This work literally begins with a huge cloth, pliable and resistant. A surface, then, which will cover all features, hinder any movement, and separate the concealed from the revealed. But also, a surface for you to find shelter under, take new shapes through, self-withdraw behind, sustain your integrity by.

Rather than as the disclosing of form and meaning, undercover advocates choreography as an active ”concealment” in both a literal and a metaphoric sense. The project argues for the gesture of art, not only as the re-covering of the forbidden, segregated, or otherwise repressed, but also, and perhaps most importantly, as the language chosen by the uncompelled recondite. Thereby also recognizing the act of non-disclosure as a political strategy by choice.

The project refers to the concept of fold as formulated by philosopher Gilles Deleuze through his reading of Leibniz and baroque aesthetics. Fold stands here for the turning of surface onto itself, whereby surface exposes a virtual ”internal” depth, not by ”unfolding” itself, rather by surrendering to the ”revealing powers of the chiaroscuro of light”.

undercover is one hour long, repeated four times per day, one hour after the other. Audiences are welcomed to attend just one hour, or stay for as long as they wish.

Performed by Anja Arnquist, Philip Berlin, Louise Dahl, Samuel Draper, photography Dajana Lothert

undercover unfolds:

the exhibition cloth.00

the installation cloth interactive

cloth.00

Choreography is not translatable, but easily transferred onto other bodies, shapes, materiality, and fields. That’s the very prerogative of the pattern in motion.

cloth.00 allows choreography to reinvent itself into things/images whereby it loses one appearance from another. Piles of soaps, rugs in a heap, skin like rubber in abundance, films from above, photos from underneath, and a huge cloth, all stating the iterability of the gesture of art. From the concept to a body, to a projection, to a thing, and back to the concealed. Layer upon layer of transpositions, each layer turning choreography into something else, whilst allowing it to remain the same. Projected, and revealed anew.

Finally, recognized as a repetition of the trans-(ap)parent, hanging from above, fully disclosed and yet the most concealing leafing of all.

performers on screen Emelie Johansson, Cilla Olsen
photography Håkan Larsson
film and editing Madeleine Lindh

first installed in 2013, this is the fifth edition of the exhibition

trailer

cloth interactive

A huge, black cloth is spread out on the floor. Unknown figures dance under the covers. The cloth hides their bodies and prevents all their movements, itself wrapping them tightly, rippling its own flat surface into unimaginable shapes. Under the cloth, dancing is an intimate, tactile, skin to surface experience. Anyone who watches from the outside, on the other hand, sees the rippling ocean of the cloth, and the clair obscure play of light much like in the draping of the Baroque. Spectacular, sometimes threatening images emerge, conveying something other than the dance that takes place beneath the surface. The underlying sensory sensation concealed and at the same time revealed anew. Visitors are encouraged to join the under-cover dancing. Under the cloth, deprived of oversight, they will perceive the limits of their contours, whilst we on the outside will sense the unlimited potential of form. Inside and outside interdependently diverging.

The installation directly refers to the art installation ‘All’ by Maurizio Cattelan.

performers/facilitators Anja Arnquist, Philip Berlin, Louise Dahl, Samuel Draper

premiered in 2011 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the piece has been performed extensively in various contexts and for audiences of all ages and kind

cloth excerpts

“Page after page, she said, while the lash line bent over the bay”*

what if choreography never tells a new story, rather always one and the same ragbag of different moves?
one move after the other, every move lingering into the next, spooning one another into long chains of diversities
eyes fixed on the dancing at its core, bare to the bone, stripped of former staging, unhinged from previews coherence
minimal difference all over the place, properly aligned, holding one another dear

spoons render the recurrence of likeness, intricacy of movement, and overall dispersion of narratives, which have sustained a decade of work on language off track.

*Citation from the novel Här, här och här här och här, här här här och här, här., by Anja Arnquist and Madeleine Lindh, driven by cc

spoons bring to display three choreographies and one film suite:

att att5.7

The Untouchable Mild Ones

Here, here and here here and here, here here here and here, here.

