Navigating black boxes with Grace and Love
In the last few years I started to spend again some time in dance studios and black boxes. My relationship with these spaces is complicated and ambiguous, as the following notes might show:
“Yesterday evening I went to the studio and stayed up late. I listened to music, I couldn’t do anything else, but it was nice. I remembered being in the studios at CNDB, more than 10 years ago, most times not really working. It was more an atmosphere for reflection, contemplation. I was wandering around the studio and letting things go through my head and through my body. From time to time I would lie on the floor. Sometimes I would play some music. It was not directly productive, but sometimes ideas or desires to try something appeared. Completely different from being at home. First of all, less staying online. It was a space and time for reflection and potentiality more than anything. Later I learned that a studio is not always indispensable for that, yet, it helps a lot in setting this kind of open atmosphere.” (22.05.2022 TFB Berlin)
“I remember feeling a bit lost during a July heat wave in a residency at Station Belgrade in 2016. My everyday going to the studio started to feel hollow, as my entire presence in the dance world. I realized that the performance environment makes me betray my practice, to transform it into spectacle. And didn’t want to do that to Unexperiences, my work at the time. One day I just decided to stop going to the dance studio and started to work in the ghosted city (because of the heat), mostly in parks. I was thinking that my way of working with the mysterious capacity of the body to affect and be affected can be enough, no need to make it entertainment. For me it was and it is fascinating to do it and see it, but not so much for the dance / performance scenes, or contemporary art world in general. They kind of expect entertainment, more and more.” (24.01.2025)
“It feels like a cycle is closing. I hope so. I was in France during a residency in 2009 when I was stolen from my body by the internet. I remember exactly how the pleasure of being in the studio, of being in a creative process, was quickly extinguished by joining Facebook, and especially Twitter. My time in the studio suddenly switched from a playful joy to a chore, to work. I didn’t understand why, but I also didn’t worry too much because, in tone with the optimism of that time, I was seeing social media as nothing less than revolutionary – the old politics of manipulation and top down manufacturing of consent would be finally defeated because everyone was getting a voice – a truly democratic collective mind was forming, and I was contributing to it, I was part of the revolution. Well, it was indeed a revolution. A revolutionary disembodiment, and not only mine, unfortunately… All this was precipitated also because somewhere in 2010 I stopped having easy access to a studio and plenty of access to the phone.
Now it starts to feel possible again to just enjoy being here in a studio, doing nothing, just walking around in a state of light contemplation, pensiveness mixed with boredom, without reaching for my phone. Like in my previous life, I’m again using the studio as a stage for embodied thinking – a light space for intuition, sensibility, creativity. But I’m also sad to realize that I lost for so many many years this special way of being, which I don’t know if I can still resuscitate.
On the other hand, because I didn’t have a studio at my disposal, I developed a practice of instilling a conceptual studio frame and ambience wherever I am (at home, in parks, on trains) at will, by intending so. And when this works, it feels good and liberating, but I do it rarely, unfortunately. Also my public space works are a consequence of this studio loss / expansion.” (25.04.2026, Agora Montpellier)
“We’re in this big studio, perfect for big productions, and all we do is to engage with these subtle body affectivity. Yet, it makes sense to explore Love here, as it makes sense to show it in big venues, precisely because of this contrast with the context. You expect images, objects or bodies doing some sort of “performance”, and you’re encountering love, or maybe nothing, because nowadays the affective receptivity is mostly gone. This is a place for choreographing bodies, for training and controlling them in order to be able to provide dance, representations, performance. Returning after a long time in dance studios, I somehow registered their energy, and I automatically entered a control, contemporary dance mode of being. Not anymore, now my body, especially my left hand, entered a kind of blessing of the space and of the world beyond the 4 walls. It’s not an image, it’s not making fun of…” (06.05.2023, Tanzfabrik studio, Berlin)
Also, in the Unsorcery book there are two chapters that explore and conceptually expand the “black box”.
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This year Eliza Trefas invited me to join in her Grace exploration (thank you). We decided that it might be interesting, at least for us, to meet, contrast and overlap in the same time and space our projects Grace and Love. After 3 weeks of residency and a presentation in Agora Montpellier now we’re close to the end of one month residency in Teatro Comandini Cesena (we will have a presentation on May 27, 17h, if you happen to be in the region and interested).
The next phase of our encounter will happen at Uferstudios Berlin.
“Grace” seeks an encounter between its meaning in dance and a broader sense of grace as found, for example, in mysticism. In spiritual contexts, it refers to a mysterious state, received rather than produced; a blessing that comes upon you. Eliza approaches “Grace” in its wide spectrum: from wilfully spiritual (forms of attention) to playfully formal (can we dance in graceful ways?), from grace as spirit that guides the dancer, to grace as beauty, charismatic trickery in the body. She is interested in bringing (back) a possibility for spirit into the body, for dance to happen out of a negotiation between effort and grace, dedication and abandon, passion and unknown. A dance at the edge with the unknown, a groove that’s in the heart.
“Love” explores practices for embodying love – hypersensibility, ecstatic affects, subtle affective connections with things around – love in its expanded sense, as the affective base of reality, which, in a mysterious way, sensible bodies can sometimes sense and affect. In Love, the charged sensible bodies are inserted in “inappropriate” contexts where something else is already happening – from art spaces to supermarkets and anything in between (a dance presentation in this case). Their sensibility brings a contrast that can performatively interfere with the normality of those contexts, temporary zones of possibility might open. Since affects are contagious, the entire atmosphere and situation can be affected. Artworks are usually visual, movement, sound or conceptual based. Love is love based.
