O – Ordinary body
K – Kiellettyjen ajatusten residenssi.

by Arttu Palmio & Marika Peura
 

Ordinary body, aesthetics, privacy, the ideal of the unattainability of contemporary dance, dancing

We started working at Kutomo in February 2021. We came together to have an open dialogue, to discuss, read, and move. But most of all, we came together to talk about our own agency in the world: redefining our professionalism, and defining the roles of agency for ourselves in a meaningful way – in relation to the world as it is now. What kind of power and responsibility does my body hold? Simultaneously, the desire to define for ourselves the history of contemporary dance, its fleeing world of meanings and, haunting in the background, the pervasive ideology of whiteness.

Starting from the basics, deconstructing the dances in us, movement by movement. In which reality does this body move? And what happens in the streets while I’m moving in the studio?

We met in 2016 while working together on the same project as dancers. We share the same profession, movement-based performing, and we both studied at the same institution, although not at the same time. We are not looking for a common voice, claim, or truth, but instead, we stand somewhere in between collegiality and dialogue. We focus on the experientiality of the lived body, aiming at finding ways to materialise discourses in the language of art.

The body is at the core of our work. It’s the medium on which we focus and for which we give our appreciation. It’s the definition – a way to exist in the world. Not dance but dancing.

Asking questions is rooted in the methodology of practising contemporary art, but it is not about problematisation. Instead: what if I stayed even if the subject was too large, difficult, dense? What if I stayed even if the subject didn’t make me stay? What if these questions weren’t only left for the bodies that structurally suffer from them? What if asking wasn’t a way to produce content or new definitions or answers about the world but instead a genuine desire to be intimate with something you can’t control, verbalise, or solve? Dreaming is responsibility.

Z-Lab is the second part of the project and its first public showing. The residence is a space where the working partners seek for bodily means to reflect on these questions.

The project has been supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and Ehkä-production / contemporary art space Kutomo.