A parking lot after midnight. Interrupted white lines crisscrossing melancholy. Somebody smoking, cigarette out of the window or leaning against the metal, feelings it’s cold through clothes carrying a day’s misunderstandings, saturated by social interaction with noting in the pockets to hold on to. Parking by night, the moment the key is turned counter clock in order to finish a journey, tears flooding one’s eyes or in order to continue an ongoing conversation.
Nocturnal time spent in a park, void of direction for some. Some animals hunting by night also in the park, French or English, landscapes in which stories find the courage to begin. Parks like dusk have nowhere to go, hosts of transfigurations to which they don’t belong. There between the parking lot and the crepuscular meandering the park, in the increasing Gausian blur where identity is swallowed and sensations gains momentum, something happens or falls over, a moment without lack or longing that like an inhalation makes the world.
For this year’s festival the Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg together with three collaborators revisit and investigate previous performances he presented at Ob/Scene, and continue an obsession with the vague and undefinable in order to discover and share ecologies of the gaze and togetherness. In a poetic chiaroscuro a compositional precision and choreographic laying becomes tangible unfolding without seeming interest giving the viewer the opportunity to enter other and fantastical places, journey to unimaginable locations or simply vanish into a recreational darkness of the soul.
Concept·Realisation: Mårten Spångberg
With and by Park Jin Young, Lee Kyonghoo, Lee Min Jin and Mårten Spångberg
Sound created by Linnea and Viola Martinsson and Mårten Spångberg
Host: Ob/Scene, SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation
Made possible through the support of The Swedish Art Council, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Fonds Darstellende Kunste, Neustart Kultur, Stepping Out.
What new visions can dance prompt upon its future after the grounding apparatuses were thoroughly questioned under the spirit of “non-danse”? Mårtin Spångberg focuses on the very act of dancing as the core of the renewed self-reflexivity. The aesthetic realm that he constructs under the notion of “post-dance” unfolds as a set of gestures aimed at reclaiming the autonomy of dance; the purpose of his methodology comes down to the recognition and activation of the “potentials” of dance that exceed discursive language, as well as the thorough capitalist schemes to dominate language. To the Swedish choreographer who’s been active on stage since 1994, dance is the enduring, if not the last, tool to resist the rampant totalitarian schemes of neoliberalism, the resistance to which he refuses to represent, allegorize, or abstract on stage. Rather, restoring the absolute autonomy of dance is his solution on the fundamental level. For the spectator to encounter the deep affect impelled by art and quit his/her corporate job the day after is to actualize the true effect of “political” art, as opposed to getting bombarded with ideological slogans or political messages. Ob/Scene Festival has been collaborating with him for the past three years on a series of choreographic projects as well as workshops, lectures, and publications in order to support and expand his visions on the future of art.