26.06.2024 / þ thorns þ

Episode Two: Chrysa Parkinson and Mette Edvardsen

þ thorns þ

Mette and Chrysa talk about their identities as performers and choreographers, translation in their practices, and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.

This episode is a conversation between Mette Edvardsen and Chrysa Parkinson, recorded in a studio in Oslo. Mette is a choreographer and performer, and she co-founded the publishing house Varamo Press. Much of Mette's work focuses on ‘choreography as writing’. Chrysa Parkinson is a dancer and professor of dance at Stockholm University of the Arts, and her current research project is titled Authorship, Ownership and Control Dancer's Roles and Materials. In this episode, Mette and Chrysa talk about their identities as performers and choreographers. They also talk about translation in their practices, and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.

Find out more about Chrysa and Mette on our People page.

To the Glossary, Chrysa donates Belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

and Mette donates Ekphrasis

and Ineffable

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.

The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Transcript:

Introduction Starts.

Martin:

Hello, and welcome to the first series of

a sharp prickled growth on flower stems, found on roses.

thorns

, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic

. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler's Wells. I'm Martin Hargreaves, head of the Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two year cycle, we support a cohort

of artists to explore their own choreographic

inquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school

where we discover the conditions we need to learn from each other. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school

, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic

Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You'll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.

This episode is a conversation between Mette Edvardsen and Chrysa Parkinson, recorded in a studio in Oslo. Mette is a choreographer and performer, and she co-founded the publishing house Varamo Press. Much of Mette's work focuses on choreography as writing. Chrysa Parkinson is a dancer and professor of dance at Stockholm University of the Arts, and her current research project is titled Authorship, Ownership and Control Dancer's Roles and Materials. In this episode, Mette and Chrysa talk about their identities as performers and choreographers. They also talk about translation in their practices, and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.

We ask each of our contributors to supply us with sounds, to create transitions within the episode, and to give us a sense of their place or their work. Both Chrysa and Mette have given us recorded sounds which you'll hear throughout the episode. Chrysa recorded the sound of her dog scratching at the carpet, and ice washing up on a shore. Mette has given us excerpts from two tracks from her LP, Livre d'Images, Sons Images, part of her performance with the same title. You will hear bats that she recorded in her garden using a self-built bat detector. You will also hear Mette and her daughter drawing with markers on a piece of paper, which also happens live in the piece.

Introduction Ends. Conversation Starts.

Chrysa:

What I have been thinking specifically about lately is the question of belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

, and that's, this is the word that I would like to propose for the glossary. I'll maybe just give a poetic definition of belonging

as what I've arrived at, at this point, which is partly from looking the word up, but also from my experience of belonging

or not.

Mette:

Yeah.

Chrysa:

So, belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

can mean to be dwelling easily with or within. To be in the right place. Belonging

can be a feeling that one belongs. Belonging

can be to be the property of, belonging

to. And it can be a thing that you own or that can be moved, a belonging

can be a thing. Belonging

can mean to be making an event extend in time. Belonging

is to be yearning, as in dwelling upon something or someone in thought. And then I split the word into its two parts, be and long. Be is to exist, occur, or take place. Be is to be around or about, to be close to or nearby. Long is to yearn. Long is to extend in time or space, and to be long is to be tall.

I’m looking at this word and trying to understand it, in relation to choreographic

the choreographic can refer to choreography, and to the writing of dancing bodies, but it can also refer to modes of generating and circumscribing movement that do not register as dance, or as art works.

process and to the experience of being a choreographic artist, as a word that has a kind of it could be an antidote to ownership. So, rather than owning a work, maybe I belong to that work or I belong with that work, I belong alongside that work. And so, I'm trying to think through or feel my way through the concept of belonging

in relation to choreographic

process. But that is a long way to ask you, just maybe, to reflect on or introduce your work with translating text to performance and performance back to text, and these processes, and how belonging

or ownership has manifested in those processes.

Mette:

The definition of the word belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

is really beautiful too.

There's a lot of resonances for me in many different aspects of my practice. One place to begin is in relation to this thing when you say, to be alongside or think alongside or think through, for me resonates with this idea of being near something in order to, not necessarily do that thing or do the same, but that proximity allows, gives, some kind of resonance for myself, or allows me to access or do. To give an example; I think sometimes when I’m writing, when I'm making a performance, which in the last years I also have been working a lot with text, and sometimes I realize that I bring some different things together, not because I'm working specifically with these texts or figures or sources, but they kind of, yeah, they author me. Or, they, I'm close with them, I bring them along and through the conversations that I'm making then with these materials or sources or references, there is this sense of, yeah, creating a companionship or creating a belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

together of being near something. And that creates an opportunity for something to…I mean, we are never in the void, we are never in, out of nothing, there's all kinds of things that exists in the room, or with us, or already in our imagination or…so how to call this kind of, yeah, way of working when you're not specifically saying, “I'm working with this topic or this text” or “I'm working with”, when you cannot define an idea or a content from the outside, but you're inside and trying to reach something, go somewhere.

