jag har haft rätt kul på jobbet i alla fall. Skrev en psalm till ett kortfilmsprojekt, Nyxxx föreställning Hör så tyst det är som jag var med och skrev blev bibunominerad, och jag fortsatte snickra på ett projekt om hundars tragikomiska potential med Britta Kiessling mfl (premiär vår 2023). En del knåp med allt detta även under hösten, vi får se.

“Hund”-mix från våra samlingar:

Documentation of conversations around Kritiker #60

Thanks to Kulturrådet, Ottarfonden och Kulturfonden för Sverige & Finland, we had the possibility to make and document conversations with some of the authors of Kritiker #60. The conversations took place in Nyxxx‘s space at Ljusnevägen 3A in Bagarmossen.

Introduction with the editors, me and Elin Bengtsson (in Swedish):

Conversation about penetration and revolution with Niels Henning Krag Jensby and Nikolaj Tange Lange (mostly in English except the very beginning):

Conversation about communities and language with Ida Mirow and Edith Hammar (in Swedish):

The documentation was made by Saga Gärde and Lode Kuylenstierna.

Kritiker #60 coming out

In online dates spread out during almost a year now, me and my author colleague Elin Bengtsson have been working late pandemic nights in ergonomically questionable sitting positions to make this issue of Kritiker one of the most meticulously edited attempts at mapping aspects of BDSM as a theme in contemporary Nordic literature. Now it’s out there, containing some truly amazing texts and a long foreword for which we really mobilized most of our brain capacity, experience and reading skills. I wish the issue a long life, coming to use for a lot of different people.

October 23, we will host a literary conversation with some of the authors in Nyxxx’s space in Bagarmossen, at Ljusnevägen 3. The Danish novellists Nikolaj Tange Lange and Niels Henning Krag Jensby will talk about penetration and revolution in formations of male homosexual desire. The Finnish cartoonist Edith Hammar and the Swedish poet/editor Ida Mirow will talk about how kinky languages and communities shape literary fiction. Don’t miss it!

You can read more about the issue, and order it, here:
http://www.kritiker.nu/nummer60/index.html

PassiviTV

In connection to Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged premiering, the makers Tova Gerge and Britta Kiessling hosted three conversations about passivity with three different guests. Kind of like podcasts but live and on screen. Watch them/hear them here:

Marika Leïla Roux aka Gorgone:

PassiviTV the 20th of November was about being tied and tying in the context of rope bondage: what these roles and their respective skill sets can mean, on a metaphorical as well as aesthetic level. Marika Leïla Roux aka Gorgone has many years of exploration and experimentation with the traditional techniques and emotions of Japanese Rope Bondage (Shibari/Kinbaku). Since discovering ropes in 2011, she has been a professional shibari model and rigger, teaching and performing worldwide. She emphasises the artistic, metaphorical and sensual nuances of this practice. An example is her durational project Study on Falling, exploring the relation between the body and gravity in ropes. She is also the founder of the online tutorials platform Shibari Study. 

Artist-researcher Hamish MacPherson:


PassiviTV the 21 of November was about kink and choreography, politics and passivity. Hamish MacPherson is an artist-researcher in the crossovers between choreography and philosophy. He is busy with the dark and complicated aspects of care, pleasure, passivity and power. Lately, he has been working with the zine STILL LIFE, which is about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. Or about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Författaren Eli Levén:

PassiviTV den 22 november handlade om queera helgon, makten, maktlösheten och litteraturen som kraftfull betraktare. Eli Levéns båda romaner “Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats” (2010) och “Hur jag skulle vilja försvinna” (2020) berör skymningslanden mellan begär och utplåning, upprättelse och förnedring. Med språket som hållande och lyssnande kraft låter Levén ofta sina karaktärer vistas i olika gränstillstånd som också berör det passiva: i sexualiteten, i livets flöden, i närheten till döden och andlighet. Levéns första bok gav upphov till två filmer: guldbaggebelönade Nånting måste gå sönder (2014) och dokumentären Pojktanten (2012).

The movie Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged is available on request – get in touch.

Program text, Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged

In our ongoing project, Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged, we are premiering a movie instead of a live performance in these strange covid19-times, and learning a lot about digital distribution of events that we never knew before. It’s not only bad, but I miss the audience and the flow of performing deeply.

