With its attention turned towards experimental and innovative works of performing arts, Atalante offers a space for the artistic works, a discourse surrounding those works, and the field at large. During the fall of 2024 we will delve deeper into the various universes of the artists presenting work and make space for a dialogue between the artists, the spectators and the venue.
After engaging in dialogue with MOA Kompani’s artistic director Moa M. Sahlin, lines of thought were set in motion which touch upon the companies bodies of thought, negotiations and ghosts. Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray which highlights Moa M Sahlin’s ideas regarding the multifaceted expressions of staging dance and places their insights within an expanded field of thought.
The notion of speculation from the Latin speculari [to observe, from specere, to see] makes itself known in the past and present works of Moa M. Sahlin as an attitude towards her surrounding environments. Through movement this attitude of observations finds its manifestation. The speculative as observation also strikes a chord with the arena in which movement is given its space: in the theatre [through the Greek theatron, to see]. But what exactly is it that we are seeing and how does the choreographer come to terms with seemingly complex ideas? In the case of Moa M. Sahlin to choreograph implicitly entails a form of learning which haunts her. She speaks of “being haunted by something” and that something “wants their movements to be made”. Movement must here be understood as encompassing something much grander than what the dancer engages with in the studio. As such, movements, includes the oscillating currents made visible in hindsight throughout history. In order to give herself, along with the dancers that Moa M. Sahlin engages with, ample space to investigate these currents it is of utmost importance to linger in what she calls the ”germination stage”. This is the stage where ideas are given space, but more importantly, this is where ideas are transformed into physical, tangible, forms through light, sound, objects and movement. The ghosts of Elin Wägner and Flory Gate may be prominent in CYKLISK DUO, however, the world of thought that MOA Kompani inhabits touch upon a host of topics from the visibly transformative life cycle of a butterfly to how phenomenology acts as a tool for the dancer to articulate their practise.
The articulation of movement is a practice that the dancer devotes an entire life to investigate. The articulation of how they do this is not as obvious. It is remarkable that we from childhood into our adult lives are expected to be able to articulate either our speech or our thoughts, yet we are very rarely expected to be as rigorous with the articulation of our bodies. The young dancer, on the contrary, finds herself expected to place body over thought. These opposites can easily be taken for truths about how things seemingly “are”. However, our tendency to accept truths that we have been handed down prompts us to commit logical fallacies due to a series of unexamined claims we perpetuate about the world around us. That a dancer’s scope of cognition concerns only the world of movement, or that non-dancers would be better at articulating their thoughts, is rooted in the ghost that is dualism: either or. These “either or’s” haunts us not only in society at large but more specifically in artistic educational institutions. After having encountered Rudolf Laban’s choreographic universe in London, where choreography and choreology are an integral part of architecture, theosophy and philosophy, Moa M. Sahlin found that the mentality prevalent within the Swedish dance community was one that held on to an anxiety and fear over the prospect of letting go of dualism as the only perception of reality. This insistence upon dualism seemed strange when, in fact, the sense of movement as such is experientially indistinguishable from one another. This experience of dissolution between object and subject is the dancer’s everyday life – through dance and the touch of the other, the exact knowledge of where my hand, or my leg is, vanishes when I am in the midst of a mass of legs, hands and bodies. The approach to the view that choreography involves all the senses, as well as several disciplines, in the spirit of modernism, was in Sweden viewed as something religious rather than artistic thus maintaining the hold of dualism. Based on a belief in dance as a human activity that operates beyond borders, that eliminates borders, we risk committing a serious logic fallacy if we insist adapting our external world to a world of thought instead of the other way around.
