Performance

MA choreography: work in process showing

Kyuja Bae:
In the presentation of pre-research, Kyuja Bae explores how the dance of daily actions transforms as a dance art by using the method of Contemplative scores in collaboration with Simen Korsmo Robertsen, Carl Joseph Santos Aquilizan, Ann Kristin Holte, Jasmina Sinadinovic and Katarina Skår Lisa.

Katarina Skår Lisa:
In relations to her pre master project «Gift of Stone» Katarina Skår Lisa has made an choreographic enquiry between textiles, photography and landscape. This period has worked as preparations for a longer fieldwork in Várjjat/ Varanger in 2019, which will result in the final master project, in collaboration with several other artists involved.

Thomas Talawa Prestø:
DE MAN DEM reveals the complexity of carving out a self-defined identity as a black Caribbean male in urban Norwegian society. DE MAN DEM seeks to interrogate these narratives by representing a nuanced spectrum of black Caribbean manhood in a racially and politically charged world.
In this sharing Thomas will show video of some interviews taken as background material and mapping that will feed into the work.

Otto Ramstad:
Otto Ramstad’s work Lineage combines the learning practices of experimental dance and somatic work, and ‘artistic geneology’: a creative interaction with his Norwegian ancestors and the ways that their lives have been recorded, as a way to learn about his Norwegian cultural heritage, which has been previously invisible to him. Lineage combines dance, storytelling and video and in this sharing Ramstad wants to pay attention to the way that the audiences presence and movement work in the stage space and investigate how to move the audiences attention through video, light and the performers movement through space as a way to gain material with which to choreograph the space.

Project leader: Professor Amanda Steggell

Tickets   Free admission. Welcome! 

Longer description of the projects:

1. Kyuja Bae’s project research concerns the meditative body, combining movements with meditation to understand the flow of energy in the body and around the body, focusing on how to response to the force from the outer world and as well as the inner world. Through this research, she is developing the method of Contemplative scores based on the idea that dance is already existing in everywhere and every moment. Choreography by Contemplative scores is the means to find such a dance in everyday life and attempt to frame it by the poetic gaze of awareness.
The basic structure of Contemplative scores is inspired by Obangsaek, the Korean traditional color spectrum with 5 colors: Blue, White, Red, Black and Yellow. These 5 colors represent 5 cardinal directions: Blue- East, White- West, Red- South, Black- North and Yellow- Center. And each color is associated with 5 different elements of traditional Korean culture: Blue- Wood, West- Metal, Red- Fire, Black- Water and Yellow- Earth.

2.  Katarina Skår Lisa's project is an expanded choreographic enquiry of the liminality and sacredness of a landscape; between stones, rivers, ponds and fjords located in Várjjat/ Varanger in Sápmi area in Finnmark. The project is also an enquiry of family and cultural heritage of Buorresárku/ Bergeby, while spesifically listening to the stones and the water.
My fathers ancestors, I do believe, did understand the Sámi philosophy of being and living with the natural world, whilst traveling across landscapes, spiritual realms and borders in an embodied and knowledgeable way. Still the colonization of Sámi, Finnish and Kven people in the Sápmi area resulted in a traumatic ‘loss’ of cultural heritage, also within my family. I am investigating, what this means to me today. The stones and the water becomes the navigational aids within my journey, allowing ‘feelings’ and ‘sensings’ to appear within the landscape in which sentient beings and humans still is moving and living today. In a physical, spiritual and practical sense, I here search for the untold stories, reposed inside, in - between and or under the stones and streams, and to share the experience of them and meeting with people in Várjjat.  Since I will collaborate with textile and costume designer Ramona Salo and photographer Torgrim Halvari in creating the master project in 2019, I have in this pre-master project choreographically explored ways to use textiles and images as landscape. Through placing three different samples of knitted work in space as well as photographic images, I invite audience in to a journey still to come.

3. Thomas Talawa Prestø is known as the Artistic Director and founder of Tabanka Dance Ensemble, as well as the creator of the Talawa Technique. His work speaks from the black experience and creates discourses around subjectivity, power, and corporeality. He is known for soulful and rhythmic choreographies steeped in social commentary. He draws from African and Caribbean performance technologies and challenges the hegemonies of western dance normativity.  His latest work DE MAN DEM reveals the complexity of carving out a self-defined identity as a black Caribbean male in urban Norwegian society. DE MAN DEM seeks to interrogate these narratives by representing a nuanced spectrum of black Caribbean manhood in a racially and politically charged world. Drawing on gestural movement, Caribbean dance forms, spoken word, and rhythm, the performance explores the expressions particular to Caribbean masculinities as they are lived on Caribbean-Norwegian males and interpreted by 3 dancers and one choreographer who have each lived this experience.  The work also contains traces of 45 black male youth informants, as well as more than 15 Caribbean male and 10 female elders, who have generously been a part of the process of bringing the identity work to life. The process behind the work has led to an archive of the Caribbean Norwegian experience.  In this sharing Thomas will show video of some interviews taken as background material and mapping that will feed into the work.

4. Otto Ramstad’s Lineage looks at learning and how we learn. It draws lines between: the learning practices of experimental dance and somatic work, and ‘artistic geneology’: a creative interaction with his Norwegian ancestors and the ways that their lives have been recorded, to learn about his Norwegian cultural heritage, which has been previously invisible to him. Lineage strings together these seemingly separate ways of gaining knowledge to think about what it was like to live in a body in rural Norway 100 years ago and ask how this effects how we are living in our bodies now.
How have our embodied relationships to the ideas of ‘land’ and ‘nature’ been transformed in this time?  Otto’s great grandfather John Fredrikson Ramstad, a metal worker, was born in Skjåk, Norway in 1890 on Ramstadtrædet husmann farm. He immigrated to Minnesota in 1911 and only returned to visit once in 1948. Since then none of his Minnesota family has had any contact with family in Norway. He died 1984 when Otto was 9 years old.
In May 2016 Otto came to Norway for the first time and he found the family farm his great grandfather was born on and met the relatives living there now. Using his knowledge of experimental dance he made a series of dances and videos on the farm and in the surrounding mountains as a way to build a relationship with the places and create methods to process and learn from the information that he was collecting. This research has led him to immigrate to Norway as a way to experience the cultural learning his great grandfather went through in 1911.  Lineage is the preservation of intangible cultural knowledge. Family geneologies are preserved in national archives and created in family stories. The dance and somatic practices of Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores, Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine, and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Ming Centering are archived in and transmitted through the bodies of dance practitioners.  This is not a story of reconnection or continuity. Rather, these are strange encounters that expose large gaps and discontinuities that have led to new experiences and ways of thinking that call to be probed further. Within these gaps and discontinuities there is space for questions, imagination and poetics.  Lineage will be presented as a studio practice, a series of discussions and a dance, video and storytelling performance.