I was also thinking about how there has been this idea of “sharing references is diminishing the work”, so there's this idea of you’re original in your thinking, or this is something I've been a bit curious about, and I've been attempting this in different ways, in different pieces, to try and find a way of, you know, to actually bring them in, and how to make them visible or how to share them and what could be a good way for it. I don't mean it in the sense of, you know, adding footnotes to a piece or how to try and render, yeah, these companionships let's say, but also by doing so, what does that produce? It's not only about naming and then something is solved or something is out there, but there's also a productive or generative thing, I mean, where I feel also, that sources or references then enters another sphere, and it's not just about facts or something, but also where new references can be imagined or even made up.

Transition Sound – ice washing up on the shore.

Chrysa:

The idea of gatherings and companionship reminds me of when we were speaking about memorization, a little bit, and how the process of memorization undoes the surface meaning sometimes. So, there's the thing that you're memorizing gets taken apart and undone and makes these other associations and then reconvenes, ungathers, and then it regathers, and in that, that’s part of how you inscribe it into yourself, is to undo it and then bring it back. But it's also interesting about your work, and having observed you work over the years, that your choreographic

process involves a kind of dwelling, in and with, many ideas that then something else emerges from. It seems like you don't necessarily start with one thing that you're going to illustrate.

Mette:

Yeah, I mean, I had a joke with myself when I started the artistic research program at the academy in Oslo, and I had a very deliberately, a quite vague title to kind of feel that there would be room for it to develop in a different way. So, my title was Writings in Time and Space. And at a certain point I thought my title should be everything all the time because there's this sense of, sometimes I can admire artists that have, they have a topic, or they have one idea, or a thing that they can then, you know, investigate, research, take apart, put together, look up about, and somehow this feeling when you start from nothing, which of course is never true, but this idea that you have to find it.

Well, another thought that came up when you're speaking about belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

is this idea of holding, which you are mentioning that word, and I think this idea of holding is something that I think that's also relevant in the moment of performing, of making the piece. What is this space that we are proposing? What is it? What is the situation that we are in together? Where I feel, a lot of the time, I'm trying to make something that is in a shared space, that it's not only that the audience is sitting and watching what I'm doing on stage, but there's something that is happening in that total space.

Chrysa:

Right.

Mette:

And, I think holding is a very good word for me to try and understand what is this?

Chrysa:

Yeah.

Mette:

What is it that's there? Because sometimes I also feel like actually there's not so much that is even there! My next title for my research would be, where is the work? So, to understand this idea, that through what you're doing, through the relationship with the audience,and all the conventions of the space, and our ways of seeing, and all of this together, like what kind of time space can we hold together for that moment in, in time, and that a lotof the time, that's what it's about.

Chrysa:

Yeah. I think about that, about coherence, like when things come together to create a here, rather than sticking or clamping down or insisting that there's a sort of coming together to hold. That's a very, that's a very nice experience of performing also, when you feel that there's a…that the whole atmosphere is conditioning how we can relate in that place. And like, I've worked with artists who have very established practices, and they have very established ways of doing that and then, working with other artists who are trying to figure out how to do that, in this particular case. By what means can we create a condition that this artwork can dwell in, or we can dwell in together, that can hold attention?

Mette:

Like if we think of the theatre as a space that gathers, and then there's conventions of how we enter that space, or it, you know, it can be, suggested in different ways, or we can push and pull on these conventions. But still, it's not a given that there is something to hold together, I mean, we can enter that space, and we can follow the contract, let's say, or, but it's not necessarily that this exists, or that this feeling, or this thing will construct, or will, be built or will…I will enter one word that I thought in this moment, which is the word ineffable

What cannot be expressed in words

. And my very short and maybe simple understanding of this word is “what we cannot put in words”, that which “we cannot put in words”. That's also one of the things that I think is very interesting in the context of artistic research, is to try and share something about that thing which is not so obvious to put into words.

Chrysa:

Yeah.

Mette:

So that you can say, like, you don't want to justify it by adding theory to it that wasn't there before, or you don't want to explain it. And I think that what is interesting, is to try and find the language, which is one's own language, then that tries to say, maybe we don't exactly get to it, but to try and share something about the work or the process or what one is trying to do. The piece does that work, or our work speaks for itself, but what are other things to add to that story? And what are things that I could bring into make visible that is maybe not visible when I just experienced the work?

And I heard, and I'm very sorry now to not be able to say who it was who said this very beautiful sentence, which was a definition for this person of research is to say, It's like being in the dark and then getting used to the dark.

Chrysa:

Great.

