Mårten Spångberg
La Substance, but in English
January 10–12, 2014
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101
How can a dance exist in a museum? Does it have to change its parameters to comply with the museum’s spacial and temporal conditions? Can dance, in return, enable the museum to reimagine its conception of space, time, and audience? As part of its continued exploration of these questions, MoMA PS1 invites renowned Swedish choreographer and theorist Mårten Spångberg to develop a new work.
Built around a conceptual approach that highlights choreography as a medium, Spångberg’s recent work considers the potentiality of dance as an object. He approaches dancing from outside the regimes of performativity, through an examination of contemporary modes of attention. His work reexamines what dance is as an experience and how that experience has been transformed as a result of contemporary capitalism, immaterial labor and social media.
La Substance, but in English is a large-scale dance performance with eight dancers, a singer and a group of performers. All participants inhabit and produce a landscape that, over four and a half hours, transforms into an endless but indeterminable entity, a palpability without properties.
“It’s like a slo-mo make-over into an excessive blur, an over-the-top exaggeration totally deprived of qualities, a dance that forgets to keep it up and turns into slime or perhaps a vintage Diesel jacket, not knowing if it’s a pair of camo shorts or Bubba Kush. The dance is a self-generating existence of variation completely indifferent to the audience presence, yet welcoming like a beach, a group sex session or a Skype chat. It’s a little bit of homemade magic slowly falling apart, smiling somewhat surprised.”
With and by Johan Bandholtz, Linda Blomqvist, Ludvig Daae, Yoann Durant, Emma Kim Hagdahl, Sandra Lolax, Linnea Martinsson, Pontus Pettersson, Mårten Spångberg, Rebecka Stillman, Hanna Strandberg, Marika Troili
La Substance, But In English by Mårten Spångberg
Friday, January 10, 2–6:30pm, open rehearsal
Saturday, January 11, 2–6:30pm, preview
Sunday, January 12, 4–8:30pm, premiere
This performance is part of American Realness.
Sponsorship
The commission for La Substance, but in English is made possible by MoMA PS1, The Swedish Art Council, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Swedish Institute, Stockholm City and Stockholm City Cultural Council.
La Substance, but in English is produced in collaboration with MDT Stockholm and PAF.
Sunday Sessions program, organized by Jenny Schlenzka, Associate Curator with Mike Skinner, Producer, and Alex Sloane, Live Programs Coordinator.
Sunday Sessions and the VW Dome at MoMA PS1 are made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen of America.