WORKSHOP BY METTE EDVARDSEN

WRITTEN BY JENNIFER LACEY

BIO

Jennifer lacey is dance artist raised in New York City. Based in Paris for over 20 years she is currently an assistant Professor at Stockholm University of the arts where she directs the MA program in choreography.

A partial report of the experience of a workshop of three days and a performance of 45 minutes, transmitted by the artist Mette Edvardsen.


Mette
The floor circle (convention of many kinds of dance communities, used to be with each other to learn)
23 people who are definitely dancers but not in the same way(s)
Time
Ekphrasis as an activity not a subject. ( look it up)
Language
Mette
Time (a different sort)
Some kind of love










Ok, so the above actually happened in the time of writing that is presented. 1,2,3,4. I was busy describing the group in my notebook, Mette began to lead by naming what I, and perhaps others were busy seeing.

M. proposes the notion of Ekphrasis as a place to work. Simply defined, this is the describing of a work of art to make it appear elsewhere than where it is. We will do magic in a circle, transporting things without ever moving.

I know Mette, a little bit, but for a long time. I have only seen two of her works (big fan). This spooky beginning confirms for me that the transmission of whatever her ‘work’ is, it passes through a materiality that is atmospheric. I am not sure how she does it. She is clear and spare with her interventions, both as workshop leader and as a choreographer. However the material in/at work is less graspable: the what-ever substance generated by conscious poetic embodiment. Mette works this energetic material that is a byproduct of a commitment to detailed , witnessed embodiment ( let’s say dancing).








We describe our mornings by writing them down and reading them. This is what we have in common:
The snooze button, soy milk, frozen spinach, meds, other bodies, feet, coffee, dog, thermos, dream, PHONE, weather, snooze button, snooze button, wisdom tooth cleaning, peanut butter, porridge, banana, liminal state, soy milk







The Pillow Book is a work that has accompanied me in several projects and still does. It is a book of lists and descriptions in the form of literature that is pretending not to be literature. Possibly because this was written a bit early for literature, in the 1st century. And Sei is a woman. Here are some of her lists: Things That Fall From the Sky; Things That Should Be Large; Things Worth Seeing; Squalid Things.

The books that Mette has brought into the room work on everyone through their very book-ness. We gloss over them, discuss them and sit in their presence. We eventually read aloud, around the circle ( mais oui), but this is not the only way the texts/ books/ art objects are acting on us.







….









Somehow, this is not the same as what I think, or maybe it is. The objects of transmission that I have made (do make do make do make do make do make) are deliberately shoddy carriers, full of holes so we notice the circulation of sense and sensation. During Mette’s presentation at MDT I am grateful, admirative and just greedy for what she gives: a precise series of constructions that are aerated in a different way than leaving gaping holes, a sophisticated engineering of perception and use of time as a material.






















This is what happened during Mette’s workshop: 23 people sat in a circle for three days and had a conversation about the act of description, paying attention to and giving all our creative tools to the service of bringing ‘something else’ into the room. This conversation mostly avoided distraction or ass cramps.

( bored bored bored bored bored. It happens it happens it happens it happens it happens)

This discussion included points of view that did not seek to be agreement with each other but in communion with each other. Everyone brought their language to the table between us. None of us were naming directly the thing of which we were speaking . We all knew and know that the work we were doing . The making of something detailed and temporary ( let say a dance) that exceeds language and also prompts it. Everyone said what they meant and the meaning gathered beyond the inadequate or too specific ways we use to describe our body thoughts.



The tension between languaging and dancing is a specific materiality which some dance artists work as material, some work with the body as that material, some ignore it and some are in thrall to it.

I feel ( love) that Mette touches this material directly with her hands, with her tongue as a hand, with her voice as a hand, with her attunement as a hand, her body as a hand. The sculpture she makes, in workshop or on stage proposes a way of attending, a specific calibration of the substance of time. I am not quite sure how she does it. Probably with a longer deadline I could un-mystery it but I am very happy not to. Instead I will attend to Mette and her work as a possibility of transmission, to me and whoever is there to receive it. My western style intellect ( ideally disembodied from everything but the body of a word) could then play with it and that is fun. But it’s not where the transmission lies.

There is a dense activation being in the force field of Mette’s work, in engaging in what is necessary for those of us attending. The attention we give in response to how she holds the space is the very material she needs to hold the space. It’s a mobius loop. Cutting it to smaller parts makes it something else. Let’s leave it there then


End of Wednesday
Chrysa says: “Alice had the most perfect beautiful holes in her socks”


LOOP LOOP LOOP LOOP LOOP

*This incantation of five is directly lifted from Mette’s work. I have never seen it but in the work shop Mette used this repetition as a concrete method that was contextualized slowly over time but immediately usable and useful.

Hello everyone. I am so late with the deadline for this that you may never see it. I know for a fact I am not the only person struggling with mood, concentration and sense of purpose in this very violent moment. It is challenging to continue to believe in the power of a nuanced body and in the proposition that dancing is a powerful strategy to escape the discomfort and brutality of the symbolic while still being bound together. JL

CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE CIRCLE

Ingredients:

1. The circle has 23 parts . There are many versions of sweaters. The socks tend towards the thin and ankle length.
2. CIRCLE: an oval with a bulge on its lower right side if we are oriented towards the circle enabler (Mette E)
3. All the socks hug the contours of the feet, making their shapes personality filled, desirable and communicative.
4. Mette speaks into the waiting group and says: “there seems to be a theme around feet.”

Monday

Still Monday

Bambi sweater, deep-forest-pond-moss green, three flowers approaching Bambi’s belly from the waistline. Expensive?

is ‘open’ akin to Resistant when ‘open’ is an incomplete description?

1. Lists, I think on the subway, something about lists and listing re describing
2. I come into studio 11 and Mette has brought a pile of books, the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is among them.

D asks: how far can you go into the details of a description, ie how long can it last before digression?

Digressions= the mixing of the object/thing described and the describer.

Wednesday

I start getting bored and Imagine describing my pants ( no voice, only haptic hands) and then letting that be inhabited by dance. I can do this without disturbing the circle.

She (Mette) lets the conversation go-she is not stressed by its length. What is it like to ‘do’ this?
What is it like to do this kind of holding.

Delay. Suspension. Gap. Stay in the place of bringing something before it becomes something.

This workshop is the suspended gap between arriving at a workshop and the doing of a workshop. The main material is the meta-material of Mette’s curiosity and the specific perception of time and space it transmits. She claims it’s not a method, but it is definitely a technique.

Mette: ‘It’s not so usual to be in a room like this, with 23 opinions.’

The way we can stay in this conversation is by using the experience we all have in respecting the Complexity of Doing: doing the body through not--useful movements that are both more and less concrete than the words we use to describe them. We are speaking in depth and detail but the speech is not the same as the thing we are speaking of, and we know it.

Tuesday

transcribed in italics,

commented in regular old )

do

Notebook (

I THINK: the doing of transmission does not hold all of the body of the transmitted thing but the rest of this body may be captured anyway by the receiver of the transmission, with or without direct perception.

But as soon as I write this Mette says, again, that the Ekphrasis becomes independent of either transmitter or receiver.

The “independent object” of the ekphresis can be activated without the creator.