Content advisory:

This work contains nudity.

Moving in Concert

Moving in Concert imagines a universe where humans, technologies and natural materials coexist to create an abstract set of movement. Inspired by how bodies are sensorially affected by living in a digitalized world, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination.

Together with eight other dancers, Mette Ingvartsen inquires into how humans, technical objects and organic matter can interact to create a new conception of abstract form. How can we understand technology as something that is still active in our bodies, even when all technical devices have been turned off? How does it affect the plasticity of our brain to be inhabited by recent and future technologies? Or, how can bodies move and organize their collectivity in a plastic manner?

In the performance luminous reflections are used to produce a liquid experience of space and form, by elastically modulating light and shadow. Hallucinatory visual impressions emerge as the dancers transport sources of light and color through space. The audience is invited to partake in a mesmerizing landscape produced by abstract movement, sculptures of light, as well as intense sensations of color. Instead of drawing and regulating form, choreography in Moving in Concert is a process by which shapes and patterns emerge to modulate the experience of space, bodies and things.

Moving in Concert premiered on October 3rd 2019 at Kaaitheater in Brussels (BE)
Duration: 1h without intermission + 15 minutes in foyer

Credits

Concept & choreography: Mette Ingvartsen

Performers: Bruno Freire, Elias Girod, Gemma Higginbotham, Mette Ingvartsen, Jose Calixto Ramos Neto, Norbert Pape, Thomas Bîrzan, Hanna Hedman, Armin Hokmi Kiasaraei

Original cast: Jacob Ingram-Dodd, Manon Santkin, Anni Koskinen, Dolores Hulan

Sound design: Peter Lenaerts

Lighting design: Minna Tiikkainen

Set design: Mette Ingvartsen, Minna Tiikkainen

Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejić

Technical director: Hans Meijer

Assistant choreography: Christine De Smedt

Production assistant: Manon Haase

Fascia training: Anja Röttgerkamp

Sound technician: Filip Vilhelmsson

Company manager: Ruth Collier

Production & administration: Joey Ng

Communication: Jeroen Goffings

A production of Great Investment vzw

Supported by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès within the framework of the New Settings Program

Coproduced by Kaaitheater, NEXT festival / Kunstencentrum BUDA, Festival d’Automne, Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou, Dansehallerne, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, PACT Zollverein, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Theater Rotterdam, Les Hivernales – CDCN

Additional support by Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek, STUK Great Investment is funded by The Flemish Authorities, The Flemish Community Commission (VGC) and The Danish Arts Council

Artist Notes

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. From 1999 she studied in Amsterdam and Brussels where she in 2004 graduated from the performing arts school P.A.R.T.S. Her first performance “Manual Focus” (2003) was made while she was still studying. Her early pieces comprise among others of 50/50 (2004), to come (2005), It’s in The Air (2008) and GIANT CITY (2009) – performances questioning affect, perception and sensation in relation to bodily representation. Her work is characterized by hybridity and engages in extending choreographic practices by combining dance and movement with other domains such as visual art, technology, language and theory.

An important strand of her work was developed between 2009 and 2012 with The Artificial Nature Series, where she focused on reconfiguring relations between human and non-human agency through choreography. The series includes three performances devoid of human presence: evaporated landscapes (2009), The Extra Sensorial Garden (2011) The Light Forest (2010) and two in which the human figure was reintroduced: Speculations (2011) and the group work The Artificial Nature Project (2012). By contrast her series, The Red Pieces: 69 positions (2014) 7 Pleasures (2015), to come (extended) and 21 pornographies (2017) inscribes itself into a history of human performance with a focus on nudity, sexuality and how the body historically has been a site for political struggles.

In 2019, she premiered Moving in Concert, an abstract group choreography, that focuses on the interlacing between humans, technological tools and natural materials. In 2021 Mette Ingvartsen presented two new projects: The Life Work, an in situ project with elderly people in the Ruhr region in Germany which addresses migration issues. And a solo, The Dancing Public, inspired by a fascination for dancing manias throughout history.

Skatepark, a large-scale performance for skaters, dancers and local skatepark communities, premiered in 2023. And in the beginning of 2024 Mette Ingvartsen presented RUSH, a solo performance for Manon Santkin that draws on 20 years of collaboration.

Ingvartsen established her company in 2003 and her work has since then been shown throughout Europe, as well as in the U.S, Canada, Australia and Asia. She has been artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels (2012-2016), Volksbühne in Berlin, and associated to the APAP network.

She holds a PhD in choreography from UNIARTS / Lunds University in Sweden.
Besides making, performing, writing and lecturing, her practice also includes teaching and sharing research through workshops with students at universities and art schools. She has collaborated and performed with Xavier Le Roy, Bojana Cvejic, Jan Ritsema and Boris Charmatz, as well as invested in collective research projects such as the artist platform EVERYBODYS (2005-2010) for which she co-edited everybodys publications, but also the educational project Six Months, One Location (2008) and the performative conference The Permeable Stage.

An interview with Mette Ingvartsen by Katleen Van Langendonck & Eva Decaesstecker

Could you tell us about the themes you are exploring with Moving in Concert?