Mette:

Yeah, and that kind of gives such a good description to how we can try and get to these things that we don't so easily know. And that, I think that the kind of defensive mode of artistic research, then like, what is it? And then why should we do it? And it's not good because it’s academic, or like all these kinds of things that exist out there, I can also understand that in relation to that, to the ineffable

What cannot be expressed in words

, to these things that we don't know exactly how to put into words, and then we're asked to put it into words.

Chrysa:

It makes me think also of a person who's, I can't quote who said this, but I, that poetry troubles language and the way that dance troubles movement, and I think the way that artistic research troubles research. By saying it wrong, which is what poetry does, or by moving oddly, or like undoing the conventions of movement, or by undoing the conventions of knowing, of how do you know, and when do you know, and what is evidence, and that there's the potential to redistribute the authorities, or the authorization of knowledge, which I think is such a beautiful effort to be part of that.

Transition sound – Bat detector.

Chrysa:

Nice to have just a little talk about artistic research. So many things to say about that, actually. Maybe there's too many things to say, but the inarticulable, in what medium? That would be the question. Like it's maybe inarticulable in language, but we don't need to depend on language in every articulation that we have. So, with the, I mean, personally, I really like language, so I'm glad to be there. But, in the process of translation from one medium of thought to another, different knowledges emerge. And that's the beautiful potential of even trying to share artistic processes beyond what they produce.

Mette:

The fact that artists reflect upon their work was not invented with artistic research. That also needs to be remembered, like that the critique of the work or the reflection is inherent in the work, it's part of how work is. And then maybe artistic research is a context that facilitates or gives an incentive to share that reflection or that kind of way of sharing one's process.

Chrysa:

It also, I mean, it brings me back a little bit to Varamo Press as well. Giving context to perceptions or concerns that are fleeting and don't necessarily have a good spot to land.How did you make that? How did you work with those people? How did that artist who was part of your gathering of artists come to be in their body at, in that way, at that time. That might be something that in performance is fleeting, but then you can maybe grasp it and, or give it some traction, you know, give it some, some place to be. It's ineffability remains. But it can be somehow included, like in the canon, I don't know.

Mette:

In the, so Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais method, he has this way of putting, he calls it the elusive obvious. So, things that you're doing, that you don't, they're so integrated in your habits that you don't even think about them anymore. And when we try to speak about what we're doing, or share something about what we’re doing, our ways of doing are so integrated with ourselves that we might not even think about that, that's something that's interesting to share.

Chrysa:

Yeah, yeah.

Mette:

And I've had that sometimes in reading people's writing and there's a lot of very interesting sources and additional information, but what's really interesting is actually their details about what they're doing, how they get to this or, how they actually practically do things or…

There's the Belarusian writer, Svetlana Alexievich, not sure if I say her name right. In her speech when she got the Nobel Prize for literature some years ago, she was speaking about, for her, the lost literature is all the oral literature that is happening, that we are making it, everyone, all the time, walking the streets, conversations that we have, things we tell each other, the real accounts of history and lives, and that never are written down, and that we don't have a practice of catching these, and that it, for her, in truth, that this would be the lost literature. And I think that's a really beautiful image to think about all the information or all the stories, all the things that, that will not make it to the page or, will not be communicated or shared.

Chrysa:

Yeah, I often think about that about dance practices and choreographic

practices. There's so much in the spectacle form of concert stage performance. There's so much lost, right? There's so much that isn't accessible, including touch, the texture. The quality of touch is pretty much the thing that movement is based on in those forms, but, that's not something that an audience knows. But also, the amount of language that is around dance, like as an oral tradition, how much we generate, the poetics that are generated. It's just incredible how people talk. If you interview dancers, the way they talk about time and space, it's like they're talking about food. They're just, it's like, it's like they eat it, and they move it, and they shape it and they're… It's so rich, especially when you realize, oh yeah, this is not a metaphor.

Mette:

Yep.

Chrysa:

They really are moving time.

Mette:

I think also the kinds of vocabularies and language that is being created in the making of a piece, which is a language that can be fluently spoken between the people of the inside coming from the outside, you don't know what these words refer to. This word is, means that section or naming things, which has completely its own logics.

Transition Sound – Dog scratching at the carpet.

Mette:

There's one thing that I'm trying to do for the research, is that, in relation to performance, there's also the drawings of the light plans, for example and the designer I'm working with, and I've worked with for the pieces inside of that context, is Bruno Pocheron, and he will also say that himself, that I'm the kind of light designer who's still drawing my light plans. So, before every performance, because every theatre has its different measures and lamps, and so he kind of, on the design that's made for a piece, he draws the light plan for that specific, and this is a super detailed thing, it's like how they're hung, what kind of filters, all of these things. And I think that is also a material, all these drawings of his light plans.

Chrysa:

He redoes the drawing for the new space?

Mette:

Yeah, each time.

Chrysa:

Amazing.

