Sandra Noeth 

How to catch a thought as it falls, maybe into your body? This session is dedicated to the corporeality and physicality of writing. In small groups and individually, we will use strategies of reading and (hand)writing in order to explore the relationship between ways of moving, sitting, writing and sensing our environments. No previous knowledge is required; please bring paper and pens to the session. 

‘Hållning’ is a Swedish word and holds the meanings of posture, position and attitude offering bodily, political and ethical implications. It is also our chosen name for this body-based platform of collective learning and action, at the intersection of dance and performance, education and civil society. Hållning began as project in 2020, with many formats and temporalities. Now we welcome you all to June Encounters, and introduce, alongside our partners and collaborators, some of the many ways of working and strategies we have been exploring so far, going into what we hope to explore together over the next four days.

Liz Rosenfeld & Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris 

Artist Liz Rosenfeld and curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris find correspondence in their practices through a joint enquiry of queer bodies of water, encompassing fleshy matters of cruising, brackish waters and wave-based vibrations. This conversation will elaborate on the hydro-visceral exchange on their joint sound work, Ground Water.

Over the first lock down period, Liz* was able to gain access to the darkroom of one of the oldest queer bars in Berlin. With the intention of exploring how a queer cruising space felt after its most empty and unused period, Liz* performed a series of tableaux where Liz* trembles in different areas of the darkroom under full house lights. Exposing the architecture of the space and Liz’s flesh, in this video work, entitled “Tremble,” questions arise regarding the emptiness of queer spaces, new manifestations of desire, and the traces that queer bodies leave behind to open up future holes. 

Bronwyn has been working with watery ways, ethics, poetics, politics, planetary climate coercions, metaphors that merge from clouds through puddles, trickles flood into waterfalls and livers, and most generally can be found merging score making, academic reporting, curatorial rhapsodies and perceptional precipitation sensing in bodies and words. 

Based on their practices and research, this dialogue will revolve around different ways of relating to the environments we live in, and also introduce Ground Water: an audio walk developed specifically Liz and Bronwyn for Hållning.

Gunilla Lundahl & Jenny Richards

We are all care workers. We are all caretakers, we are all caregivers, whether paid, unpaid or underpaid. These experiences are valuable, and this study circle seeks to listen and learn from our collective and distinct experiences in connection with other thinkers and artists work.　

Exercise ‘att blir gammal’ for those attending this session:

Please write a few sentences about what you think it might be like to grow old yourself and what kind of care would you wish for? We hope that it can nourish a conversation and consideration in what it is like to grow older and what it means for how we look at the knowledge and tools in caregiving. During the session those that wish to, will be invited to share their responses to the exercise. 

*Please note as we will be a larger group with only an hour together, we will only be able to hear from a few people who wish to share their responses.

During this online discussion, Gunilla Lundahl and Jenny Richards will share a short presentation of our collaborative research exploring the working conditions of care work from intergenerational and intersectional perspectives, and invite you to take part in a couple of exercises which we have developed as part of our recent Bodies of Care study circle with ABF (as part of Hållning).

Liz Rosenfeld and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Listen to the letters while you move around a body of water. It can be a body of water of your own making. As you traverse the perimeter of your island, be it fictional or real, listen to the letters.

Artist Liz Rosenfeld and curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris find correspondence in their practices through a joint enquiry of queer bodies of water, encompassing fleshy matters of cruising, brackish waters and wave-based vibrations. The audience will experience this hydro-visceral exchange through an outdoor audio walk.

Ground Water can be listened to and accessed from wherever you are, whenever you choose to listen.

To listen, please follow the link to the MDT SoundCloud here.

Jessie McLaughlin

In this morning session we will prepare for the day together by creating space and listening to music. Taking cue from Hållning as body based platform, we will explore how and what we can learn from music, particularly the act of listening to and/or reading lyrics and melody together as we make space to work. If you feel comfortable, please come to this session ready to share one or two pieces of music that strike you as helpful when creating space (to listen, to think, to be open to challenge).

