Su En
ABSTRACT: Performance art and dance practice can be very different, it’s a diversion in your own experience. This includes history, choreographic technique, review, and the theme. I believe that we are all very different and because we are all different that is what makes society very different and interesting. For example. A dance group from Sumatra is very special because Sumatra speaks 52 languages and you have such variety in culture. In Sweden today everything becomes homogenous, we become a homogeneous society. Continuity is important.
By: Radmila Djurica
KEYWORDS: performance art, choreography, diversion, K.R.O.P.P.body
As the society in transition, we have very dynamic art scene, partly because of the bad economic situation, bad politics and problematic society, but what is important to us is that we always have the alternative and right to protest. Due to these complicated, turbulent and constant overtimes, we may have few advantages over developed Western countries. We can look at different performances from a different point of view and hear different artists and choreographers when they talk about their pieces. To look at the performance and review it may be very different from the one viewed by the author: there are very often two different concepts. Every artist, in general, offers more perspectives of his piece, and that is important because then the audience can be subjective, but this is not ultimately a complete truth. Joseph Beuys said that every person is a potential artist, through intimacy and feelings, and that we are all a source of creative life. These are key factors that allow individuals to see the configuration of matter.
Sweden as an economically developed country also offers different perspectives on art, or performance, but from a completely different angle. Swedish artistic reality is one and Serbian artistic reality is the other because of the attitude towards art that dictates the economic system of values. Sweden is one of the most developed Scandinavian countries, it has a rich culture, based on literature and there is not much room for discussion about the role of the body as an artistic object of observation. Su En, Swedish artist and Butoh dancer, also the founder of important performing and dance festivals in Uppsala spent her working days in Japan, where she studied Japanese traditional butoh dance and material arts. Butoh was first of all created as one of the most naive forms of traditional Japanese striptease and is playing a serious role with the eastern sense of eroticism, something like manga comic book. After so many years in Japan, the return to Sweden for Su En was shocking, because Japan has a serious pronounced body culture. The body with a performer or the dancer is very present, all the time. Of course, the human mind should not ignore that we are all physical bodies. Society is not ready to take such position today. It gets way too abstract. The society expects from us to all become efficient machines for making money. Su En, as a representative of a far-eastern ancient culture, believes in the power of the body (a body that can be present but not as a sexual object). What does it mean? That means that we can do everything with our bodies. For Su En, it’s no longer art, it’s about using feelings. In fact, it’s expanding the mind and intimacy. In order to do this, you have to leave the raids and somehow become a body or organism. “I want people to come to feel the power of the body. I believe that there is a future, but that we must fight for it constantly. ¹ ”
If the underlying work comes from a personal experience, it’s a way to reflect how you see the world around you, with or without technology. Su En knows a way how to process the world. Of course, the world is changing a lot, while we are processing a world that actually looks very different. “Even though we are overwhelmed with robots and machines, and that’s a part of us, we are pure life, and this is again an organism. I think we can find different dimensions in this. The body is the spirit in order to live a life and live with that body in this way makes you part of the world. In a way, it is a spiritual container. ¹ ”
K.R.O.P.P. Extended
All productions were special for me at the Swedish K.R.O.P.P Extended Dance and Performance Festival in Uppsala, all very different. The selection of different artists, choreographers, and art performances make layers: i.e. a densely layered program with different perspectives. The concept of the festival, apart from diversity, was also equality with no awards at the festival, and no competition. Artists from all over the world are invited and the money is received only for participation. This is a festival that respects primarily artistic work and actively participates in this process. “Performance art and dance practice can be very different, it’s a diversion in your own experience. This includes history, choreographic technique, review, and the theme. I believe that we are all very different and because we are all different that is what makes society very different and interesting. For example. A dance group from Sumatra is very special because Sumatra speaks 52 languages and you have such variety in culture. In Sweden today everything becomes homogenous, we become a homogeneous society. Continuity is important for me. We can give each other an experience on how to organize the event, and that is important for everything¹ “.
Su En Butoh Dance Company is a curator and founder of K.R.O.P.P Festival in Uppsala, Sweden. Su En’s production “Snow” is a short twenty-minute snowball performance, where the dancer Su En and the musician on the scene are directly inspired by artistic action and practice of nature-snowing. The piece is actually a meditation on the snow. No snowflake is the same when millions of different snowflakes fall and create a snow cover. Then everything changes. Everything is quiet and quiet, and when the snowflake starts to dance, when it starts to climb in the storm, there are so many different crystals that together exist in one world. So there is a body that moves very slowly as well as flakes, through space, and passes in front of the eyes. “I dance because I love life, and when I dance I feel that life loves me. A brutally beautiful world of butoh dance allows me to enter into my body and through it to artistically explore the world, matter and human existence.¹ ” It is very common for artists and choreographers anywhere in the world to make a very radical choice because no one really wants artists: There is no money, but we decide because we believe in it; you know that you are alone. You need to develop your own tools, your own strength in order to survive in society. In this way, many of the artists are stubborn and we are clear about the fact that we are not all equal and this is crucial. Everyone needs to find his own way. “I always do my performance at this festival because I never forget that I am above all a dancer, then an organizer. This time I’m working a short piece with the musician called “Snow”, my musician plays a traditional Finnish instrument that resembles a harp. We work on improvisation based on the snow phenomenon. Every crystal of ice and crystal of snow is unique, different. No crystal of snow looks the same, and this is fantastic, I want to survive in this simple idea. That is unique, we can not understand the essence of life. I think we have to find a way to be different and to exist together. We are not the same and because of that we live together¹ “.