Mette:

So, every theatre he will receive the drawing of the theatre, and he will draw his light plan for…

Chrysa:

And tour with you there to-

Mette:

-to prepare, so, for the place to also prepare. I mean, I think it's been a very common practice, but it's not necessarily one of these practices that survive.

Chrysa:

When I was working with Cullberg, I realized what they do, the lighting designer comes and creates the light design in the theatre space that they have there, and then they go on tour, and the lighting technicians install the design, more or less. They have to do a lot of interpretive work to decide how this is going to move into a new space, which is how we worked in New York. Also, that was never, the designer did not tour with us. And yeah, that's one of those, what I would call an authorial process, that the technician goes through to re-interpret that design for a completely different space, I mean, the space can be a different colour. So I would like to see those.

Mette:

Yeah, it’s beautiful to try and collect them also. That's also language that you start to learn to read, to understand what they mean, what the drawing means and how it's adapted from one space to the next.

I'm thinking now about these kinds of collaborations when I think about Bruno. But I'm also thinking about Michaël Bussaer, the graphic designer that I'm working with for many years. I mean, I feel that we have quite shared understanding about how we work together. And it's interesting to feel also, where's the boundaries? Where does the work of one begin and the other end? There are clear places where there's the expertise of the other, that's definitely being able to do something specific, and then in the exchange of these. I mean, first of all, for myself, I'm thinking, what do I learn from it? Like how I look at light and space differently with having that practice of collaboration, and also in terms of understanding how things are organized on the page. Maybe that's also a choice of how one wants to work.

I know that there are designers who have a more separate way of working, “this is my design”, and “this is the work”, I mean a bit sketched up now. And there's other places where there's more involvement perhaps, so that you feel that you can start to think through that…what would you call that? That medium

For us, the choreographic is not only confined to explicating the possibilities of the medium of dance, but it can do this alongside other things.

as well.

Chrysa:

Mm hmm.

Mette:

I mean, I’m not saying that in the end, you know, for example, for lights, Bruno is the one who will know how things work and how to translate ideas or thoughts or questions into the physical space, but that there's a place when this shared language starts to make it possible to think in that other medium

For us, the choreographic is not only confined to explicating the possibilities of the medium of dance, but it can do this alongside other things.

as well.

Chrysa:

Yeah! And then that starts to affect your imagination as a maker, right?

Mette:

Yeah.

Chrysa:

Then you begin to see things, you begin to imagine or project different outcomes.

Mette:

Yeah, there's also this kind of nearby situation somehow that you…

Chrysa:

Right.

Mette:

It's not just lights, it's not just this external thing, but there's something that you have to start to feel a bit close to it and then you can understand to work with it a bit differently or

Chrysa:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes me think about agency

, of course, and the question of the plasticity of the boundaries of knowledge. You can feel that there's a different knowledge in the person who you're working with, but they can take more or less influence from you, and you can take more or less influence from them, from that artist, or from their medium

even, when you get closer to it or you have more familiarity with it.

And it's true that working with people, like working as a dancer for a choreographic

artist for a long time, you begin to do that a lot, where you're anticipating the needs, or you're resisting, you know, pulling back from what, might be the aesthetic intentions of that other artist with their mediums, like these kind of, I don't want to say negotiations really, because it is, it's an alongside-ness, it's like that thing that, I guess it's mules, when they're going downhill fast, they lean into each other, like they're on a cliff. The one that's on the outside is being pushed by the one that's on the inside, but the point of contact between them keeps them steady, going down.

Mette:

Haha, that’s good.

Chrysa:

That's a somatic practicing thing that I learned. So, I feel that in working with choreographic

artists, and also working with other dancers, there's this kind of “lean in” to how the other person is working, or what the medium

that they're working in. And then it begins to change how you experience your own work, or how you see your own sense of velocity, or momentum, or proximity, or like, all these things get affected.

And then the question of like, whose is it? You know, is it yours or is it theirs? The question of belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

, for me, the way that I'm thinking right now, is that the belonging

no longer rests on me or the other person, but rests on the thing that we do together. We are belonging

to, or we are belonging

with, this tumble downhill that we're in. But then you leave it behind, you know, you do this thing, you make this thing together, and then you leave it behind, and maybe you even leave that relationship behind. There is melancholy in that also, that you leave things. You leave as an art maker, you leave the thing that you made, and you also leave the people that you made it with, sometimes, and you go on, and then that kind of stretch or extension of identification with them and with that thing.

I don't even have a how with it, I just notice it, I just feel it. There are dances that I belong to, that don't exist anymore.

Transition sound – Markers on paper.