What were we thinking? Hållning is a dynamic environment in which questions might be stronger than answers. In a daily, informal encounter between invited guests, the project team and audience members, this format aims to track and trace what has been brought to the physical and mental space.

America Vera-Zavala in conversation with Sandra Noeth 

This conversation stems from a basic desire to be in touch. To meet, to sit down together, to catch each other’s gaze, to ask questions and commit to the silent moments when the narratives, projections, and expectations that we carry interweave with the more brittle, often corporeal and situational and less coherent moments that every encounter holds. – It’s a small exercise in what Édouard Glissant maybe imagined when asking us to “consent to not be a single being”: a conversation about being composed by many experiences, about choosing (or being forced) to give space to some of them while neglecting others, about who lives are imagined, narrated, and performed and about how exclusions and inclusions are formed.

Natasha A. Kelly in conversation with Andrea Rodrigo 

Decolonize Aesthetics! The call for Hållning is not only a reminder of values and norms, but also an outcry for freedom from a colonised past and the ongoing colonially stretching into the future. In different ways, Black scholars and thinkers have articulated and translated their intellectual traditions in the constant battle to decolonize knowledge, power and bodies from Eurocentric narratives, their social and political relations and the structured ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world. Against this backdrop, my approach to Hållning takes on the question of how to decolonize aesthetics by reclaiming a concept often used to other. Consequently, by identifying Black Aesthetics as an action and an imperative for social, cultural and political change, Hållning allows room to create revolutionary visions that reach beyond the dominant paradigm (Natasha A. Kelly).

Emily Beausoleil & Chrysa Parkinson 

Emily Beausoleil: Embodying Responsibility

The normative demand to attend to social difference and absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so invite an affective approach to the ethics of encounter, construing responsibility as responsiveness. Taking affect as both context and resource for ethical thinking, in this talk I draw on the embodied ethics of thirteen somatic practitioners across various artistic and therapeutic genres to articulate three dimensions of such a ‘dispositional ethics’ in practice: particular orientations that undergird and sustain openness and responsiveness in the face of radical difference, as well as somatic practices that foster them. Yet to become both situated and responsible within a relational ontology is more than a matter of embodiment – it is also a call to attend to structure and history. I end therefore with discussion of how inhabiting positions of structural advantage produces structures of feeling and unfeeling that create further barriers to embodying such an ethos, and trajectories this sets for theory and practice.

Chrysa Parkinson: Disorienting Front

I’m always interested in how performers work; how in reaching toward being seen, heard and felt they create something other than, and alongside, themselves. Historically there has been an anti-theatrical prejudice in Western culture that conflates performance with deception, ritual with dogma and imagination with the less-than-real. Dis/orienting Front attends to the performer’s action of making themselves seen as a poetic crafting, both daily and spectacular, ethical and amorous, full of play and hard at work. The online version of Dis/orienting for Hållning/MDT will include Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion’s Music for Lectures. Jonathan Burrows on drums, Francesca Fargion on synth and Matteo Fargion on bass.  Mixed and mastered by Giacomo Fargion. Text and voice, Chrysa Parkinson.

Liz Rosenfeld and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Listen to the letters while you move around a body of water. It can be a body of water of your own making. As you traverse the perimeter of your island, be it fictional or real, listen to the letters.

Artist Liz Rosenfeld and curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris find correspondence in their practices through a joint enquiry of queer bodies of water, encompassing fleshy matters of cruising, brackish waters and wave-based vibrations. The audience will experience this hydro-visceral exchange through an outdoor audio walk.

Ground Water can be listened to and accessed from wherever you are, whenever you choose to listen.

To listen, please follow the link to the MDT SoundCloud here.

Chrysa Parkinson 

Since 2017, Chrysa Parkinson has been holding workshops that propose and explore tactics for experimenting with the experience of front, facing and dis/orientation. In this training session we will encounter movement scores, conversation and writing prompts and function as an introduction to specific practices that could be carried into other contexts, languages and skill-sets by the workshop participants. ‘Performance’ is considered an expanded practice in this workshop. Non-professionals are welcome.