“Onto the edge that shows you, she thought, while the fingertip pointed out the places on the map”*

att att5.7

Strangers with their nervous systems hanging outside travel a place they do not understand. Literally soundless, they dance with great specificity. We look and find it less then palpable. Perhaps their hard drives aren’t fully programmed, or much too advanced for us to grasp. Then, without any warning, they unpack our senses and headfirst we fall into pleasure.

A pack of uncertain figures arrives from elsewhere. Odd-looking, spineless upright, they seem transfixed by the unspoken and end up performing no one’s body. Still, where no one body comes forth and no clear meaning is exposed, other figures speak up for themselves, claiming ambiguity to be allowed.

Spineless upright they take a stand and make a statement
Straight through Inwardly bent
Totally entangled with the post-traumatic syndrome of their whiteness
Hunting down the kind of dancing/language/field which is not to be consumed yet no one can resist
Which runs a technological project of its own
Run by the micromalic and its affective spillage
Which performs much too much information and at the same time leaves much too little information

The project emerges from the transpositions of predetermined movement sequences, whilst reading an essay. The dancers devote themselves to absolute accuracy of description of a model by resisting interpretation and otherwise seizing strategy. And as they dance with unconditional loyalty to the given, they perform themselves and otherwise choreographies. For us neither to understand or ever possess, rather to allow and let go of.

Ever since its premiere in 2012, att att has been performed by several constellations of dancers in different formats and various contexts, such as within the choreo-drift project in Berlin, at MoMA PS1 in New York, at Slouch in Philadelphia, and lately as part of the retrospective Midsommar 2021 at Hallen in Stockholm Farsta.

Current version presented at KINDL, is named att att5.7

performed by Ulrika Berg, Philip Berlin, Louise Dahl, Jim De Block, Samuel Draper, Adam Schütt, Kristiina Viiala
dance material June material by Cristina Caprioli
text reference Att att dröngrajma by Johan Jönson

att att trailer

The Untouchable Mild Ones

To be dancing so incredibly precise
To distribute oneself into so many pieces
And behave like a fog
Whilst you restrain from ostentation
And cultivate a colorless barricade

To cultivate the silent incommensurable untouchable. To travel by an oscillation that can neither be bribed, nor owned, only acknowledged, and left behind.

To enter a place and stay in that place. And therein dance the dance which dances you. That dance that is somewhat ceremonial, but not pretentious, clearly dysfunctional, yet with the outstanding capacity to perform the hyper-real and by that to bring the entire room to relate to the unconscious and to its illimited production of desire. So that she who enter the haze come out as someone else, knowing this is an obfuscation no one can resist.

So you hunt a high-frequency silence
The kind of a-chromatic (white) silence
Whilst you desist from exuberance yet overspend unaccounted precision
With no need of validation
Her entire body a question of what mildness may pave for

Two female figures move into a haze they take for granted. Uneven in their contours, utterly vague, yet unusually clear-minded, they dance several choreographies with no start and no end. Consistently gentle, unaffected in every untuned tone of theirs, they blend into one image alone, distant, ungraspable, what slightest sight could make you cry.

As if they were the final evidence of mildness, of what mildness might achieve.

performed by Ulrika Berg, Louise Dahl, Hana Erdman, Morgane Nicol, Louise Perming
photography Dajana Lothert

Here, here and here here and here, here here here and here, here.

This is a choreography committed to the overlapping of scriptures. Real and virtual, right here and over there.

The work involves a daily practice of reading, dancing, writing, and filming at once, folding one page at the time, moving one narrative over the next.

The work also cultivates the shifting moods of a young girl in a cosmopolitan body. Feminine at its core, half of two, always more than one, eager to travel far, she targets unknown horizons, from Stockholm to Medelpad, via Paris to Las Vegas, then walks the desert, gets lost on the shore. Aimless, with a clear sense of purpose, she wonders.

The project ran between 2011 – 2016, and now again in 2021/2022, overtime producing several publications, installations and performances, presented in various formats in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Florence, and Copenhagen. After ten years and several children, this choreography continues to feed its wonder.

The project brings two dances:

She thought
HERE.

and the film suite ”Onto the edge that shows you, she thought, while the fingertip pointed out the places on the map”

performed by Anja Arnquist, Madeleine Lindh
photography Dajana Lothert