Spinner

Spinner (2019- 2022)

Spinner centres around the idea that the artistic environment has a subjectivity, needs and expressions on its own terms. Shaped by transactional factors, such as time, research space and financial support, the practice has built different milestones to become its own landscape.

Oscillating around the notion of what meaning can be, the work creates vibrating forms and absurd approaches, where it is possible to give and receive meaningful information. Meaning is approached as always communicative and therefore always affective. As a result of collaboration, the space in between is highlighted and consequently materialised; electrically charged with movement, attraction, repulsion, fascination, dreams, desires, misunderstanding and the never ending duty of attending the other. In this electric field lies the quality and aesthetic of a meeting, that expands into the sphere of where the spectator can meet themselves through joining the material with imagination.

Sigrid Stigsdatter and Toni Steffens started their collaboration in 2017 when studying at the School for New Dance Development, in Amsterdam. Throughout the years, they have been created a body of work that researches and deals with the politics of collaboration as a shared encounter. Their choreographic practice tries to evoke a space that can communicate, negotiate and alternate its needs like a self expressing environment. Agency occurs by relating to the other and the environment as a sensitive stranger that has to be re-encountered, memorised or yet to be found out. Topics and questions that materialise out of their universe touch upon themes like synchronicity, friendship, practicing female witness-ship, intimacy, sensuality, memories and nomadism.

Credits:Choreography and performance: Toni Steffens, Sigrid Stigsdatter

Advise: Maciej Sado

Light design: Paulina Prokop

Costume: Ginta Tinte

Set design: Toni Steffens, Sigrid Stigsdatter

Co-produced and supported through Afk Amsterdam, Dansmakers Amsterdam, Bologna C.C.,

8-Athens, critical laboratory for Arts and politics, Veem House for Performance,

New Fears Gallery for dance and performance, Flam festival Amsterdam, Batard Festival Brussels

Booking info:

Length: 40 minutes

Technical info: We are presenting this piece together with out light designer Paulina Prokop. It includes a simple Set Design, that can be transported in a Van. The set up is discussible and adaptive to the conditions of the venue.

Reviews and reflections, documentation:

Flam Festival, Theaterkrant 2022: https://www.theaterkrant.nl/nieuws/flam-2022-weemoedig-stemmende-geesten/
Ivan Cheng, curator of Bologna CC, 2019: https://antoniasteffens.tumblr.com/post/189745978055/november-2019-hosted-by-bologna-cc-ivan-cheng
PDF version of New Fears Issue #1, 2020: https://www.newfears.net/_files/ugd/94abe5_b0a340228e9b4fb8b156b18a21aa2d31.pdf

Thomas Lenden, Flam Festival 2022


Attending/attendees
Attending describes the process and attempt of overcoming binary modes of experiencing, typically when subobjects, strangers, “formerly known (entities) as x” cross paths, while they are also in complicated, transitional states. Not only linked to subobjective realties, the process can further be observed within ecosystems, that appear to deal with a temporal or lasting tension, like the state of reconfiguration of crisis, healing, imbalance and chaos, Often times, those localities deal with strong emotionally charged confusion or hopelessness and are at the verge of “giving up”. Attending operates mostly as a mobiliser of a potential 3rd space, challenging the binary process of identity-making. It aspires to dissolve the phallic crisis by materialising agents beyond their self-proclaimed defined boundaries and deliberately attune to the procedures of space from “within between” the present entities. Colloquial called “attendees”, these spaces operate as mediators, that allow for cross-interference,-information and mutual regulation. Attending offers ways to operate within disquiet but leave entities, subobjects and localities usually permanently altered.

UNder armour

♲ Line,losing line ♲

Weaving Passages for the momentous

An Attendee

Orange Rest/Sacrifice

Spinner

Hope, Test

Metamotion for 270degrees

Night Flying Project

Movement

delineations

Unfamiliarities

PAST-Present-future

JUNE 11-14 : PLANETARY POETICS / SANDBERG GRADUATION SHOW AT FRAMER FRAMED AMSTERDAM, HEART BREAK RADIO, 12TH OF JUNE, 5PM, 13TH OF JUNE 1;30PM, PERFORMANCE UNDER ARMOUR, 13TH OF JUNE 6PM, 14 OF JUNE 4PM
SEPTEMBER 14: In collaboration with TONI BRELL at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, Performance at 4:15pm, Finissage Toen de dieren nog spraken
SEPTEMBER 20: BROKEN HEART DANCES, WORKSHOP DURING RE-NATURE FESTIVAL/ GRIEF SPACES, 2PM, FULL INFO: https://re-nature.org/
September + October 2025 : teaching movement research at the university for applied sciences, Osnabrück, BA theatre pedagogy
NOVEMBER 2025 : TEACHING MOVEMENT RESEARCH AT SNDO AMSTERDAM, BA CHOREOGRAPHY
DECEMBER 2025 : CREATION TOGETHER THE WITH 2ND AND 3RD YEAR STUDENTS OF SNDO, AMSTERDAM IN COLLABORATION WITH CHOREOGRAPHER ELISA ZUPPINI