Gry Tingskog (they/them) works with choreography together with dance, sculpture, technology, DIY programming and text, making experimental scenic and sensorial experiences. Their practice moves between making performances in a collaborative manner, performing for others, institutional critique, teaching, dramaturgy and writing. By crafting how various scenic mediums come together to choreograph the audience's perception and attention, Gry explores how to set the conditions for a dance which takes place more in the body and imagination of the audience, then on stage in front of them. Their work has been presented in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway and France in theatres as well as in museums and galleries.

www.grytingskog.com

I begin with a list:





























My writing soon abandons the form I’ve given myself. The frame I borrowed, for obvious
reasons. In its familiarity I also begin one about groceries. Itemizing phenomena into things, and as the things stack up, they testify to the frameworks that defined them as such in the first place.

I think I have a dysfunctional relationship to lists. In periods I make them religiously, trying to get my shit together. Probably, “getting shit together” is a poor starting point for any practice, and why I forever will make lists and not practice lists. Anyhow, my list from dead dead document doesn’t aspire for aptness as it materializes memories through this act of externalization. The deep-etched practice, both mnemonic and associative, begins an indexed narration of my situated experience. Soon, it accelerates my recalling, the form too slow to follow suit. The list-writer is forever imbued with incompleteness. The negative space of the list, in-between the lines, is not as much a blank canvas as an invisible trace. It whispers of trains of thought, associative pathways ventured and abandoned, an intricate choreography of situated, structural and subjective links. The tension between the lines a space where subjectivity manifests. This time I thank the inherent quality of incompletion as it leads me to new corners of dead dead document.

Before there were lists there were two bodies. Still, yet active. There are speeds in these
bodies, constituted by layered temporalities of simultaneous doings. In Lisa’s and Tuuli’s
bodies reigns a pace and rhythm of movement easy to disregard in an everyday setting, but which dance is trained in perceiving, and which dance summons to craft cognitive and
perceptual apparatuses attuned to notice them, which, in a collective form, is a thing some call a performance.

A soft busyness, a continuum of attention and the rhythm, rupture and discontinuity in the
trajectory of that attention. This subterranean vibrancy moves inside, across and sometimes despite of various organizations. There was my perception of these bodies, in these states, engaged in these tasks, as a perceptual playground, where Sensation is an unruly kid high on stimuli and Attention is the parent desperately trying to keep up.

It is Attention that will later write the lists. Attention’s list speaks to interest and importance, revealing Attention’s priorities and capacities. And Sensation will probably be more or less surprised or pleased to notice what was brought to Attention’s awareness.

The lists trace Attention’s journey through the dance and collects stops along the way: the
spot on the wall, a sensation in a muscle, a sound, a visual composition from the vantage point of the body’s current arrangement in space. The lists, assigning language to dancing, perform a portal between Sensation and Attention, extending this introspective labour of Tuuli and Lisa outward, depth made surface via direct address. A self-unfolding that is also a going-back-into-itself, a pore where the surface coils over to become its own inside.

The lists support my attention in its movement across spaces, dispositifs and forms of
attentions. As I begin to move between the two rooms in MDT’s basement, I crouch down to read the list Tuuli has just written. In the other room, my attention shifts to read the lists that fold to cover the publication It absorbs. My attention shapeshifts yet again, attuning to another framework governed by social codes and habits. I return to the initial configuration, to hear Lisa read a list aloud.

What does the list as a written object do? I inquire performatively. Mine tend to be forgotten, not extended enough authority to sustain my own accountability. A list relates to time in a sometimes implied way (a grocery list indicates an immediate future, or a “best movies of 2023” a concrete measure of time, a bucket list the remainder of life), others more in the abstract (a list of contacts indicates a lifetime of relations, a bibliography list the past of a text). The lists made by Lisa and Tuuli in Oda’s performance document things attended to and noticed while dancing. The scenically newly introduced upright position invites my reading of an organizing principle, Attention supplied with a system of valorization and discrimination, a map to navigate through the storm of perceptual information at hand. The list is where Attention stages this labor. The list is where language performs, as meaning and reference, as deferral and erasure. The list is where another dispositif is introduced, zooming in on other scales of attention, activity and performativity.

Once the list is written it is read. After the list is read it falls. On the ground, the title rings in my ears. This document to attended experience, killed. Falling, the paper breaks all
dramaturgical rules. A signified and a signifier, falling together in this theatrical death. I smile at the sudden drama. In its wake quivers incompletion, the things the list couldn’t or wouldn’t contain. The list is also a place where phenomena overstep the confines of thinghood, uncontainable within the organizing principle at work. Through the porousness made by the list’s incompletion whispers a sensorial perspective that appears in the cracks and blind spots of Attention. Beyond the lists’ attempt to archive this dance I assume an ode to the parts played by Unruly Attention, Undisciplined Thought and Uncaptured Sensation, in a back-stage role-reversal shadow play about the perceived that wasn’t as attended, or intended. I look at the documents, to notice all that has escaped. Maybe they survived by remaining ephemeral.

In the end my Attention has relaxed to fire its own masters to notice the various doings and activities that live here, together, and the various forms of attention roaming between them.

The colour profile of the performers’ clothes in relation to the audience’s clothes and how all the white
surfaces reflect light
Still, yet very active bodies
A cart that later makes a satisfying and disgusting noise
Breathing, but not my own
Faces and the speed of eye movements
A sub subbing a speaker
Papers, camouflaging against the white dance mat
A while, before I notice them
Bodies organizing and re-organizing (performers, audience, later: words, lights, books)
One organization makes Lisa’s hair quiver
A room where all the books are
My desire and overwhelm wanting to read them all, right away
The architectural joining of these spaces and how a joint separates to connect
A score, slowly unfolding
The ventilation system, every time it turns off
My cold nose
Fleeting interesting-part-awkward mingle conversations
Having them
Hearing them as they leak into the room to mingle with the soundscape for the dance
6 floodlights (my favourite) with diffusion filters
Working light-style flood lights lighting up the wall
A crafted three-hour dramaturgy and how my spatial decisions DJs my experience of it
Bodies and books moving between the spaces
More and more books migrating from one room into the other

BY GRY TINGSKOG