Your body is not yours

Your body is not yours

An interview with Meg Stuart

I’m Meg Stuart. I’m a dancer-choreographer. I’m from the States. I live in Berlin, and I’ve worked for about 30 years with my company, Damaged Goods, that is based in Brussels.

The body as a container of memories

I think I realised early on that I felt that I was sometimes dancing — memories or traces or… — of maybe people I haven’t met, that actually my dance wasn’t only mine, but somehow I felt like I was accessing other bodies and information. So I was just very curious about how each interaction shapes our body, and in life looking at trauma, or things that are not expressed or the moment when someone steps out of their body or they feel not in their body. So all these relationships where it’s not given in any moment that we’re deeply connected and moving through time and space, but actually there are moments that have kind of created irritations or ruptures where there’s a kind of delay.

And also how to think about presence, or consciousness, and how that can be in movement. How what we pay attention to, and in what way also the body, kind of, expresses an inner growth — like, you know, when you’re talking and someone is moving their hands, or you know, if they have nervous hands or their palms are sweating or something’s related to their breath… You know, all these unintentional movements and how we might have an emotional state but also we might be very much, like, taking on energies of others, or like how we can share an emotion.

So all of this I just kind of sourced, and research as potential choreographic material, and also knowing that looking at one part you can reveal the whole, so just looking at one body part, like to work with the arm, or the head or the face… So, kind of, looking at detail, looking at the details, and through the details seeing it unfold — a whole world unfold through the details.

Sometimes this whole journey has been quite dark because you feel this kind of detachment or absence or disconnection, but over years there has also been a lot of exploration with the dancers about imagination and also this sense that if you have this assumption that the body is not only yours, or that your body is a crossroads and it’s channelling fragments, and different energies and qualities, you can also imagine that you’re channelling and that you’re also… You know, you can be very playful. So it also has that big openness in terms of potential and how we can be not only singular but multiple and multi-dimensional and how we can resonate with the environment.

An evening of solo works

The solo programme is a series of, I would say, portraits, and it ranges, you know, from just some years ago to a solo that I made in 1994, so it arcs a very large span of time and, of course, it’s very strange to go back and perform such an old piece. I still feel very connected to the work, otherwise I wouldn’t be dancing it. But, yes, it’s interesting to see what is timeless, and what is still true and what has shifted. And how, yeah, how does your body need its own history or its own past and how does it adapt to that?

There’s a lot of very small, intimate gestures; like, tiny, tiny movements; tiny actions, so there’s a lot of micro work, almost like the mumble or the utterance or the breath and, again, there’s a lot of play with the imagination, like in this one solo from Hunter, which is a longer piece that I made, I’m drawing different faces and bodies around my body. So I draw them with my hand in the air and then I erase them and then I create spaces and I live in different spaces. So I’m kind of creating a world through drawing around me and then I live in these fictions.

I have a sense that sometimes I not only think about… You know, I work on dancing with memory or memories, real or fictional, but also the memories of a kind of longing for things that didn’t happen; like, you know, when you imagine something or you’re afraid of something, or you project something but it gets abandoned, so also this, kind of… the movement of things that are sort of dropped or disillusionment, or what could have been. How those traces or those dreams, how they also kind of impact reality or physicality; that’s also some of the work.

I also like very much that there’s an improvised solo on the programme, which is really my body now. And together with Brendan Dougherty the musician and… you know, I’m starting in the audience so I have a really strong connection to them and it’s really channelling whatever’s going on in the moment, so that’s what I also enjoy, that it really does a lot of cross references.

I’m not nostalgic for the body that I had twenty years ago, but I know that I have a different kind of awareness, different focus, different sensitivity.    

Improvisation 

I think even as I was learning to dance, I was always interested in improvisation. And even for some years I worked in New York in a jazz club and I was very interested in how these jazz musicians were improvising and I got more and more focused on it after I made my first pieces, and even when I make my work, often I tell my dancers that they should make it seem improvised, even if it’s set, to have that sense of spontaneity and… Yeah, that the movements that they are doing are happening in real time.

We make most of our work by improvisation; I give simple tasks or questions to the dancers and they respond, and then I video-tape the rehearsals and then often there is a certain time that they have improvised that I’m very attracted to or I feel like everything is connected. And then we go back and we learn.

So improvisation is like a central tool to the work, in terms of developing the work, and it also, throughout all of my work, has been a kind of… A way for me to meet other artists, so I was also very interested to develop improvisational projects with other artists. And I did this in different moments.

In the ‘90s I co-created this project called Crash Landing, because I was interested in what it would be like if not only dancers would improvise together, but also visual artists, and musicians, and costume designers and lighting designers, and scenographers. So we would get together for a week and we would have all the elements to make a finished performance, but we would, with all of these elements, improvise together. And we did this in many cities, and it was great because often you meet artists in festivals and you talk about the work, but to have this spontaneous moment to improvise or create ideas together…

Yeah, I’m very, very passionate about it, about improvising, especially with musicians and it is something you can really do in smaller scales. Improvisation, I think, is just a heightened form of awareness, and so it’s something that I think that I’ll always be doing.