My conference paper and solo dance performance “THE BODY, THE OBJECT AND EXPRESSION OF THE SELF. OR, WHEN DID I LOSE MYSELF?” received such a positive response at a research symposium in Lithuania that it began to grow into an independent solo performance. The first work-in-progress performance took place on 15.12.2023 at Pikku-Virgiinia’s Winter Festival in Helsinki, Finland.
This self-portrait, dance and text combined in a simple set of a chair and a desk, deals with whiteness, the self-righteousness of contemporary dance and my personal journey through the dance world.
“A dancer can have a lifelong career without ever finding themselves in their own movement. She can be left echoing the expectations of others and fearing mistakes in movement, silence and stillness. When it comes to dancing in the western societies, more mistakes and shame are listed than successes. In here, already before any training begins in this tradition, the bodies need to either conform, adapt or move out of the way.
(…) And what tradition? A month as a dancer in Benin and I have begun to question the whole European construction of contemporary dance. We have nothing decent compared to the physicality, polyrhythms, skills, living tradition, history and philosophy of this continent. What we have is a flimsy philosophy of “ballet as the mother of all dances”, followed by the exposed tits of white Miss Duncan as she leaps to freedom without any control of her limbs. And we have less than a hundred years of “exploration of the body’s movement potential”, left behind in the sixties when Paxton & Co discovered that you don’t have to dance to dance?
My expressive body was always too much for its masculine stand-still surroundings.
At some point this body copypasting and printing its environment must be forgotten and reinvented. It has to be imagined again every moment, when some new sensation or phenomenon appears on the skin.
How to become aware of those learned patterns and habits deep in the flesh, in order to recognise where they end, and I begin? How to attract myself past the echo of my surroundings, beyond what has been given as a preferred way of moving?” (an extract from the text)