Mette:

And do you sometimes have this image of things passing through you? Yes. I'm just thinking this in the context of belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

and what remains and what, what we leave behind and this experience of you're working as a dancer for a dance piece, we're dancers on stage and when the premiere happens, people will tell us dancers then that Well, now, now you can make the work yours. Now it's the premier has happened. And my reaction to this when this happened the last time was that, but I don't want to make it mine. It's not mine. Yeah, I am there, and the work is passing through me. It's not for me so much about a detachment or not wanting to, you know, it's not my feelings about the work, but it's more my role in that moment. in how that work is set up. And my pleasure is to think of it as something that is, this dance is passing through me to be able to manifest on stage or, and I quite like that image or that feeling.

Chrysa:

Yes, I really recognize that in freelance conditions, where I'm passing through, or it's passing through me, both of those things are happening. And also, the knowledges that I gain in this situation, I also move into others. So, there are things that I don't lose. They don't necessarily stay distinct, like sometimes people use the metaphor of sedimentation. I would say, I don't really see it that way. It's more synthesis and mess, mess and spill and blur. But it is clear. Continuous. There is there's continuity to other things. Yeah, I agree. And there's also the thing about the, the, that the piece itself, like the pleasure in, uh, an artwork, having a life like this, this creature thing, subject that we've created together exists and we can. And we can lean on it, and we can know that it's more or less itself on different nights. And I think that's, I just love that.

But I also, just to say, when I go and work with repertory companies, teaching or whatever, I don't dance with them anymore, but sitting around the coffee table or lunch table, it's very often that the conversation is about visas. And immigration, and borders, and who's from where, how long are they gonna be here, and how did they get here, and how did they manage to get here, and are they gonna be able to stay, and what is it, like, there's a lot of question about what am I doing here, and how am I managing that. I see that community of artists as having, particularly, unsteady relations to place, and belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

, and being part of.

And so, it isn't only a melancholy word for me, but it does have that in it as well. That there's this sort of unsureness about where you belong and what you carry, what you do hold and what you don't, and it's somehow in the work, and particularly because the dance artists don't have rights to what they create. Even if they are credited collaboratively in works, they cannot, if someone decides to replace them, they will be replaced. Or if someone decides to perform somewhere where they can't go, then they won't go. I would like to not be mistaken for thinking that I have an answer about it, that I think that a certain kind of collaboration is the right kind, or a certain kind of contract is the right kind, that's really not what I'm saying, but I'm just saying it's there, in our world. We have this condition. We're so dependent on place and time and the understanding of it, but we're so precarious within it also.

Mette:

I think that's one of the things I've been trying to hold within my practice. Since I think of myself as a performer, I don’t think of myself as the choreographer, even if I accept to say it, then I will, in terms of, you know, responsibility then, or to be clear. It's okay to say it. There's not a problem with it. But I think like where I come from is from, being a performer. I'm also always inside of my works.

Chrysa:

Yeah.

Mette:

I don't have this outside perspective on what I'm doing and one of the things I realized also I enjoy a lot, is to try to keep, of course, not always so easy, but to try and keep these relationships of performing in the works of others at the same time. I mean, maybe in smaller moments, in the beginning, it was more in harmony. I would work as much for others as I was doing my own things. And at certain moments, there was an imbalance in the time. But when these moments happen, I think of this now because you're saying about it's not that there's one way, and I think that it's very important that there is not one way.

Chrysa:

Right.

Mette:

That it's important that different works needs a different setup, needs a way of doing which is specific to what it is that we're working on, or what it is that, and I don't mean good or bad work ethics, or relationships, or power use and abuse and all, it is not about that, but just simply a kind of hierarchical triangle is sometimes the right thing, for a certain work to take place, and I have no problem with that. And sometimes the kind of flat structure is what is needed for the situation. I mean, maybe this goes in waves, that there's moments where something feels more right and wrong, and other times it flows more easily again.

Chrysa:

For the individual artists or like as for our community, for our community, like how we view it.

Mette:

I remember a period where the kind of hierarchical structure was looked upon as very bad.

Chrysa:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mette:

And, I mean, can be bad. Doesn't have to be. Power is not bad as such.

Chrysa:

I agree with you. I, I mean, I think we, we might not be, people might not agree, but actually what it is, is that I've worked with artists who are better off in the hot seat. It just works better for them, and we will make a better work together if I let them take that authoritative position. Their imagination works better, and I can do the work of interpretation and resistance and getting with better if we maintain that, if those roles are allowed to take their place. I've also been in group situations where I can see that a fellow artist, a dancer, is suffering from that authoritative condition. It does not work for them. I just think we should be able to talk about that. I want it to be part of work instead of a problem that we can’t solve, you know, that we can't work with.

Transition sound - ice washing up on the shore

Mette:

I'd like to go back to the research with, um, authority, ownership, control. Control.

Chrysa:

Authorship, Ownership and Control: Dancer's roles and materials.

