October 5-18. Residence: Manon Santkin ((BE/SE) – Unexplained Dances

After work periods in Paris and Brussels, Manon Santkin continues at Weld the composition of her score.

Underneath the project Unexplained Dances lies Manon Santkin's desire to perpetuate dances that feed from the things we still ignore about them. Dances that make themselves porous to the thoughts people have about them. Dances that listen to subjective ideologies, preferences, doubts and critiques and use them to move forward.

Manon Santkin establishes protocoles to think from dance instead of knowing about it. In distinguishing thinking from knowing, she seeks a form of skillfull ignorance appropriable by anyone, a way of not-knowing that is minutious and intelligent in its curiosity. In modalities that resemble both an interview and a performance, Manon proposes an interactive formula for one dancer and one spectator, where thinking and dancing happen conjointly.

The proposition still matures in the studio and will be shared publically in the coming future.

Manon Santkin (BE/SE)
is a belgian artist living in Brussels and Stockholm.
Within the field of the Performing Arts, she operates as an dancer, choreographer, dramaturge, artistic advisor and writer.  After graduating from P.a.r.t.s. in 2004, she has been working as a dancer and performer in close collaboration with choreographers Mette Ingvartsen, Salva Sanchis and Sidney Leoni and took part in the work of Xavier Leroy, Eleanor Bauer, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche amongst others.

In the last years, Manon saw her role as an interpreter morph into that of a facilitator of collaborative processes. She now regularly takes part in the processes of other artists as a mentor, advisor or dramaturge.

In parallel with her performance pratique, Manon develops projects in varying formats and medias on and off the stage (performance, installation, written and audio publication, workshops). For instance, she initiated The Library of Schrödinger (2012- ongoing), a hybrid project mixing performance and publishing, in collaboration with designers Nicolas Couturier and Angeline Ostinelli; By-product (2006-2011), a collaboration with stylist Jennifer Defays and choreographer Leslie Mannès on the performativity of the garment; Performance Kit (2012), a research in collaboration with Leslie Mannès on instant interpretations of choreographic instructions.

Occasionally, she publishes texts, maps and audio documents derived from the creation processes and collaborations she takes part in (Glossary of the Atlas of Interpretation; A Dancer is Moving With…/a map for conversation; The Endless Manifesto; Rescript; The Great Code of The Knights of Non-Order).

Manon recently finished a Master in New Performative Practices at DOCH in Stockholm, where she revisited the notion of ‘interpretation’ in terms of an ecology of practices and intelligences, self-organization and interactive agencies.