Kl. 16.00–17.00 Stofa 55 (3. mars) (EN)
Steinunn Ketilsdóttir
 
Express nothing. Express everything. Express something. Express anything. 
What is expected of expressions? 
 
“Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). 
How are we expected to perform inside a structure; public, private, political, or personal? 
 
How are we expected to express ourselves? To act or not act? To move or not move? Investigation of our surrounding structures, their frameworks and modes of production, requires us to look closely at the conceptual architecture of those structures. What effects and affects are they producing? What kind of expressions? And what are the expectations of those expressions? 
 
The choreographic research project EXPRESSIONS is an exploration of expectations. It is parallel research of theory and choreographic practice in which I will study the expectations of the moving body in performance. The project is an offspring of my ongoing solo project OVERSTATEMENT/OVERSTEINUNN: Expressions of Expectations in which I express the expectations of a performance and the performer through a series of statements. Through my solo project my interest in expectations and the expression of them has developed and deepened. In EXPRESSIONS I will narrow my research and focus exclusively on the dance performance and the dancing body. Concentrating on the expectations of the moving body in space I will study borders and extremities of passivity and activity in the body. Likewise, I will examine common choreographic structures and traditional beliefs about the dance performance.
 
Experimentation and research are the main objectives of the project that will start this year and continue to develop and expand in the coming years. Throughout my theoretical approach I will work closely with my research and writing collaborator, artist and scholar Sierra Ortega from New York, to further investigate my research questions and support my study with theory.  
 
In my practical approach I will explore my ideas with professional dance artists utilizing an embodied practice. Through investigations and improvisations I will examine and exhaust notions of lack and excess, activity and inertia, playing with limits of too much and not enough. With this I seek to capture the embodiment of the expressions of expectations of the dancing body pursuing other sides of the expected and unexpected inside the choreographic structure.
 
In the beginning stages of the practical research I will work closely with a small group of experienced dance artists whilst defining and outlining the practice and working methods. 
How does memory affect expectations? How does memory affect our expectations of the dancing body in space?  
 
http://steinunnketilsdottir.com/about