Mette:

And that's what I mean a bit with this example of the thing where there's a desire for you to, to claim something that, you know, make it yours, claim it back and, or as if, uh, every dancer's dream is to be able to one day be a choreographer and sign their own work, which, which is a kind of strange, or if you make a solo work, your next work should, you would want it to be a group piece. Like there is kind of inevitable to think in these kinds of, uh, or it seems from the outside as if to be just a dancer in the work is not sufficient or something. And that's, yeah...

Chrysa:

Yeah. It's okay until you’re like 30. And then by then you better start stepping up.

Mette:

I remember. I'm not sure which year, it's many years ago when I saw a piece, a duet performed by you and Thomas Hauert. And I remember this, it was a very clarifying moment, I think, because of how it was articulated. This idea of we make this piece together, but we don't sign it together. I'm a dancer. So, you are the dancer inside of that piece by Thomas Hauert, although you clearly see the two of you there on stage equally in the, um, you can imagine that this has been worked out very collaboratively. And I think that's, for me, that's one moment that is a very clear example of exactly not thinking the reverse of like, oh, I also want to claim it. I want it to be mine. But to say, oh, I want to claim my agent as a dancer and let that have value as such and not to make it smaller by saying, no, no, no, now I also want to have my name on top. Yeah. I see it more as a movement of giving a gesture, of giving value to the role of the dancer.

Chrysa:

Yeah. It’s this thing that, well, it's, you know, it's very nice that you've been a cat all your life, but now finally you're going to be a dog! That's, congratulations! You've become a dog and that's really, that's really great for everybody because that's what we were waiting for! So, you could, you know, just finally grow up and be a dog.

I decided to maintain that role when I was around 28 to say that I'm going to be a dancer all my life. And at 28, nobody really noticed. But by the time I was 40 or 45 people were like, oh, you're still, you know, you still think, she still thinks she's a dancer! It was beautiful. But the thing that's great about it is that then I just, it gave me this, all this opportunity to define what being a dancer is in my life, in my artistic life.

That brings me to the point where I can ask some questions about how dancers experience authorship, ownership, and control, because I have been working in that role for so long, and I'm now sort of past the point where I'm going to offend anybody, or I'm going to lose any jobs by asking the wrong question, I can, I can really delve into what that might look like. I am also coming from a very specific world, which is the concert dance world, where things are made to be seen. There's a spectacle element in what I do, even if it's not in the conventional spaces, it's still based on a sensation of front, even if front is not placed so obviously it’s still a concept that we're working with. So, I have these embodied knowledges or experiences of rendering ideas into movement. I would say that's a dancer role of working in groups. Where I, I have to learn to get along with people who I didn't necessarily choose to work with. I have to respect and understand other people's languages and knowledges in touch, as well as in speech. I have to work towards the creation of something where I don't know what it is. I don't know what it's gonna be, and I have to collaborate with other people in order to make that happen. That's a very, very strange skill, you know, odd thing to do. It works, I, I notice, but I get along quite well with, like, five-year-olds. We do, we do well together because they're like, let’s play this game. No, let's play it this way. No, let's play it this way. Let's play it this way. It was like, yeah, I know that game. I know how to do that. Yeah.

And also working with partialness. So there, there's a lot of the work that I'm doing as a dancer that is invisible, as I mentioned before, or it's not, it's not invisible, but it's not the product. It's not what's produced. So, figuring out how to take care of and find continuity with those materials that are in excess of the thing that gets made. And so, a project like AOC is for me to be able to find out how other people are doing that. Because generally, and it's also that I know a lot about how I do it. I’m very happy to talk about that at length, but I don't really know how other people are working with those, I don't really, you know, I haven't really had time to really ask other people how they're doing it. That project has that built into it.

I think what's happened since the beginning of the project, now we're making plans, we're meeting people, we're talking about how to do things. And since the past month, I have been asking myself about the three words; authorship, ownership, and control. I can feel that the word authorship has, it has a kind of above water and below water element and the above water is being authored and the below water is making. And being authored, you know, that doesn't actually happen. So maybe it's being authorised. I'm not really sure, but that word is having, is getting troubled. And then ownership definitely is a troubled word. And I think that belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

is kind of nudging the word ownership out of position. And then the word control, I tried to replace it with skill, but then it lost that over water moment. Because the question of being controlled. and having control, that has to remain considered. I don't know how to get, I haven't found another piece of language to, to bump that word yet. And I look for it. I mean, I, because I would like to have a spectrum of dimensional language to work with there. But I think that will come in conversation with dancers and with my collaborators and colleagues.

