Son[i]a #248
André Lepecki

Alma Söderberg is a choreographer and performer who works with music and dance. As well as exploring close listening, Alma listens to rhythm and movement, in order to inhabit polyrythm and "simultaneous difference", to quote Eric Davis by way of Alma. In this podcast, Alma tells us about the many musical influences that inspire her choreographic practice: jazz, flamenco, hip hop, and experimental and Afro-American music. She also talks about multiplicity, reduced listening and deep listening, about letting rhythm run through you, about the voice, sharing, idiorhythms, Anni Albers, weaving, learning to wait, and about playing.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with choreographer and performer Alma Söderberg that we were unable to include the first time around. Alma discusses her influences, teachers and schools and two collective projects of different sorts: Manyone and John The Houseband.

Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of social imagination founded by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden in Paris in 1984. In 1986 it moved to Bogotá, where it operates today. Since its earliest days, Mapa Teatro has worked in the field of live arts, with a commitment to collective practices and the creation of temporary experimental communities. Like good cannibals, its members work on transforming materials to create new universes that embrace testimonies and fiction, poetics and politics. In this podcast, we chat to Mapa Teatro about 40 years of practice and extended fraternity. We talk about living archives, happenings, witnesses, and fiction.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the choreographer, performer and artist Maria José Arjona. We talk about travel as a catalyst for her work, about interaction with the spectator, about her repertoire of gestures, about connecting and listening to animality, and about contact with the other side.

Con una trayectoria de varias décadas de prácticas e intercambios entre pecho y espalda, Maria José Arjona explora a través de la performace de larga duración un cuerpo que pendula al borde del abismo de manera afirmativa. Su repertorio de gestos hace parte de un gran archivo en permanente tránsito y transformación, a menudo atravesado por la historia de la performance, aunque siempre vivo. En este podcast, Maria José Arjona mira hacia adelante y hacia atrás, para trazar un diagrama invisible de procesos, acciones y deseos, entre su hacer en solitario y su necesidad de desbordar una política del tiempo con otros artistas, mediante la subversión del tiempo institucional: ¿qué le pasa a la performance y al performer cuando su trabajo pasa por estar ocho horas en un museo?

Antonia Baehr’s works explore the fiction of the everyday and of the theatre, among other themes. That’s how her official bio at the time of writing this starts. But it does not fully convey the level of meticulousness that goes into her performances in order to emphasise every little aspect of the area between everyday life and the theatre. We talk to Antonia Baehr about switching roles, about her strategies for collaboration, some of her alter egos, gender stereotypes, and much, much more. Prepare for a bumpy ride that will take you from scores and Fluxus, to imitation, fetishism, and socks, by way of drag kings, drag queens, S&M, contracts, and even telepathic connections.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Yvonne Rainer that we were unable to include the first time around.

Dance interpreter, choreographer, thinker, writer, teacher and curator Boris Charmatz reflects on how to address power structures within the artistic field. He also talks about polisemy, collectivity, communities and anti-communities, radical pedagogy, dissent, the Musée de la danse, the complex and inexhaustible relationship between dance and history, working inside gestures, and the beauty of older people skateboarding.

Lithium mines, Trotskyist sects, black boxes, planetary exodus, augmented architecture, a city as big as the entire planet Earth, the mythology of Area 51. McKenzie Wark, Liam Young and Mette Edvardsen explore these and other ideas in an attempt to think about space as more than just a medium. Space as object.

Yvonne Rainer talks about the passing of time, the transferability of dance, training as legacy and the body’s filmic decay. About tenacity, physicality, and influences. And about the turns, leaps, and tumbles of a multifaceted career spanning more than half a century.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with André Lepecki that we were unable to include the first time around.

Art gallerist, critic and curator Gigiotto Del Vecchio talks about some of the key aspects of The Living Theater: an attempt to break the fourth wall and promote ideas of anarcho-pacifism and liberalism around the world.

Morten J. Olsen’s mix for the INTERRUPTIONS series presents an extreme, complex and long journey into drumming, to discuss out loud Olsen’s most personal theories coming from his very own personal experience and background. As Morten puts it, possibly, ‘a long and painful listening experience of percussion oriented music’.

Quinsy Gario talks about the role of the activism in the Netherlands today, and about the relation between its performative nature and the boundaries of the museum.