Transmisson

One of the reasons for conducting this project was that I speculated around different ways of working, and a wish to try out a completely new procedure, a different kind of process. On the one hand, I wanted to go into the studio and work by myself, on the other hand I wished to create an extroverted project involving other people – and have these course of events merge, at first with a focus on the process, later to bring it into a performance structure.

A long-time introspection into the position, possibilities and aim of art in a cultural and social context characterized by a marketing- and production-fixed preoccupation suggestively veiled by claims of pluralism and freedom of communication looking to anaesthetize the individual and the collective into a moldable passivity, constitutes a kind of intellectual background.
Alternative ways and different methods of producing art are emerging, in ways making possible audience as well as artist realizations of a deeper kind of creativity.

For me, the maybe most important aspect of this project has been to meet an array of Swedish choreographers and their motions. Had I asked foreign choreographers, it would have happened in a different manner, perhaps more conceptually or provoking, but as it is I wanted to test the limits here in Sweden.
I have addressed colleagues active within different dance genres not only in Stockholm, but also around the country. For obvious reasons I have not been able to call on all existing choreographers active in Sweden, even if this indeed was my initial aim. I wished to meet with a great scope of choreographers and get in touch with various ways of thinking and reasoning around a particular movement. Along the way I have gained an insight into their ways of working and their attitudes towards their profession, and witnessed the stubbornness required to remain active and work with that which one wants and must, each one in his own way.

I have documented all events and initiations to contacts, reactions and approvals, striving for as open an attitude as possible towards the process. I wanted to create the prerequisite for a personal and inquisitive meeting. My suggestion was to trade movements, which obviously allowed for a wide spectrum of interpretations. Through this I wanted to create a network action and account for the material I had gotten in exchange.
The collected anonymous material is the discord of the action that has already taken place. The action, the meeting and the joint movement are the central aspects of the work [Transmission].
Where the movements I have offered as a trade end up doesn’t matter so much, since it is my conviction that each movement itself generates movement, even if a totally different one.

Last summer I spent five weeks in the studio, chiseling a kind of “movement bank”, an investigation of movements stored in my body. Some days dance emerged that I could sign myself, other days things I could identify from somewhere else. During some meetings I have traded off movements from the movement bank, but adjusted them according to whom I met. I wanted to offer a movement dedicated to the singular meeting. At times I have tried to go against my sensed feeling of the person I met. My colleagues and I have experimented with different ways of giving, and with various ideas of motion. We have given away movements through instructions, through on-the-spot improvisations or through written texts.
Possibly it is the feeling of challenge that interests me most: to challenge the perception of limits and preserves. There has been an atmosphere of solemn ritual in the person-to-person meeting of colleagues and also by way of the written word; a meeting which has made us show a piece of ourselves through that which we have in common; the movement.

Transmission becomes a study of communication, a work dealing with different kinds of movements. It is also a celebration of the participants and of people who strive with listening to themselves and not to the power of profit.

Anna Koch