These questions find their expression in Moa M. Sahlin’s dual role of artistic creator of choreographic works and as dance pedagogue. It was through words and worlds of thought, that she found a similar mind in Jonna Bornemark’s writings, through which Moa M. Sahlin realised that there were currents, albeit small, within Swedish academia that resonated with her own intentions of working with a larger body of thought. This expanded body of insights involves making room for a larger demographic than the 17th-century European worldview based on Descartes—a view that, in the 2020s, remains prevalent within the majority of the Western world. By resisting the separation between me/you, the inner/outer, Moa. M Sahlin is searching for a symbiosis between the inner and the outer. This symbiosis is also a self-evident physical reality experienced by half of the world’s population as sustaining and giving new life. Through the female body, two heartbeats are contained within one material entity, as the self and the other merge into one body. This reality is conspicuously overlooked and rarely talked about although its nature is not only present in our lives but is indeed the very reason that we are alive at all. Considering this fundamental aspect of life it is remarkable to what degree society insists upon neglecting the full extent of our lived reality.
To be given the right to speak, through both voice and body, also marks the work presented here: CYKLISK DUO. The ghosts of Elin Wägner and Flory Gate perched on a tandem bicycle seems to prod Moa Ms Sahlin as they whisper: “we accomplished this in our time, what are you going to do? How will you in 2024 sustain and further what we did then, now?” Moving through varying time eras the work at hand could be treated as a cyclical epic; that which once was will come again. However, I believe that the issue of the cyclical may disguise something more profound. The bicycle presented to us in the poster of the performance as well as in the original photo of Elin Wägner and Flory Gate is a tandem. In its modern day use tandem is a spatial concept, for example two in a row, or one after the other, yet its original use was as a temporal concept deriving from the Latin as that which is “at last”. In her description of the original photo, it becomes clear that Moa M. Sahlin is ”in dialogue” with the women in the photo. This dialogue is as much fictional as it is factual. Moa M. Sahlin refers to needing a tandem bicycle in order ”to understand and to experience the city differently”, yet using archive material in an attempt to recreate a documentary style retelling of Elin Wägner’s life is of little artistic importance as such. The openness as a space between past and present is the main point of interest. This kind of open space where generations and time are given room to coexist also give the innovative and experimental its habitat as Moa M. Sahlin points out; ”everything has been made but not by me”. Hence recreation in a certain sense means innovation, with the caveat that the person recreating must be aware of the choices they are making which differ from the original they are using as template. Making the right decision is also one of the difficult tasks for the artist. When are the decisions to be made and how are they made? These are questions that we cannot necessarily answer, the awareness that they are questions of utmost importance is nonetheless essential. Through this search of questions and answers a moment is revealed: tandem! at last! whereby the ghosts prodding us on to tell their stories through movements in time are given space to be expressed through whichever artistic form we grant them. And it is here within the dimension of what has “at last” arrived, or not arrived, that I approach the bodies of thought brought together in MOA Kampani by Moa M. Sahlin.
The influence of the 1990s aesthetics in the performance which Moa M. Sahlin gives references to as the harshness and brutality of the spirit of punk and experimentation seem also to have been an era that shaped her own dance experiments in the form of observing a host of dance performances. Those observations fostered her critical stance towards the bodies and movements that were (not) presented on stage and informed the development of her own sense of what direction she would take later in life in her own choreographic works. About that specific time she mentions that ”experimentation was hard, so black and white, today there is a broader spectrum of nuances available”. Instead of working with the body as material that is to be reshaped and reconfigured according to a variety of different movement systems, Moa M. Sahlin advocates an appreciation of the materiality of the body, especially the skeleton and its structure which enables us to be in motion. The human body’s scaffolding. Attending to this fundamental bodily reality nurtures the possibility of giving rise to experiments that do not necessarily entail subjecting the body to an imposed violence. Through an awareness of the body, we are given the opportunity to remain available and curios about the present tense. For it is here, in the present, that the performing arts appears. The relationship between on the one hand the wish of completely dissolving time and space and on the other hand understanding what kind of boundaries are needed to define the stage are constant negotiations for Moa M. Sahlin. Her preference is to carry out those negations with herself, the dancers and the audience in the arena of the blackbox. Here, in the darkness, the light shines brighter still as we are invited to speculate, to observe, to see, what once was and what possibly might come. It is also here, in the black box, that we find the ghost of modernism. A ghost that Moa M. Sahlin, together with the audience, welcomes.
Reflection & text: Josephine Gray
Join us for an in-depth discussion on Monday 21/10 at 7 PM with some of the invited guest artists performing at Atalante this autumn!