Passivity Rules / Memories of Being Hanged is a performance and-or film based on movement and speech. Passivity Rules / Memories of Being Hanged builds on experiences of being tied, especially in the context of rope bondage. The piece is a spin-off of the performance Someone You Trust (from 2018).

Passivity rules are systems where passivity facilitates something, opens up something. It is also an interjection, puting passivity first: Passivity rules! Memories of being hanged stands for experiences of losing control over one’s passivity, being close to dying or disappearing, concretely or metaphorically. Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged is about what is going on in a body that seems to sink, let go, lose its grip – or that actually does.

Here, passivity is related to femininity. Our entry point to that is feminist. It’s not that we want to demonstrate that Women Can Do It (be active). Rather, we want to examine passivity as a lived experience, demanding competences and having consequences.

Me and Britta Kiessling wrote and translated a poetic text (from Swedish to English) that circles around passivity and activity in a social, subcultural and personal sense. It’s our program or just a text. I thought I’d share it here.

program-passivity-rules-memories-of-being-hangedDownload

Images, Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged

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Images from rehearsals, by Ekaterina Lukoshkova.

Summary of Trains and Boats and Planes

Today, I did the last little tasks related to my project Working on Travel aka Trains and Boats and Planes. It is as series of interviews about travels for art, with eighteen amazing persons. I’ve basically been working with the project all through 2019, and I’m very proud of what it became.

If you want to download all the texts in a pdf-format from Skogen’s homepage, you can do it here:
IN SWEDISH
IN ENGLISH
(You can also order the book in paper format from Skogen.)

The pdfs include my introduction, and the most updated versions of the interviews – the blogposts might contain a few more language errors. However, in case you prefer reading on the screen, here are direct links to all the texts available in blog format:

Dinis Machado: Why do you travel so much? 
Ebba Petrén & Gabriel Widing: We can’t remember all the hours 
(also exists in a podcast version in Swedish)
Maria Salah: I never felt before that I don’t want to
Sara Parkman: If you’re in motion, you can’t stop 
Ghayath Almadhoun: If the borders refuse me, I refuse them 
Anna af Sillén de Mesquita & Leandro Zappala: Before, we would have gone along with it 
Amanda Apetrea & Halla Ólafsdóttir: A big part of the work for us is to have a good time 
Elizabeth Ward: I live in between these places, emotionally
Stina Dahlström: Are you handling the carbon offset for this trip, or are we?
Ofelia Jarl Ortega: Different places for different parts of me 
Aino Ihanainen & Alexander Weibel Weibel: It’s ok being in the same place for a while 
Uri Turkenich: We should go live on some hill
Gestalta Judd: It’s a bit of a love-hate relationship 
Katja Larsson: You’re there physically through your object

Apart from these wonderful, generous and bright interviewees who have really taught me so much, I also want to take the occasion to thank Moa Schulman for the super smart and beautiful graphic design, Gabriel Widing who did the type setting with patience and precision and last but not least Gabriella Berggren who gave my English some support to lean on and contributed a lot to the overall quality of the texts within a fairly limited time frame.

The project was created with the support of Skogen and Helge Ax:on Johnsons Stiftelse.

Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged

In 2020, me and Britta Kiessling will continue a choreographic exploration that we initiated in 2019. We wanted to take on the challenge to work with passivity as a performative practice: finding ways of letting the audience gaze see the activities of the passive body, both with the help of speech, choreographic practices and other choices on stage. Out of that desire, Passivity Rules/Memories of Being Hanged was born.

In November 2019, we had the luxury of working on these themes together with Weld Company (and some lovely guests). In the coming year, we will continue working with support from The Swedish Arts Council, in Skogen among other places.

Here are some visual imprints from our process so far:

 

 

 

Working on Travel aka Trains and Boats and Planes

During 2019, I’ve been busy with an interview project about life and travels of artists. I’ve interviewed no less than eighteen bright and generous and smart people. The interviews will be posted on workingontravel.tumblr.com during the autumn. Very much worth a read! The interviews are also published in a book with the same name, that is distributed by Skogen. The book will be available online as a pdf within a near future.
Moa Schulman made the visual material.

The project is coproduced by Skogen and supported by Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse.