16–18 dec. Lasting Figures / Salka Ardal Rosengren med Louise Dahl, Marcus Doverud
I sitt verk, Lasting Figures, arbetar Salka Ardal Rosengren tillsammans med Louise Dahl och Marcus Doverud på ett ömt, pulserande och erfarenhetsmässigt möte med dansen, musiken och värderingarna i Lindy Hop, slow drag och tidig folklig jazz.
Lasting Figures har varit en process att skapa en dans från ett dansperspektiv, inspirerad av upplevelser av att dansa ute på dansgolv. Det är en social dans. En dans som centrerar rytm, intimitet och rörelse som synkoperad dynamik av närvaro och makt. Ett möte mellan historier, traditioner, somatiska fiktioner, former och begär i ett förkroppsligat meningsskapande. Det är en fråga om hur en kan mötas för att känna, omvandla och vara närvarande med figurer som stannar kvar och flyr förbi.
16 december kl 19.00
17 december kl 19.00
18 december kl 16.00
Weld
Norrtullsgatan 7
Boka på book.weld.se
Idé och koreografi: Salka Ardal Rosengren
Dansare: Louise Dahl & Salka Ardal Rosengren
Musik: Marcus Doverud
Dramaturgi: Andrew Hardwidge
Ljus: Jonatan Winbo
Kostym: Behnaz Aram
Jazz koreografi: Fredrik Dahlberg
Lindy Hop coach: Sakarias Larsson
Samproducerat av Weld.
Med stöd av: Statens Kulturråd och residens på DansPlats Skog.
Text av Salka Ardal Rosengren skriven tillsamans med Andrew Hardwidge
Lindy Hop started out as a social dance, as experiments in being together at ballrooms and rent parties in African-American neighbourhoods around Harlem, NYC, in the segregation of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and lasts among us now in many forms. In the groove of a relatives two-step, inspiring and appropriated into much of the dance on Hollywood screens and musical theatre stages, and transformed in the second half of the 20th Century through house and hip-hop dances. Lindy Hop spread to Sweden in the 1980s taught by early pioneers like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller. In Sweden its popularity grew among a white middle class in the halls of social democratic Folkets Hus, and tapping into the tradition of dansbana. Becoming institutionalised in festivals like Herräng Dance Camp. Much like Jazz and Hip-Hop, Lindy Hop is an African [Black] American artistic social practice that has become international and globalised.
In dancing and thinking with Lindy Hop and Vernacular Jazz [and the way they‘ve travelled,] I relate to something Zora Neale Hurston called “rhythmic attenuation”. She described it as the “between beat” and a capacity to feel the senses and presences it summons. Hurston argued that a prevailing western thought and culture didn’t know what to do with the “between beat” and described its social and philosophical tradition of capture, abstraction and universalisation [that could also be described as whiteness] as unable to feel the sense between the beats, as an “unrhythmic attenuation”. Lasting Figures follows my complicated encounter with the subjects and technologies of Lindy Hop and aims at rhythmic entanglements with the presences and values enduring as experiments with life, dance, spirit, sociality, history.
For me, this work has been a way to work for and with these projects. To work on proximity as a form of power and eros, to work on boundaries through the ambiguities of pleasure and contact, to be in a dynamic feeling embrace with various partners, with social spheres, with histories, copresences, joys and violences. In this way, I see groove and resonance as ways to work in a context of what Eduardo Glissant called “transversality”, a concept he describes emerging in the history of the Caribbean as “a site of multiple converging paths”, a multiplicity that doesn’t seek the “universal transcendence of the sublime”, and as a “project to relate” enduring the dispossession of the racist, supremacist, patriarchal catastrophe of the imperial capitalist web of life and death.
In Lasting Figures, we work with a resonance when dancing with and against someone. The piece considers the creation of a temporary participatory culture of looking, listening, feeling and dancing on the dance floor [gaze, contact, interior, tenderness], with qualities of swing, pulse, absorption, and percussion as aesthetics and habitus of Lindy Hop and vernacular jazz’s fabulative social experiments and to play with their presence and absence in a more theatrical social setting. We consider the ambiguous role of the couple, in one way a normative dynamic, a gendered leading and following, [a reductive dualism], but also a temporary, transitory process of prolific coupling and decoupling, a lyric dividuation moving in and out of bodies, and an errancy in the givenness of the individual as the root of subjective agency.
Dancing has always been a way for me to play, learn and meet the entanglement of intimacy, connection and autonomy. A way to hold solitude as the edges of bodies blend and blur. In Lindy Hop “figures” are the names of the different combinations, moves and relations of the dance between partners. In the show, we work on tenderness, on sensing. We follow the social somatics of groove and rhythm. Working with these techniques started with a joy for dance and music, of different forms, aesthetics and values [or a production of difference from what] than I’d experienced in my dance education. It has been an embodied heuristics in de-essentialising that high western “colour-blind” dance education and to start to know and work for solidarity alongside the aesthetic, political and social experiments in these dances, the often masked, racialised and marginalised histories and values of the people that are part of these dances.