Nan Jombang Dance is an Indonesian dance company from northern Sumatra. Their practice is based on traditional martial arts, traditional dance and the use of ritual music. They want to maintain a local tradition through the practice of modern dance. Two dancers on the stage seem to want to make love on the stage, not to fight, but again, they are strict, precise, rigorous in discipline, which makes the integrity of this production.
Swedish company Shake it collaboration led by performer Tove Sahlin from Stockholm has performed with the production “My own body” which is a solo performance where the body moves on a specific way; she shakes in a cramp and small movements for about an hour, flashes from one to the other in the audience. Her body is like a flashing machine that infects anyone who touches the audience with the movement. Tove is an art director and resident choreographer at the Swedish Theater Institution. Her production implies a choreographic practice of shake it and thrashing the body: a practice that is being practiced commercially in Stockholm study.
Project O is a collaborative project, primarily a visual dance performance done by two British artists Alexandrine Hemsley and Jamile Johnson-Small, which relates closely to a club life and the phenomenon of DJ that conduct and moves a mass of people at the same time. With this project, two dancers address the crisis of scenic movement, self-confidence, youth identity crisis, and gender-related issues in the UK. Those two dancers explore different forms of introducing intimacy in the service of politics and economics. On the stage, in the club, we see two bodies dressed in space clothing that dictate to the audience how they will move around the space, touching it in order to achieve complete group ecstasy. Project O is stationed in London and through its choreographic practice this production explores the various formats of the structural racist mechanism and misogenia in the UK; what is the impact on the body of an unpleasant background of hidden racism that is being fabricated in contemporary dance? Their choreographic practices draw the roots from the practice of free dance styles and the structure of the clubbing. They examine limitations and questions of intimacy in the conductive big mass of the club DJ set space.
Performing practice at the CROWN
The practice of art performance at KROPP Extended is common. Delta RA’i is a German butoh dancer, performer, and choreographer since the early 1970s. Initially, he was drawn into the world of butoh dance through autodidactic experiments with German expressionism of the 20s, Tatoeba-THEATRE DANCE GROTESQUE, which he considered to be related to butoh and the German-Japanese company that he founded in 1988 in Berlin. His performance “Ritual Feet Washing” at the KROPP Extended Festival in Uppsala is more interactive dance created in collaboration with Felix Ruckert. The way his performance “Ritual Feet Washing” is associated with dance grotesque practice and butoh is not as obvious as it is supposed to be. The Ritual of the Delta RA’s feet washing is a reflection on the old custom from ancient times. This custom has survived in Germany in the Catholic Church, when on Friday before the Easter Pope ritually washes his feet to believers. It is an old tradition that pulls the roots of religion, but it has not survived in society. Now it’s an art installation, which raises the question of who is the master here or the one above. “If I’m down, I control my feelings in my legs. In my interpretation of ritually washing my feet, when I wash my legs, I work and communicate with the soul of that man. It looks like I serve it, but it’s actually the other way around. This is an art installation behind which the concept is ². ”
VestAndPage project is a project made by Italian performer Andrea Pagnes and German artist Verena Stenke. These two artists work in the field of live performance, and also are independent curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week, also authors of The Fall of Faust-Consideration on Contemporary Art and Art Action. Their performance “Aegis IV (Hope)” at K.R.O.P.P Extended is a part of the existing performance trilogy, and the performance that lasts five hours is more a performance in the theater space that talks about different life processes. It is a five-hour performance in which the two bodies, dressed in costumes, move in space, walk on the glass, speak in a microphone, work unarticulated and independently from each other. Here we find the modern concept of the Greek word aegis, meaning doing something under powerful protection. The protection of powerful powers is a common motif in Greek mythology and refers to an extension-an extension or a third part of the trilogy to K.R.O.P.P Extended. Time is expanding and people who are passing seem to have an extension. Millions of people are passing by temples and churches without getting into buildings but relying only on postcards and souvenirs bought in a local kiosk. For them, there are cities that have views but are not really experienced. But like in everyday life, they compress space and time into the unconscious consumption of pre-fabricated images and experiences.