Gessnerallee
Zürich

Francesca Verga: The Internet is the first rendition of a new work, conceived for Supportico Lopez and realized on January 9 – 11 with Hanna Strandberg, Rebecka Stillman and Sandra Lolax. How long have you been working at? What was your main concern driving you towards this direction?

Marten Spangberg: It is an ongoing research in many directions at the same time – part of a long journey that starts in 2007. It took three-four weeks to arrive to where we are now and the first version of The Internet. This was, so to say, The Internet 1.0. At the same time it has also taken twenty years of practice, thinking, reading, writing and so on to get this together and formulate aesthetic strategies and a methodology to make happen whatever it was that happened. Instead of making one piece, one product, I rather think about a practice that has many end, a work is a knowledge. Up until the moment the performance starts I have contributed with my knowledge and the dancers contribute with theirs. It’s very collective in this way, the contribution in respect of knowledge. But it is not a collective work in the sense of the initiation and organisation of resources. This is important, the understanding of collective or shared worked in respect of when, not only if or not but when and under what circumstances. 
In any case my or the practice we share is not about making a statement passed on to the audience or the world, it is rather a permission to work with this material, build and learn something, which is a collaboration between you or us and the world. It is not about interpretation, but instead about production and a making of. Organizing a new location that is previously weak, unknown, and inventing a place of relationship and a place of thought.

The Internet © Tani Simberg

FV: Often in the piece the dancers alternate moment of stillness in which they perform, resembling Merce Cunningham’s movements, and moment of rest in which they eat, drink, go away, stretch like in a practice room, laugh and talk – in swedish so very little people understand. Nothing seems too serious. How did you merge these happy and open moments within the choreography and what is the spectator’s access to what is lived by the dancers?

MS: The Internet is a piece for a gallery space. I don’t want it to end up recreating the attention that dance performaces normally ask for, in a gallery space, a museum space, an exhibition room the focus is completely different and the piece reflects this quality, or is addressing the tension between the social situation of the theatre and that of the gallery. The lights are up, there are paintings all over the place and then there’s you and me; we talk about them or not, we talk about the art or maybe we talk about children. I like that kind of environment and find myself imprisoned or whatever when I’m forced to be seated, compartmentalized in the darkness of the theatre saloon. It can sure also be totally groovy but there’s nothing that says that dance is better or best over there.
In this case all the talk between the dancers is one way of emphasizing the social capacity of the museum, of the exhibition. The audience is not asked to talk but there is a permission to talk as much as they like. If we wanted people to be silent we would have put up a sign. We neither ask people to turn off their mobile phones. So if you want to use facebook go ahead, we are super happy as long as you feel happy and open. Great. In La Substance, but in english, there are a lot of blankets where the audience hang out, people can have a nap and a little picnic. For The Internet there is no blankets, we don’t want people to become immobile on the floor, or be too comfy. It’s deliberate that they should somehow constantly disturb the show. Like you know a bunch of tourists disturb the painting, or irritates a sculpture.
I have seen a lot of contemporary dance performances that are often very contemporary on stage, but they are not exactly contemporary in the audience. We are still sitting there like we did in the 18th century, bourgeois installations, silenced and treated like an anonymous mass. Fuck that. I’m more interested in creating a contemporary experience where multitasking is as obvious as any other moment in life, where if in the performance I wonder what is this about, of course I google it. And when somebody is next to me I talk to that person; we look at the piece and the way we talk is influenced by how the piece is confronting us. By the way, I really can’t stand people that come up afterwards saying something bla bla but I’d like it better if I, the audience, could move freely in the space, like in an exhibition. If you like that better super, but that’s like going for sushi and afterward saying to the waitress: Hey, I’d like it better if it was a pizzeria. I also think it’s really great with dance shows with the audience all over the place, but this one is obviously not one of those. It doesn’t attempt to become an exhibition with bodies moving, it exactly is working on the tension between two modes of framing.
And even better one is “I felt there was too much, you know, distance between stage and audience.” No it’s not too much it’s exactly this distance, deal with it. Look, if we wanted a weak threshold or non at all, we’d do another show. But obviously these are comments made by a certain kind of curator that probably also would dizz movies for not being realistic. The thing is that they always want to fix the work to be exactly as they have “learned” that is should be when “good”, but art doesn’t need to be fixed but I’d be very happy to discuss the political consquences of this particular threshold between this or that.

The Internet © Tani Simberg

FV: You pointed out at some time that Judith Butler is tightly important in your work – saying that our gender is built on the repetitiveness of gestures, on the performativity in the everyday life. 3,5 hours long choreography in which gestures are always similar and the songs are few and always in repeat. In which way repetitiveness of music interest you?

MS: I have no idea when it needed to be like this. However, at least the music should be groovy, if everything was bad with the show at least the music is something that should be enjoyable. I don’t know whatever musical taste people have, but for me the music has to be enjoyable. I use music with groove – it’s quite particular how the choices are made – in order to make the audience be kind of hypnotized, the music is there kind of like something between the radio when doing the dishes and suddenly realize you sing along and like when you thirteen years old and listened to like The Strokes because you had a major crush on, what was his name, Julian Casablancas.
In this performance, when the women are dancing almost all the music is the instrumental version of wellknown contemporary R&B and hip-pop songs. In the beginning for example “Stay” by Rihanna is repeated over and over again for twenty times or something but no singing, no lyrics. It produces a particular kind of suspence, but, at least to me, it again suddenly shifts and it’s like you and the voice in your head. I think it produces a permission to imagine, to metaphorically sing yourself. Judith Butler is of course important for more or less everything also to my work and I to some extent agree with her thinking, but I’m simultaneously skeptical to a tendency that everything is performative and performative is good. This is a long story and sort of complicated, not to dismiss gender and identity discourses but to cut a few corners Butler isn’t cental to my work. Everything that is in the world has or carries some kind of performativity, so of course for example The Internet performs something but instead of establishing identity and confirmation its attempt is to withdraw and never coagulate into some thing. I’m faschinated by formalism not identity, also the way the dancers perform is kind of to never become personalities, they are just persons. I love them and it’s a very particular way or technique we use, but they should give the sensation that it’s completely irrelevant who they are, but that that is exactly them is also, and exactly because they don’t claim anything, it is extremely important that it is them. See what I mean, they are whatever but it is exactly this whatever.

Das ganze Interview hier/ the whole interview here:
http://atpdiary.com/marten-spangberg-supportico-lopez-berlin/
https://spangbergianism.wordpress.com/