The first few times I went out dancing at Lindy Hop social events I had mixed emotions, there was an obvious code, a stylised invitation to the dance and to keep changing partners. There wasn’t much time to think and reflect before you ended up in the arms of someone and then you had to find the pulse together. I was moved to meet so many people who came to the dance for different reasons. Sometimes it felt uncomfortable; someone’s hand pressed too hard or greasily against my back or when someone stared into my eyes with a frozen forced smile on their face hoping to express ”dancing joy”. Other encounters in the dance left me feeling unexpectedly moved, elated and high on life. There was something compelling about all these encounters. There was a risk-taking and vulnerability in meeting and of an attention [responsibility] for each other.
This work has also been an exchange with the Lindy Hop communities I have been part of, and is in part a gentle challenge to some of the habits of conservation I experience. In particular the risk of a fetishistic white gaze in how the dance endures as a form excavated from the filmed archive or particular ideas [hierarchies?] of authenticity. I am curious to widen the sense and paths of connection and see what comes out of meetings between the way people practise lindy hop— not only emphasising the forms and shapes captured by these filmed images but also the spirit and feeling anchored in collective and personal experiences of dancing.
As we dance here I imagine others dance these dances. In the complications of the pandemic I reached out to Louise and Marcus, two friends and artists close at hand to dance, witness and play these dances with me. The piece is a fragment, a moment we share in one space, an issue of proximity, a fiction of authorship, a pleasure of context, all the while a shared dance form continues to be met, made, transformed and lost – elsewhere, elsewhen, in more worlds and more rooms. There’s a rhythm to that. Tonight we share a dance, its ambiguity, its sensing and its participation before another extends their hand. Making interiors and making publics. A shared dance, temporarily autonomous.
SALKA ARDAL ROSENGREN (SE)
jobbar med dans och performance. Hon är född och uppvuxen i Stockholm men flyttade 2006 till Bryssel där hon utbildade sig på P.A.R.T.S. och gick ut 2010. Salka har skapat verk tillsammans med Mikko Hyvönen (Trash Talk), Nicholas Hoffman (The Thing with a Hook) och Andrew Hardwidge (Subbodybodysub). Som dansare har hon jobbat och turnerat verk med: Ezster Salamon, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Daniel Linehan, Sarah Vanhee, Tino Sehgal, Gunilla Heilborn, Malin Élgan, Liz Kinoshita, Salva Sanchis med flera. Våren 2021 tog hon en master i nya performativa praktiker på Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola.
LOUISE DAHL (SE)
jobbar med dans och koreografi med Stockholm som sin bas. Hon är intresserad av att utveckla nya former av subjektiva och kinestetiska erfarenheter som förmedlar kroppens transformativa potential. Louise har jobbat tillsammans med koreografer som Margrét Sara Gudjónsdótti, Cristina Caprioli, Deborah Hay, Alma Söderberg, Jefta Van Dinhter, Mårten Spångberg, Frédéric Gies, Hana Lee Erdman, Philip Berlin och Mirko Guido. Louise har varit en del av Cullberg dansensemblen sedan 2020.
MARCUS DOVERUD (SE)
är sedan 2006 verksam som koreograf, dansare, musiker och föreläsare. Utbildad vid Teaterhögskolan i Stockholm, mimprogramet. Med studier i estetik och filosofi vid Södertörns högskola. Doveruds arbete utmärks ofta av hur koreografisk och musikalisk komposition vidrör varandra sceniskt. Doverud har satt upp flera soloföreställningar i Sverige och utomlands och ingår i flertalet samarbeten med andra konstnärer bl. a. Liv Strand, Roberto N Peyre, Susana Santos Silva för att nämna några. Doverud har arbetat också med teater, bland annat på Unga Klara. Samt med gastronomi som föda och konstnärlig presentationsform.
ANDREW HARDWIDGE (UK)
är danskonstnär, dramaturg och forskare. Som danskonstnär har han arbetat med konstnärer som Ligia Lewis, Dragana Bulut, Joe Moran, Adam Linder, Stav Yeni, Beatrice Loft Schulz, Lina Hermsdorf, Else Tunemyr, Lucy McCormick, Alexander Baczynski-Jenkins, Tino Sehgal, Arcade Fire, Simon Vincenzi, Choy Ka Fai och Jose Luis Vidal. Som dramaturg har han bland annat arbetat med Beyond Love (2022) med Dragana Bulut, Companion (2021) av Hana Erdman, На Чешмата (At The Source) (2018) av Gery Georgieva för Block Universe, och med Tate Modern och Boris Charmatz’ Musee de la Danse för projektet What if Tate Modern were Musee de la Danse (2016). 2012 var han producent och manager för Tino Sehgals Turnerprisnominerade verk These associations (2012) för Turbine Hall på Tate Modern. Som forskare avslutade han nyligen ett forskningsprojekt om frågor om ontologisk politik och healingmetoder vid KU Leuven.
Weld stöds av Stockholms stad, Statens kulturråd och Region Stockholm