Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le theatre, 2017 Mårten Spångberg Mårten Spångberg (b. 1968) is a choreographer living and working in Berlin and Stockholm. His interest concerns dance in an expanded field, something he has approached through experimental practice in a multiplicity of formats and expressions. He has been active on stage as a performer and creator since 1994, and since 1999 has been creating his own choreographies, from solos to larger scale works, which have toured internationally. Under the label International Festival, Spångberg collaborated with architect Tor Lindstrand and engaged in social and expanded choreography. From 1996-2005 he organised and curated festivals in Sweden and internationally, and in 2006 initiated the network organisation INPEX. He has considerable experience in teaching both theory and practice. From 2008-2012, he directed the MA pro- gramme in choreography at the University of Dance in Stockholm. In 2011, his first book, Spangbergianism, was published. His more recent works La Substance, but in English, The Internet, Natten and Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le théâtre has gained extensive international recognition. His work is currently devoted to relations between dance and ecology which has resulted in a series of works Culture, The Climate, 46 and Anthropology. Anthropology (2019) Premiere at Explore Festival Bucharest 2019. “Anthropology” is the second part of a series addressing relations between dance and ecology. The project researches alternative narratives concerning ecology and its relations to the body, understood as a possible intermediary between modalities of organising life. In what ways can dance function as a laboratory for how we can approach the world differently? Perhaps what is needed is not to regulate life as we know it but to labour for the possibilities of new forms of life. Not climate change but a change of the climate, climate being what all beings, creatures, animate and inanimate share and contribute to. It’s not a matter of commitment to save the world but instead a letting go of established dichotomies between for example nature and culture, work and leisure, intuition and science, human and non-human, subject and object. “Anthropology” proposes vague forms of being with, cohabitation and exchange that dissolve information and knowledge in favour of experience and wisdom. Instead of definition availability, instead of from here to there a landscape that expands with us. The performance takes the form of an autonomous system, a living being, that the dancers need to generate relations to, to form ecologies that nourishes the system and still maintains its specificity. In this sense the performance will adapt to conditions, unfold differently each occasion and continue a process of care and awareness. Understanding the piece as an autonomous organism refers to forms of knowledge transfer taking place across species and different, incompatible epistemologies, a kind of leakage between realities that open up to new forms of ethics, alternative narratives and non-human geographies. The Climate (2019) Premiere Stamsund Theatre Festival 2019 “The Climate” is the first part of a series addressing relations between dance and ecology. The project researches alternative narratives concerning ecology and its relations to the body, understood as a possible intermediary between modalities of organising life. In what ways can dance function as a laboratory for how we can approach the world differently? Perhaps what is needed is not to regulate life as we know it but to labour for the possibilities of new forms of life. Not climate change but a change of the climate, climate being what all beings, creatures, animate and inanimate share and contribute to. It’s not a matter of commitment to save the world but instead a letting go of established dichotomies between for example nature and culture, work and leisure, intuition and science, human and non-human, subject and object that together have in common to distance and compartmentalise the anthropocentric. Together with a group of five dancers these and other questions has been folded into practices that aim at shifting or even changing what determines the ecologies of dance, choreography and aesthetic experience - ecologies that contribute to the climate, and ultimately what it means to exist. “The Climate” is a dance for you and a dancing together, a little bit of hope that things can be otherwise. Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le théâtre Premiere Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2017 C’est peut être la raison pour laquelle Maria Hassabi pose dans son titre une question sur le théâtre ou que l’oeuvre de Mårten Spångberg a pour sous-titre une pièce pour le théâtre ; parce qu’au fond l’apparition du paysage sur scène ne modifie pas seulement les possibilités de la dramaturgie ou l’idée de paysage, mais elle nous met face à notre image, assis ensemble en train de construire la simplicité inexplicable du théâtre: une consécration collective de temps passé à la fenêtre. Daniel Blanga-Gubbay Natten (2016) Premiere Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2016 Again, making a long leap, I would associate Spångberg’s choreographic gesture with the experience of the uncertainty of life we live now – in Europe at least – after the period of modernity and postmodernity where society and life attempted to be ‘well tailored’. Today, in order to learn how to live – or even simply survive – we must get rid of that phantasm; we must endure contradictions and face the horrifying uncertainty of existence. Alone and together. I wouldn’t say that I exaggerate (too much) when I claim that while attending Natten I experienced the historicity of the current moment. The moment happening on the verge of language. The moment that doesn’t resemble European 1930s but 2030s. On that ground, speaking now from within the field of performing arts, I see Natten as a proposition for the choreography of the moment in which we live. A new proposition, which we experience as familiar because we live it every day, but for which we still lack words. And how indeed to find the words to inscribe Natten into history, yet let it bounce around? I don’t know, but I nevertheless tried. Ana Vujanovic The Internet (2016) Premiere Gallery Supportico Lopez It seems to me that in his performance Spångberg brought the vibe of the Internet into an analogue form. The incorporated objects are very haptic; the movements of the performers are strongly human and natural, even though I was silly enough to expect robot dances beforehand. The performance area is stuffed with a complex variety of symbols and motifs including labels and patterns, both characteristic for the web. Meanwhile the young females have come to sit down on the blanket with the word Unrendered printed on. They are now wearing stewardess uniforms, and each of them is carving with a knife on a piece of wood. It triggers a vision of girl scouts who build a wooden world (chain, anchor, rifles) inside this realm of colourful chaos. The sound of birds singing adds up to the image and for the first time the audio piece seems to support the visual aesthetics. This fantastic and very pretty scenario seems to me like a very literal image of the return to the analogue world. Sarah Rosengarten/Kuba Paris La Substance but in English (2014) Premiere MoMA PS1 New York The political-philosophical unconscious of Spångberg’s tour de force is this black power — it is an unconscious, however, that is not Spångberg’s; it is an unconscious that does not belong to an author, nor to a subject, nor even to the subject of the “creative collective.” The unconscious names the assembler and producer of all those affects already crisscrossing the undercommons of our existence, the movement of things independent from their masters and their encounters, and the “anachoreographic” (Harney and Moten 2013:50) collisions produced. Under the dome, under the glitter and shiny bottles of Listerine and Monster and Coke, the black (under)ground thuds its sounds, proposing a force no choreography can control. One may only unleash it and brace up for what it makes happen: dance’s black matter, its dark physics, beyond emancipation. André Lepecki The attempts at creating landscape on stage partly come from deliberate experiments with democracy, while partly requiring a truly new epistemic of perceiving the space around us, be it mental, physical, emotional, political or social. The dramaturgical tactics of co-existence in that space as one of its elements largely emerge from probing that new, post-Anthropocene, so to speak, epistemic. They are uncertain. They promise new beginnings. We may best understand them as prefigurative artistic experiments for a time that is coming. Ana Vujanovic on La Substance 46 (2019) Premiere Impulstanz If abstract things can exist, such as a rumour, a jpeg stored on a hard drive, the Hindu goddess Parvati or the nothingness in a half empty bottle. What says that dance can not exist, generate some form of autonomy or simply a life of its own? 46 is an ongoing research into the autonomous existence of dance, expressed as a series of performances where dancing is a means of forming bonds with dance. To dance or be danced by a dance that has its own existence implies to grant dance agency. To approach or care for such a dance requires a new mind-set and opens for the possibility for altered forms of experience. 46 is presented in parks, nature or in semi-public spaces such as churches, museums and libraries. Inspired by contemporary materialism, quantum-physics, emoji aesthetics, AI and urban- dance, 46 aims undermine dominant modes of composition and formations of representation, aiming at producing places for the possibility of shared practices to emerge. Digital Technology (2016) Premiere Gessnerallee Zurich “(…) Spångberg performance Digital Technology also has certain ritualistic connotations (…).