Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.08.2011, Page 28

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13 — 2011
Last year, the promotional poster for
the Reykjavík Dance Festival fea-
tured a late-twenties dancer wear-
ing shorts and a flesh-coloured
bra standing with her back against
a wall, one-foot and chin up, star-
ing aggressively at the viewer. The
stark but startling image seemed
to promise something new and un-
usual, more concerned with ideas
than stage pictures. If there was
any bounce in ticket sales—it might
have been responsible.
The premiere of Margrét Sara Guðjóns-
dóttir’s 'Soft Target,’ the work the image
derived from, revealed a work that was
as intriguing—and as irresolvable—as
the picture. Clearly, many people were
captivated: ‘Soft Target’ was booked at
venues throughout Europe, including
Springdance in the Netherlands and
Tanz im August/Sommer.bar in Berlin. I
found ‘Soft Target’ to be ambitious and
original—yet I wasn’t sure if it managed
to convey something novel about per-
ception or the perceived/perceiver gap,
the topics it claimed to be about.
INTENSE AND CEREBRAL
Over email from Berlin, where she
currently lives and works, Margrét
Sara turns out to be as intense and
cerebral as her work. Balanchine may
have claimed to begin his work when
he walked into the studio, but Margrét
Sara “work[s] on what I want to com-
municate and how I can communicate it
months before entering the dance stu-
dio.” She prefers to work with a dancer
other than herself, even when she is
creating a solo for a female performer,
in order to gain distance.
At this year’s Reykjavík Dance Fes-
tival, Margrét Sara will premiere 'Dedi-
cation,' a half-hour performance for
one dancer that is part of her research
process towards a full-evening work,
'Variations On Closer.' That final piece,
which will involve four dancers and a
lighting designer, couldn’t be realised
in time for the festival because of fund-
ing constraints.
Margrét Sara describes ‘Dedication’
as having an autobiographical impe-
tus—“doing artistic work is a struggle
you have to be dedicated to”—but its
purview is, of course, larger. "Creativity
can even come from dedication," Mar-
grét Sara posits. As research, she is
conducting a discussion series, ‘Dedi-
cation2,’ about freedom (and, presum-
ably, its relation to dedication) with at
least thirty performance makers. She’s
also doing studio work “on different
types of body awareness and […] stage
presence” and the “resurrection of past
experiences living/stored in the body
memory of the performer.”
‘THE GAZE’
I asked Margrét Sara why she thought
that abstract ideas like those of ‘Soft
Target’ or ‘Dedication’ were well-suited
to exploration in dance or theatre. She
answered that perception, how we “ex-
perience, watch, read into, interpret,
sense, make sense” was a big interest,
and “how and what makes you experi-
ence in a new way” a favourite ques-
tion; these things were obviously ap-
propriate for the stage.
In ‘Soft Target,’ she was particularly
interested in “the gaze and how we re-
ceive through the visual allowing pro-
jection to decide what it is that we see.”
Often, she says “Looking through the
eyes of our past experiences is block-
ing us from having "new" experiences.
We have already decided what is what,
which is an automatic animalistic reflex
to survive.” She points out that the “ag-
gression of the projection that takes
place between the observed and the
observer in the theatre space is par-
allel to real life.” As a choreographer,
she says, she “like[s] to work with and
against this human reflex.”
THE MYSTERY REMAINS
Margrét Sara also explains that some
of the confusion felt by viewers of her
work is intentional; her work is “pur-
posefully obscure.” In ‘Soft Target,’ she
used “the androgynous look of the half
naked dancer […] as a confusing first
layer image,” and in ‘Dedication,’ she
is attempting to “neutralise the per-
formers’ appearance and blur the lines
of any familiar shapes and gestures”
which she hopes will open up “a dif-
ferent kind of a shared non-verbal and
non-image-based communication/ex-
perience with the audience.”
This is thought-provoking—but still
leaves what ‘Dedication’ will look or
feel like opaque. There is the fact that
Margrét Sara names Romeo Castellucci
and Ivo Dimchev as performance art-
ists whose work she most enjoys. The
work of these men is concerned with
ideas, but it is also visual, loud and,
well, dramatic. Ivo makes himself bleed
in several of his performances, and Ro-
meo’s latest work includes the pouring
of (fake) shit all over the stage. Some
of Margrét Sara’s earlier work (for in-
stance, ‘Dead Meat’ with Knut Berger)
has lacked the austerity of ‘Soft Target.’
Without doubt, though, an email ex-
change is not going to remove much of
the mystery, and Margrét Sara seems to
like it that way.
Dance | Party
Dedicated To Obscurity
Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir would like you to experience something new
“At this year’s Reykjavík
Dance Festival, Margrét
Sara will premiere
'Dedication,' a half-hour
performance for one
dancer.”
Bankastræti
Læ
kja
rg
at
a
Austurstræti
HafnarstrætiAð
al
st
ræ
ti
Geirsgata
Harpa
Tryggvagata
G
ar
ða
st
ræ
ti
Find us at Tryggvagata 11, 101 Reykjavík
EXPERIENCE
THE FORCE
OF NATURE
Our two excellent films on eruptions
in Iceland start on the hour every hour.
The films are shown in english
except at 09:00 and 21:00 when
they are in german.
Volcano House also has an excellent
café, Icelandic design shop and booking
service for travels within Iceland.
Opening hours: 8:30 - 23:00
www.volcanohouse.is
‘Dedication’ will be shown at the Kex hostel at 20:00 on
September 7 and 8, and at 18: 00 on September 9.
Words
S. Anne Steinberg
Photo
Guðjón Einarsson