Thirty years after staging Heiner Müller’s ‹Hamletmachine›, Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg returns to theatre with renewed enthusiasm, attending closely to the differences between theatre’s poetic genealogy and the aesthetic worlds that emerge through dance.

What if theatre were no longer organised around expression, conflict or moral dilemma, asking the audience to excavate meaning from what unfolds before them? What if it could instead become a landscape: something to enter, wander through and inhabit, where meaning is neither given nor withheld, but takes shape differently for each spectator?

Such a theatre might loosen its ties to histories of extraction and interpretation, replacing them with a more lateral exchange between stage and audience. Rather than being guided through a convincing story, its characters and accumulating dramaturgies, the spectator is invited to navigate—to follow affinities, drift between fragments, linger, remember, imagine, or simply listen.

Having assembled the text, and placing himself on stage, Spångberg approaches theatre as a space in which stories need not be told in order to exist. Instead, theatre becomes an invitation to listen for stories that might appear, almost by themselves.

With and by Mårten Spångberg
Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin As part of Festa, a project initiated by XING, Bologna, Nomad Dance Academy/JSKD, Ljubljana, and Kulturstiftung Vega.

Mårten Spångberg is a Swedish choreographer, writer and curator living in Berlin. For more than three decades, his work has explored choreography as an expanded artistic practice across dance, performance, writing and visual art. His recent work engages ecology, sensation and the politics of aesthetics, questioning Western art’s entanglement with extractivist capitalism while exploring how art might generate experiences beyond identity, representation and meaning.