Photo: Peter Lenaerts
Mette Ingvartsen – Away from stability – a school of seeing for people tired of screens, lessons in posture for a turbulent life.
The Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen initially studied at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, before going on to Brussels to attend Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s renowned intellectual and technical forcing house P.A.R.T.S. There, she began creating the pieces of her own that first brought her to wider notice in the summer of 2002: the athletic solo negatives, manual focus, a puzzling, contorted ensemble piece in which young women’s naked backs were topped by masks that depicted gurning, shamelessly gawping old men’s faces, and 50/50, in which dance constituted an expression of physical practice rather than psychological motivations.
After graduating in 2004, she followed up these works with to come, a cleanly analysed orgy of obscene poses without the orgy. The intention was to demystify prefabricated erotic stereotypes, with the goal of returning the viewer’s own imagination once again to its place of origin: the interior. the making of the making of, why we love action and where’s my privacy continued her sparring with the visual interference we face from the key media of our age. Her current works, Evaporated Landscapes and Giant City are spatial, location-specific performances that exhibit estrangement from humanity and sensitivity to the environment in which they are presented and, since she once again allows her dancers to ‘dance’, demonstrate her indifference to her nascent (and erroneous) reputation as a rigidly conceptual choreographer. Furthermore, they document her curiosity about potential ways in which our conception of structured, communicative movement could be expanded.
Katja Werner
