no square dance

Anna Koch
no square dance

Festival:Display, Rotundan, The Royal Swedish Opera 17–19 sep 2015

The historical and the ongoing, the material and the immaterial. Premonitions, layers of material emerge forward and slips away. There, a body appears, between the dispersing references.

Fluctuating states, components of different values and meanings. The axis of choreography works in all the layers, in all relations. A number of breaths during a continuum of three hundred and sixty seconds. A soft open body is sharing the presence in the room with other soft bodies. A privileged body in a privileged room.

The text/body writing itself does not yet know how it is dancing in this very context, but there will be dancing. Asemblage, disparate elements, schizophrenic clusters, the one material informs the other. Embodied knowledge, aesthetics, dismantled ideals.

There is no transgressing in being here. More like a dear encounter with a known. Cannot enter with anything new,  only bring a conviction that the insignificant can get significance, given the right intention.

Archaeological cuts are opened; the body wipes layers of dust, splinters of time. The monuments are falling; parts are being disposed.

She is coming closer, intending to communicate movement, necessarily not while being watched. Activity on exhalation, recuperation on inhalation.

‘O Swamp land, I have come into you I have taken the Grey-haired one to the roof, for I am the moon, I have swallowed up the darkness.’ *

The body of premonition collects contradictions. A manifest* that used to work as a negation of old values: No to transformation and no to magic turns up from another angle as yes to transformation and yes to magic. (flirting with Rainer)

Received a warning but nevertheless went out wearing the mask and the royal emblem. Between the twelfth and the thirteenth tact in the sixth contra dance he was attacked. ( the king was shot) The conductor noted the disturbance in his score.

The movement of contra dance today is the Square dance. There is an international logo that one can download. A square symbol of eternity. Its contours are drawn, vaguely onto a half dissolved body. Unimportant coordinates and moments of rupture are added. A notation and a document to act from.

* From the book Aniara by Harry Martinsson
* No Manifesto-Yvonne Rainer
* The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Also called Book of emerging forth into the Light.