MAIA MEANS (DK/NO) is a Stockholm-based freelance dancer who spends time between performance, text and organisational practices. The last years she has worked with choreographers such as Oda Brekke, Sindri Runudde, Björn Säfsten, Ellard/Lech and Mette Ingvartsen. Together with Max Wallmeier, she has created two books and the performance ‘fictions, stitched' that premiered in 2023. Means is part of running ‘höjden', a self-organised space for artists in Stockholm. https://maiameans.com/

When I enter, the back-stage areas are in focus. Blue light emits from the glass-walled changing rooms and layers of noise leak onto the stage from the bathroom, or maybe it’s from the small tool-room where performers sometimes wait before entering the stage. It’s the corners and creases and back-spaces that are enhanced.The stage, on the other hand, seems big and empty and kind of unimportant, reversing a hierarchy of spaces.

During the first stretch of the piece, one of the performers methodically and inefficiently cleans a strip of floor. They are facing the side wall, backing up a bit after each break-filled soaping and un-soaping sweep. The audience seats are placed in the back corner of the stage and it feels slightly crammed. From the corner, I feel oddly far away from the action. The meticulous movement facing away from us, accompanied by the blue lights and distant noise-sounds, bring up a cinematic feeling. Another performer relaxedly peeks out from behind a wall and disappears again. At some point they quickly crawl over the floor, also sweeping across, butt up and head down.

So the piece seems to start off independently from us. The stage is derived of importance, a figurative back-stage area while the actual back stage is the one of importance. I get a feeling that this piece wants us to witness something not so exiting, not so spectacular. It has placed us in this corner to witness the sometimes invisible labor of cleaning, creating, and collaborating.

When the third performer enters, they face us directly and approaches us, voice and feet repeating a rhythmic pattern. The direct frontality flips my understanding and I almost feel cheated. We were hidden away in the corner! You were doing your work over there! While I usually enjoy being acknowledged by performers, the room suggested something else. Did they disagree on approaches? Is this change of direction a choreographic choice or a result of the co-creators different aesthetics? Either way, the rapid rhythmic approach goes on for a while and becomes a more entertaining variation of the cleaning pattern.

I get occupied with seeing what we don’t see: We see a piece but I imagine how the piece was made. I see three co-creators making decisions, agreeing to disagree and sometimes agreeing to easy solutions. They play with the simplicity and complexity of collaboration - easily skipping across the diagonal of the stage together, or struggling to find a smooth common rhythm in a shared-weight-creating-monstrous-images-situation. The piece feels filled with everything it’s not. The process that’s over, the discussions that are not taken, the bathroom that no-one is using. We participate in the constant productions that have intricate, interesting and difficult processes spread out over long periods of lots of planning and probably not enough studio time. But here we are, maybe 30 people, watching the outcome. It’s clear that the three co-creators carry this process on their sleeves.

Two of the performers start doing a slow and outstretched partnering dance. It’s on the stage, but in dim lights. The performer who cleaned the floor is now cleaning the glass doors of the blue-lit changing rooms. This time it’s less meticulous and more representative, but the distance between us is established again. All three would clearly be doing this if we weren’t there. Our little audience corner seems to get sleepy, a yawn is heard and I sip from my glass of water and scribble som notes to keep from drifting away completely. I wonder if the piece wants us to drift.

The dissonance of cinematic distance and catchy direct approaches are mended at one point, towards the end of the performance, when all three are standing at a line, watching us. One performer leans forwards a bit to look at the others, looking at us. They stay like this for a while, and the stage is both a stage and a back-stage. The satisfaction! It’s an old critique of experimental dance that it’s internal, only for the inside-crowd and not focusing on the experience of the audience. With this piece, I feel most in tune in the moments where it doesn’t acknowledge me at all, watching the three choreographers work, alone and together. After the show I’m left with questions of collaborative methods and process-based work. And with an imprint of the blue lights in the changing room glass doors.

BY MAIA MEANS