admin The 14th edition of eXplore festival – Bucharest International Contemporary Dance and Performance Festival, the most important event in Romania and Eastern Europe dedicated to contemporary dance and performance, begins in Bucharest on Friday, September 13, 2019, at 7:30 pm, with the premiere of the Anthropology performance, signed by the Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg.
Anthropology is the second part of a trilogy 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 nourish the system and still maintains it 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.
Production: WASP Studios
Co-financed by: The Administration of the National Cultural Fund, Romania
Supported by: The Norwegian Art Council, The Swedish Art Council, Impulstanz – Vienna International Dance Festival
Anthropology is the second chapter of The Climate, part Wanderers / Hope.
Mårten Spångberg (b. 1968) is a choreographer living and working in Brussels 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 programme in choreography at the University of Dance in Stockholm. In 2011, his first book, Spangbergianism, was published.
M. Spångberg is professor in dramaturgy and choreography at Oslo National Academy of The Arts, departments of dance and theatre. Mårten Spångberg is associated artist at Black Box teater Oslo, 2017-2018. His more recent works – La Substance, but in English, The Internet, Natten and Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le théâtre – have gained extensive international recognition.