In Moving in Concert we are working on the body’s abstract relation to technology. Or rather, how to understand technology as something that is still active within our bodies even when we are no longer in direct contact with technological extensions. I am particularly interested in how technology influences and transforms the neurological patterns in our brain. How it changes the way we sense, think, live and feel.

In your previous performance series on sexuality, The Red Pieces, you already touched on the influence of technology on our bodies, for example by the pharmaceutical industry. Which other aspects from that series are you addressing in this performance?

The idea of non-human agency and the body’s relation to objecthood are themes I was already exploring within The Red Pieces, but also even earlier when I was making The Artificial Nature Series. Moving in Concert started as an attempt to bring together those two strands of research: on the one hand the work I have done on sexuality and the human body, and on the other the choreographies I have made for non-humans. It led me to search for relations between the performativity of humans, technologies and natural materials, and to explore varied forms of co-existence between these elements. What we focus on in this piece is the performativity of humans, technologies and natural materials, and how they co-exist on stage.

You speak about technology and the brain; how do you think these two inter-relate within today’s society?

Technology has always enabled us to think and to do things we were not able to do before, but today it also creates new illnesses that we didn’t have to face in the past. If you think about it from a scientific and contemporary perspective, this is manifested in how the body is literally being modified by scientists in areas like microbiology, genetic engineering, neuro-science, or from a more dystopic perspective within the pharmaceutical industry.

The technological condition we are living in today is no longer only about mechanically extending the capacity of the body. It is also about transforming it from the inside out, a process our neuroplasticity is deeply involved in. It suffices to watch our computers, telephones and tablets for more than eight hours a day to understand how the images, texts and intimate communications on social networks transform our mental structures, our moods and our bodily sensations.

You do not use those very recognizable technological tools in the piece. Instead you use wireless LED lights, with which the performers create all kinds of abstract and social formations. Why did you make this decision to abstract away from concrete uses of technological tools?

First of all because the biggest part of “technology” is not visible nor materialized in specific objects. Secondly, because I am more interested in the processes that are activated in our bodies than in the technological objects themselves. In the piece, we work a lot on the perception of light, shadow and color. One of the focuses is on circular movement. Turning and spinning with the lights are used as
tasks that create a specific neurological activity both within the body of the performer and the spectator. At first this turning practice might seem isolating, as it is impossible to fully see each other while doing it, but in fact it simply relies on a different form of sociality than the ones we know from everyday life. What we aim for is to create an abstract form of togetherness where rhythm, speed, color, and sharing an intense physical activity produces a different form of collective behavior.

To me this almost metaphorical way of handling technological tools and to physically represent technological patterns, is more interesting than showing what most of us knows all too well – how to use a smartphone or a computer creatively.

What does working with abstraction offer, according to you?

In my solo 21 pornographies, I needed to address certain issues like the abuse of power, violence or sexualized torture. For these topics I did not feel that abstraction was the right strategy; I needed to address them head on. During the research for that performance, however, I discovered other physical materials that I found very exciting although they did not make it into the piece. I was for instance working a lot with a mobile LED light creating all different kinds of movement patterns that later become the starting point for Moving in Concert.

Abstraction in this frame offers the possibility to address questions I have about our society, regarding our sensory capacities and how they are being modified by technological developments. Some of these questions I felt could a be addressed in a more relevant way through abstraction than through more narrative forms. For me, dance and choreography have never been isolated fields of expression that can be completely dissociated from social and political questions. But in this work abstraction felt like the most accurate way to approach and materialize the ideas I had.

At the same time, abstraction also invites the audience to engage with movement and choreography as such, because it does not offer semantic content, as has been the case in my previous works. Nevertheless, before the performance starts on stage, the dancers also share short texts with the audience about some of the technological processes we have worked on. This is a non-abstract way to open a first door towards mental images and perception for the spectators.

Another key topic in Moving in Concert is ‘plasticity’. What is your understanding of this term? And how does it resonate in the piece?

The idea of plasticity actually comes from neuroscience, in which scientists speak about the plasticity of the brain, or the brain’s capacity to transform and build new neurological patterns while at the same time also having a capacity to resist external influence. Catherine Malabou in her book What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2004) has taken this neurological research as a cue to address current problems within our knowledge and information-driven economies, like for instance the problem of precariousness or the demand for flexibility that many people face today. This book was very inspiring, but at the same time I did not know exactly what to do with its content in regard to making a performance. Instead of trying to translate it, I started to think about what plasticity in an artistic practice could mean or what it would look like in a performative form. Moving in Concert is the result of that thought experiment.

Why is the piece called Moving in Concert?

The performance is called Moving in Concert because it is inherently a piece about being and moving together. What currently interests me is to think about collectivity across different forms of existence. If we think about the collectivity of humans only, then the social, or the idea of co-existence appears in a specific way. If we try to think about collectivity across that line and include humans, technologies, and natural materials, we need a new imaginary. When I first started thinking about the piece I actually called it “Moving in Concert (with things)” to indicate that what we need today is to reconsider how we cross-breed with non-human elements and how this transforms our human ways of relating, not only to each other but also to the non-human elements that inhabit this earth with us. What I am searching for is a different balance between humans, technologies and natural materials, towards more nuanced and experimental forms of co-existence, or perhaps even an unexpected resistant form of being together.

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