Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.04.2018, Qupperneq 22

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Ever-changing and always surpris-
ing: these words could be the tagline
of dancer, singer, choreographer and
creator Melkorka Sigríður Magnúsdót-
tir. The artist defies every label and
genre you could pin her down in, push-
ing outside the box of traditional art
forms with every new project she pro-
duces. From her dance-performance-
turned-party-band Milkywhale to her
recent pop opera Vakúm, Melkorka, in
one word, innovates.
In person, she’s just as captivating.
Animated and often silly, her thoughts
are non-linear, meandering through
ideas until eventually circling back in
an “aha!” moment, where you realise
that everything she said was related.
It’s a trait that makes her seem more
like a scholarly intellectual than an
artist—but really, she’s both.
Calm changement
“I started studying dance when I was
around six years old,” says Melkorka,
as we sit in Kaffibrennslan. It’s sunny
outside so we have the place to our-
selves. “I think it was a way to deal with
my hyperactivity. I definitely would
have been diagnosed today with some-
thing if that diagnosis was around
then,” she laughs. “But it shaped me,
and sold me on ballet.”
It’s interesting that ballet educa-
tion—which is notoriously rigorous,
strict, and physically challenging—
was what calmed her down. Perhaps
it was the concentrated accomplish-
ment of the discipline; the unrelent-
ing focus on perfecting
m i nute movements.
Dedicating your time
and body to that creates
a thirst for detail, which
can easily be seen in
her artwork nowadays.
“Ballet is about dis-
cipline,” she tells me. “It
is an art form that you
start the earliest and
end the earliest. You
have such a short life in
dance and you get the
most criticism and the
lowest salaries, so you
have to be super pas-
sionate about it.” She
pauses. “It’s a complex
subject that I could talk
endlessly about.”
Inside/outside the box
After graduating, her studies took a
non-traditional turn for a ballerina,
taking her at age seventeen to an ex-
perimental choreography study pro-
gram in Amsterdam.
“Everyone was so different there
and it was just an explosion,” says Mel-
korka. “Ballet is a high art but some-
times you can see the best dance in
someone’s apartment at a party. I had
never experienced that before.”
While it was technically a choreog-
raphy study, Melkorka explains it was
more akin to performance in a wider
sense. “You learn how to be a maker
there,” she says. “For me, it was per-
fect. I had always been in the box, and
this was completely outside the box, so
it made me look at things differently.”
Having now learned about the
fringe and alternative sides of dance,
she enrolled in a more orthodox bal-
let program in Brussels, later joining
a dance company there. “It was a very
hardcore school,” she says in a more
sombre tone. “It had been a longtime
dream of mine to go there and be in that
company, but I was very unhappy.” She
gives a small smile. “It wasn’t for me.”
Melkorka then took up the life of
a freelance choreographer, which of-
ten meant spending up to 8 months of
the year travelling. “It’s a strange life,”
she says. “You never really know where
home is.”
Casio & Chinese dances
Melkorka found stability with a group
of her Amsterdam classmates when
they formed John The Houseband in
2008. The project is pretty meta, aim-
ing to blur the line between a band and
an art installation. While the group
does go on stage and play concerts,
they hope to mix the idea of musi-
cal performance with performance
in general. All of the members are
trained performers rather than musi-
cians, so the project questions what
being a musician means. Of course, all
of this is overshadowed
by the fact that were you
not familiar with their
artistic aims, you’d just
think they were a great
band.
“On our first gig, no
one really knew how to
play music that well,”
Me l k or k a e x p l a i n s .
“We had this little Ca-
sio piano that when
you pressed it went…”
she pauses then sings
a cheesy keyboard tune
before laugh i ng. “It
got a great reaction,
and it was so different
from the contemporary
dance world where ev-
eryone just sits there in
the audience super si-
lent and focused like...” she puts her
hand under her chin, and furrows her
brow. “We’re all musicians that have
never been trained in music. But we
are also just a crazy group of people
who do crazy projects together.”
Most recently, the group joined up
with the NorrlandsOperan Symphony
Orchestra for a production of Tchai-
kovsky’s ‘The Nutcracker’. Instead of
following Tchaikovsky’s take on the
tale, they decided to create their own
story and perform cover songs from
the ballet. “So we would do a cover of
‘Chinese Dance’ and then the sym-
phony orchestra would play the origi-
nal version,” she says. “For me, it was
a once in a lifetime opportunity and I
was very nervous, I’m not going to lie.”
Words:
Hannah Jane
Cohen

Photos:
Juliette Rowland
“I find it so
interesting
that there’s
this idea that
once upon
a time there
was one per-
son who made
sound and
that was the
first sound in
the world.” Melkorka Sigríður Magnúsdóttir
Melkorka,
The Maker
From choreographed concerts
to a musical about genesis

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