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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:
When a tadpole is growing into a frog, its electromagnetic field already holds the information of its legs and body shape. In the essay ‘TransMaterialities’ , Karen Barad refers to a (cruel) experiment,where the electromagnetic field of tadpoles were changed by scientists, which resulted in them growing additional limbs, eyes in different places and other bodily mutations. Following this experiment, scientists concluded that tadpole bodies do not have fixed or defined borders. They carry their suggested futures, just as our DNA, bones and cells carry our inherited pasts, eventually manifesting anew in future times to come. The space in the air, for tadpoles at least, is sensible, intelligent, loaded with information and very much subject to intervention, interaction, and, as the experiment shows, open, porous, vulnerable and corruptible. Space is a part of the process of being, likewise it is part or the extension of beings. Space is oftentimes thought as filled with unlimited potential and possibilities. Yet the tadpoles are connected to space, as space is connected to them, from material (the body of the tadpole) to immaterial (the electromagnetic field of the tadpole) and across timelines. Space is specific enough to carry planted seeds for futures, while those are not necessarily fixed. For it to become a frog in the future, space needs be strong enough to carry information and at the same time remember how a frog is created. What is a future vision is also a memory. Such operation of space could be seen as a form of a creative, spatial training. When training starts in the brain, and something new (or old) is learned, neurones craft new pathways. The brain changes. Being enters the space, and the space enters being.
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