What were we thinking? Hållning is a dynamic environment in which questions might be stronger than answers. In a daily, informal encounter between invited guests, the project team and audience members, this format aims to track and trace what has been brought to the physical and mental space.

QUARTO (Anna Mesquita & Leandro Zappala)

in dialogue with Mahmoud Keshavarz

For QUARTO, it all started a decade ago as an exhilarating yet laborious encounter between the very long stretch of thick black rope and two of them. For many years, this wild, unpredictable movement of a rope provided an extended, precarious materiality to their performative and personal relationship. It took QUARTO a decade to learn many lessons that the rope generously and tyrannically bestowed upon them. Lessons about an accident, discipline, labor, body, substance and process – of becoming together. Now, as the time comes to let go of the rope and allow it to not just coil and knot in between two of them but rather extend, stretch and travel among others and across the landscape, this conversation between QUARTO and Mahmoud Keshavarz will explore some of the ways in which both QUARTO and Keshavarz approach borders and border politics in their respective practices and research. 

Amanda Piña & Kevin McSorley

Amanda Piña: What I Danced from WAR

In this lecture presentation Amanda Piña gives an insight into her research on war dances which emerged in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) during the 1980’s. Through interviews with representatives of the island’s most relevant dance lineages, reenactments and new choreographic writings, a narrative emerges in which the ancestral and speculative sources of the dance are weaved together into a texture of resilience. The role of dance as a form of resistance to colonial violence and enslavement and the resurgence of an almost extinct bio-cultural context, – the Rapa Nui culture-, is reshaped by the violence of tourism as a Neo colonial force. War dances become the embodiment of this experiences and at the same time a collective form of resistance.

Kevin McSorley: War and the Body: Occupation, Choreography, Transformation  

War is fundamentally embodied.  It occupies myriad bodies in innumerable ways, from exhilaration to mutilation, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.  Not simply politics by any other means, war is politics incarnate, a profoundly destructive and generative political force that is written on and experienced through the bodies of countless men and women.  This talk will explore this fundamental entanglement of war and the body, examining some of the bodily, sensory and affective practices and regimes through which war lives and breeds, both within militaries and beyond.  It will consider how the preparation and prosecution of war depends upon particular types of bodily discipline and movement, martial choreographies and sensory entrainments, structures of feeling and somatic memories, as well as the ways that bodies carry war in the aftermaths of conflict and in the wider body politic. Finally it will consider how specific bodily practices and critical choreographies may attempt to challenge militarism and resist the reproduction of endless war.

Amanda Piña

Hoko, The War Dance (2012) features a research on Polynesian dance developed in Rapa Nui( Easter Island) as part of the research for the performance WAR. Dance authorities from the island talk about the Hoko and through each interview a complex story of colonial violence, tourism, resistance and resilience emerges. Filmed in 2012 in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) ©nadaproductions 2012

Trailer available to view here.

WAR (2014) The choreographic starting material for WAR are Polynesian dance forms that were reconstructed and developed on Easter Island during the 1980s and 1990s – among others Hoko, a famous war dance of the Rapa Nui. In an environment influenced by tourism, these “traditional” dance forms are both identity forming and survival strategies. With WAR, the division of art into contemporary vs traditional is addressed as a continuation of colonial relationships. Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann use the Rapa Nui repertoire to transfer the motif of war to a global level. WAR is a danced manifesto about the advancing homogenisation of art and the world that stands for other oppressed, changed and lost perspectives. With a “post-exotic” approach, a connection is made between aggressive expansionist politics and the question of the potential resistance of the body.

Liz Rosenfeld and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Listen to the letters while you move around a body of water. It can be a body of water of your own making. As you traverse the perimeter of your island, be it fictional or real, listen to the letters.

Artist Liz Rosenfeld and curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris find correspondence in their practices through a joint enquiry of queer bodies of water, encompassing fleshy matters of cruising, brackish waters and wave-based vibrations. The audience will experience this hydro-visceral exchange through an outdoor audio walk.

