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 spring of 2025 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.
Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray based on a discussion with Sanna Blennow and Simone Gisela Weber in connection with their performance Until Death Do Us Part at Atalante in February 2025.
The nature of the abject–that it is neither an object nor a subject–is the main cause for our refusal to engage with it. If we feel the abject closing in on us, we are ready to turn the other way, ignore it, or pretend that it doesn’t even exist. It is as if the very notion of the abject makes us want to squirm our way out of our own skin; which paradoxically is an imagination of the abject itself. The horror of being able to literally exit ones own skin. The body as the site of the abject is one that art and literature has a long history of dealing with. The most pressing predicament of all bodies is that it decays and eventually withers away. The ending of all things is a fact that unnerves us and this fact has given rise to a host of cults and rituals as a means of alchemising the abject into an object. An alchemising which has never succeeded. Yet the human proclivity to cast a long shadow towards the end of all things is in itself a way of escaping the very beginning of our lives as equally abject. The cavity that we emerge out of and the cavity we sink back into is curiously also the abject. Neither subject nor object.
We are born from a hole. We are buried in a hole.
To exit ones skin, or to at the very least acknowledge that we can inhabit different skins, is a figurative image that is made literal in the piece Until Death Do Us Part, through the materiality of the leather costume used. Viewed as simply an item of clothing–leather trousers–one is faced with a host of prejudices pertaining to the modern use of it. Leather trousers can be viewed as kitsch, sexualised and tacky. Yet historically, animal skins were the only material presented to us as a form of clothing and protection. It is also in the archaic sense it presents itself to us in this performance piece. The leather costume becomes “another” skin which is being negotiated by the performer throughout the piece and makes itself known to the spectators through its sounds forcing us to remain aware that this was once the permanent costume of another being.
Other beings are also physically present in the piece as items of various shapes and forms, wrapped and tied in white fabric, scattered across the stage. They are what choreographer/dancer Sanna Blennow and dramaturge Simone Gisela Weber calls “the abjects”. These abjects on stage resemble corpses and their materiality informs the piece both figuratively and literally. The abstraction of the abjects resonates with the reduction of time proposed by the duration of the piece. The simplicity of the set: a rectangular grey floor, the abjects, the lights and the dancer in combination with the colour scheme: white, grey, black and orange all play on a contemporaneity which also signals as archaic.
The creation of the piece sprang from a desire to work on autobiographical events. Life events that were, as it seems, demanding Sanna’s attention and acknowledgement. Yet what appeared as personal: a lived history of loss and a fraught relationship with dance soon revealed a politics of both dance and the body. As a way of acknowledging those politics time has been the key method to confront the liminal space between object and subject suggested by the abject. As such the process of creation extended over long periods of time and it wasn’t until after having gone through the archive of movements that there presented itself “a horizon” that revealed to Sanna that she had “all of these movements in my system, they are there and it’s accessible as much as the traces of others.” Time is manifested by its reduction and, as Simone points out, “the aspect of slowness is a key concern in Sanna’s artistic practice. [This is] a way to resist the capitalistic speed. The piece begins slow, the audience has to be patient so that you [the audience] can project onto the scenery.” The practice of slowing down is one that is difficult and needs daily attention by both dancer and audience. The piece challenges both dancer and viewer to practice slowness and the possibility of nothingness. Simone points out that they are offering up “another time, and that slowness plays with time.” What might appear as repetition is perhaps not repetition purely, “because Sanna is going through her archive [and] from the outside it might look like the same pose or posture or movement sequences but by repeating them it is almost like a ritual that Sanna goes through in these fifty minutes of emptying herself.”
The performance uses a gestural language with a clear narrative structure, which corresponds to the choice of treating the actions in a chronological autobiographical order. I mention that the language of the piece reminds me of mime traditions more than dance traditions simply because the intention of the dancer is always clear. And that regardless of my ability to decipher what that intention, or image, is or isn’t for the dancer, it nevertheless allows me as a spectator to experience the urgency and importance of the specific gestures. When I mention this it becomes clear that in the process of having created the piece “world building”, as Simone says, has been paramount and that “mime is interesting because it’s about the invisible past.”
The term world-building is one we often find in the field of literature yet it is a method that is implicitly employed by theatre, if not as often in dance. It is also a testament to the important role of the dramaturge as an implementing force that has the potential of crystallising the dramaturgy to its bare essentials. Simone’s main question to Sanna throughout the two years of developing the piece remained “what do you want to tell?” Irritated and annoyed by the demand of such a question Sanna nevertheless acknowledges its importance and how its imposition on the creation process enabled a reduction and specificity. This created the precision of the piece and informed the specific choices that were made. Those choices, the worlds that they helped build, also opened up the possibilities for the unknown to enter. Both Sanna and Simone acknowledges that various characters have begun to emerge and establish themselves within Sanna throughout the process of having performed the piece. This is proof that a work of art reveals itself to the creator as much as the creator reveals it. The interplay between what is intended and explicitly presented on stage and what then emerges from those intentions and explicit suggestions is a constant. The creator speaks, but that which is created also speaks back.
The organ of speech–the mouth–is a totem that runs throughout the piece and shares an intimacy with “the abjects” strewn on the stage that are “not yet living, not yet dead” as Sanna and Simone says. It is the failure of speech that draws us to the cavity that can only emit breath, or “cave-wind”, as Sanna puts it. The cavity of the mouth and its abject quality reveals an incapacity of producing any word or semantic meaning. A mouth opened to its limit can only ever emit an AAAHH. How to express through reason [spoken language] all that is lost? The open mouth as an image directly transports us to images of madness, hysteria, shame and the open, stiff mouths of the dead. The mouth that emits the “cave-wind” of centuries past nevertheless finds peace within the rectangular pen she finds herself in. In the end the gathering of immaterial spirits and “the abjects” into the fold reassures us that even the abject is never a constant, but a porous state whereby we are invited to remain within the stillness of time. Within that stillness the terror of belonging neither to the object nor subject abates.
Reflektion & text: Josephine Gray