Transition sound – Bat detector

Mette:

And I think sometimes the, in work, we are not always thinking about, you know, authorship or actively or ownership or control or you want to do something and then you try and figure out the way how to do it and what you need to do that and then it kind of rolls from there. And I also think it's interesting when there's certain things, we do, grabs us and asks of us to, to consider something differently. That's what's enjoyable also in the process of making something is that you're looking for something, going somewhere, trying to figure something out and on the way, there's a moment where it kind of turns towards you and starts to ask you to do things or be in a certain way or to, I think it's a bit similar to some of these questions that the words are very, somehow they're very strong, like authorship and ownership and control, like as words, they're very charged or full, but then there's also a lot of elements to them, which is about creating the right conditions for work to take place, or how to be responsible for what you do, how to, how to care for it, how to organize the work somehow.

Chrysa:

That's nice actually, Mette, I think, I think what's important to me is sustained practice, actually. And I think that the clumsiness of those big words, I think they're a bit clumsy. What's really important to me about those concepts is their undertow. How they affect people's, artists continuities. So that when, like the question, how does the question of belonging

I long for it, jump around in it, become tall there and am sometimes pained by it. I might grieve for this place.

or owning carry through? Carry on in your artistic life, and how can you see it changing? And that's what I think is important to, to bring and to be able to really talk about. Because it, like as you said, I mean, each process that you enter, it's likely that it will have different demands on you and of itself. So, what does carry on? What are you able to move through/with? And also, to get out of this kind of every piece is an end in itself. It's the last original work. It's the most, it's the best, it's the most, it's the only, it's the, you know, the forever. We know that's not true. So, how can we continue to work without these monuments, and I like the word demand, and the way, and in French it's also ask, like the demands. What, what is it asking of you? What is it, what are its demands? Like, how do we answer for ourselves as we move along? How these things change and how we can work with them. That's what I get. I get really excited about it.

Mette:

I have this image of, that comes up, which is my daughter. She was in school. She was maybe six or something. This was the first year of primary school. And she spoke so lovingly or full of joy and enthusiasm about this one teacher. They would have a class with him every Friday for one hour and she would go on and on about this teacher and what she likes and she said it like this, that he asks questions that doesn't only have one answer.

Chrysa:

Oh!

Mette:

And so she was so amazed by this, like, because then for you, maybe it's like that, but then maybe for the other, it, you know, response like this, and it's also right. So, it was like debating and opening up questions of what is friendship? There's not one answer to it. Or, and so I was thinking of this. now in, yeah, in what you're bringing up and also how sometimes some of these bigger words, like the ones, the three that you were highlighting, there's also things that you, maybe you're not thinking about them like, you know, it's not upfront when you're starting a work or there's also things that you can deviate a bit from. And I think that, yeah, how to not make them so terrifying as well, like that it's not necessarily to claim or not claim or to find out what's different relationships and roles and how do they play out, what do they mean, to demystify it a bit or to just make it also something a bit practical and handle able and,

Chrysa:

Yeah, yeah

Mette:

It came with this that, questions that not, don't necessarily have one answer. One answer.

Chrysa:

Yeah, that's beautiful. You know, I have done studio conversations with several dancers in relation to this project before starting it as just as part of it, but this one woman, Louise Dahl, when she talked about control, she said, “Oh, well, control, it's predictive. It doesn't go very far, but you know, maybe what the schedule is, and if you're going to get on to your left foot in time”. Look, for me, it's like control is a puzzle. And Louise's answer to that puzzle was prediction.

Mette:

Yeah, that would also be an interesting word. What about prediction?

Chrysa:

That'll be our next, our next séance.

Mette:

Yeah, I mean, now I have two things that come to my mind. One thing is this reference to the Swiss visual artist Thomas Hirschhorn. It came up in relation to one of his works, the Gramsci Monument, which is a kind of, it’s not a physical monument, it's more like a community space that is being installed. And he wrote at a certain point the statement around this and what he's proposing is I mean this one can find online, but what he's proposing is something that he calls unshared authorship. Which I also thought is maybe interesting in relation to this question where he, I mean, whether one agrees with his proposal or not, but in this trying to propose another way or a new way to think, no, the work is mine, 100 %. The responsibility for it is mine, the understanding of it is mine, but I’m not the only author and maybe the collaborator will have an equal relationship to the work. It's also a hundred percent mine and, and so on. So, the authorship is not one thing that can be sliced up into smaller parts, but to consider it that this one thing can be that one thing for someone else and so you kind of multiply it.

Chrysa:

Yeah it's indivisible. And shared well, well not shared.

Mette:

Yeah. That's what, that's the twisting is saying. Is that like unshared authorship? Like, I will, I will not diminish. It's not less mine. Mm-Hmm., because I'm, there's other people that's also part of it, or,

Chrysa:

Yeah. I like that idea. And then there's another thing that we were talking about proportional, crediting, and we were saying maybe credits should be expressed in terms of centeredness and extremity rather than top to bottom line of credits for who's most important is on the top, but maybe who's more central, who's more peripheral.