Ground Water can be listened to and accessed from wherever you are, whenever you choose to listen.

To listen, please follow the link to the MDT SoundCloud here.

Magnus Nordberg

In this morning session we will collectively bring forward impressions from the talks and events of the past three days of Hållning. In a circular method of listening and responding we are aiming to create a space for observation and responses to the topics surrounding the encounters.

What were we thinking? Hållning is a dynamic environment in which questions might be stronger than answers. In a daily, informal encounter between invited guests, the project team and audience members, this format aims to track and trace what has been brought to the physical and mental space.

Steffen Krämer & plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)

Making Publics by Withdrawing Attention

The talk presents preliminary thoughts from a research project about German-speaking Twitter users who urge their followers to withdraw attention from certain topics or accounts rather than amplifying their content. Following the overall theme of Hållning, the presentation will explore how this digital media practice enacts different aspects of the German word ‘Haltung’ in the overlapping senses of taking a stance and posture, of establishing and maintaining (bodily) tension and decisiveness. One the one hand, calls to withdraw attention may be symbolic gestures that secure and solidify particular positions. On the other hand, they are also part of a more dynamic making und unmaking of networked publics, of collective affect and antagonistic play (Steffen Krämer).

The pros and cons being digitally vegan

Art making involves making decisions. Sometimes those specific choices have implications beyond the art practice which spills into everyday life, thus enmeshing art and life. When we choose as artists to start recording everywhere we go with a GPS over 15 years ago, which we consider to be sousveillence or personal data mining, we quickly realised we would have to make other decisions about our digital use and involvement. Through the different contexts that we have worked as makers and teachers we have become increasingly aware of the politics of data. We therefore choose not to partake in centralised social media – this means that we are less visible, less connected but also have less noise. By looking for alternatives and other strategies we refused to trade security for the convenience of networked connectivity (plan b).

Hero Rashid / The Women’s Center in Tensta-Hjulsta & Anna Efraimsson / MDT in Skeppsholmen with translation support from Jenny Richards

In this session Hero Rashid, The Women’s Center in Tensta-Hjulsta (KITH) and Anna Efraimsson, MDT at Skeppsholmen discuss strategies and findings in relation to locality,  community and more. 

KITH was established in 1997 as part of a suburban initiative and in collaboration with a group of women living in the area and is a meeting place, offering courses, counselling and networking for all its members. Its primary mission is to combat isolation and segregation, offering support to people who have impaired health and traumatic experiences and limitations. Today, it is a multi-ethnic association with 260 members from 20 countries, backgrounds and religions. All members are welcome to participate in the activities, regardless of background, culture, ethnicity, age, class or political beliefs. This inter-ethnic character is unique in Tensta, whose civil society is otherwise characterised by ethnic organisation that can sometimes function in isolation.

MDT (Moderna dansteatern) is a foundation founded in 1987 by choreographer Margaretha Åsberg. MDT is a place for dance and choreography, with both theatre and studios situated at Skeppsholmen in Stockholm. MDT co-produces and presents international and Sweden based dance artists and wishes to be a place for development, discourse and experimentation within dance and choreography. Anna will share findings in relation to the history of the island, going from a party island for kings via a military island to a tourist and culturally branded island, thinking about the notion of community in relation to this very centrally placed theatre in the city of Stockholm upon an island both very remote and very exclusive.

After four days of intense meetings, inputs and perspectives we are wrapping up Hållning.

Liz Rosenfeld and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Listen to the letters while you move around a body of water. It can be a body of water of your own making. As you traverse the perimeter of your island, be it fictional or real, listen to the letters.

Artist Liz Rosenfeld and curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris find correspondence in their practices through a joint enquiry of queer bodies of water, encompassing fleshy matters of cruising, brackish waters and wave-based vibrations. The audience will experience this hydro-visceral exchange through an outdoor audio walk.

Ground Water can be listened to and accessed from wherever you are, whenever you choose to listen.

To listen, please follow the link to the MDT SoundCloud here.