Mette:

Sometimes also these things are really a bit blunt, practical things. Like, I remember being in a performance, you were also doing that, the Schreibstück of Thomas Lehman, and then there would be each time one choreographer, and three performers, and there would be three groups. And the group I was in, this was with Christine De Smedt, she invited two performers to join her. So, it was Marten Spangberg, Christine De Smedt, and myself, but she also wanted us to co-sign it. Right. So, it was making some kind of problem to the system. But one thing that I thought was also really astonishing is the moment when they're making the program note. They couldn't do it because it, it would be too much to have three names on the line! So sometimes I think, like, decisions are made on the very...

Chrysa:

Type setting!

Mette:

Yeah! It's according to pragmatics that the difference between prose and poetry would be if it's the poet or the typesetter who decides where the line breaks.

Chrysa:

That I didn't know. That's great. Where the line breaks.

Transition Sound – Markers on page

Mette:

Maybe one last thing to add for your research. It's in relation to translation and I was speaking to you about a book called This Little Art by Kate Briggs and she brings up this question of when you say that you've read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, did you read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, or did you read the translation of Thomas Mann's book? Like the kind of, this is also somehow a bit relates to this, there's a kind of tradition to that, there's the authored work, there's the original, this is the thing, and every other thing is a lesser, good version of something, and then also bringing up the question, well, but when you then did read. that author in another language, unless you read in German, then did you actually, which work did you actually read? And to what point is it actually correct to, to say that?

Chrysa:

Yeah.

Mette:

I mean, also just to add that I don't think that translated work is a lesser version, provided that it's a good translation of course.

Chrysa:

Yeah. Yeah. My godfather. He gave me first editions of Thomas Mann. Translations. They're first edition translations. I mentioned them to the librarian the other day saying, you know, I have these first edition Thomas Mann books, I don't know what to do with them, and he said, they're translations, right? I said, well, yeah, yeah. He's like, I can't take them.

Mette:

Woah! He should consider this idea that Borges put forward about drafts and translations, where he, that he says that it's not a hierarchy where the original is on top and then the translations are less, or the drafts are less. It's you have to turn it around. It's just a matter of chronology. So, the drafts of the text, they proceed, the original, and the translations are versions that continue.

Chrysa:

Yeah. The feeling of unison is a translation feeling for me. Dancing in, like, I think of Cynthia Loemij, like, dancing in unison with Cynthia Loemij. She’s a dancer, she danced with Rosas for many, many years, and very specific qualities of momentum and force in her body, and also time. Like her timing was very specific. And I have, I would say, quite different qualities of not momentum so much, I would say momentum's not my thing so much. Anyway, we worked together, and we would have to arrive at unison. It was a translation process. I had to understand how she was in relation to the beat. All the, even that, I had to like, analyse it, notice it again, hear it again, reconfigure my own timing, and also get her to slow down. You know, like I had to negotiate with her also to say, I'd get an outside person. We need an outside person to get to unison together. And the unison just felt so good. It was so much fun to get there. I don't even know, like, that's translation in in concurrent time,

Mette:

I guess in relation to performance, versions is the only thing that we can relate to. So, it's, it's less maybe controversial. You perform a piece several times, it's that piece each time and there's not like, well that was the one then. Everything that comes after is just the copies I mean, each time that's the space that you try to bring into life each time and, and we repeat or, or reconstruct or, yeah, or redo or..

Chrysa:

I like, I like that you bring it up because I think it's, it's one of those hidden processes, like it's embedded in our relations to repetition or to iteration that it's in there. Like the, like the transfer, the change, the transmission from one medium

For us, the choreographic is not only confined to explicating the possibilities of the medium of dance, but it can do this alongside other things.

to another, from one place to another person to another. All this.

Mette:

Yeah. It's another way being very near to the point of integrating someone’s rhythm or movement, timing.

Chrysa:

And it also undoes this question of originality or authenticity. Like, is it, is that that's not my authentic momentum, but, but you know, it is now.

Mette:

Yeah, maybe also this image of, If the translator, like Kate Briggs, says something about to add yourself actively to an existing work, I guess that's what you do in translation, and I guess that's exactly what you're describing.

Chrysa:

That's, that's excellent. To add yourself actively.

Martin:

Thanks, Chrysa and Mette for this conversation.

For the transcript of this episode and for the resources mentioned in their conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool. com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you're listening right now. In the next episode, we'll listen in on a conversation between Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Newman.

If you'd like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.

The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Bibliography:

Books:

Briggs, K. (2018). This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Mann, T. (1924). De Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft

Livre d’images sans images

People:

Svetlana Alexievich

Projects and other resources:

Authorship, Ownership and Control: Dancers’ roles and materials
Dancer as Agent Collection

Documenting Experiential Authorship

Norma T

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine

Studio Conversations/Clearings

Varamo Press

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Episode Two: Chrysa Parkinson and Mette Edvardsen

Mette and Chrysa talk about their identities as performers and choreographers, translation in their practices, and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.