Writing with my pants down // Mårten Spångberg

An interview with Marten Spangberg, held at the "Choreography As Expanded Practice"

conference in Barcelona.

You pointed out at some time that you started out as a dance critic.
Would you please elaborate on that?

I was trained as a musician, and somehow I started writing about opera in a

nonprofit magazine. This magazine was forced to have something about
dance, because of some art council that they got money from, and since I was
the youngest in the editorial board, they told me that if I write about this dance
stuff, I could also write about this Italian avant-garde opera. Quite quickly I
realized that it's much more exiting to write about dance then opera. What
was interesting is that when I wrote about dance, I didn't need to write about
the history of the choreography, I didn't have to write about the history of the
piece, I didn't have to write about the history of the interpretation, so writing
about dance was not so much about interpretation of established capacities,
but was very much about inventing ways of seeing. Writing about dance was
more of an exploration, learning something about the world. What happened
was that the abstractness of dance was excellent from the writer perspective.
I took on a mission for myself, not to use metaphors that we know, but to use
metaphors that expand: the audience, or the reader, had to become activated,
not only consume imagery, but also activate himself in image production. So
first of all it was articulation, enabling producing a language about dance.
And then it was also about coming home after a performance that wasn't even
bad, and knowing that there has to be a text in the morning, but not knowing
how to do this. I couldn't give up, I couldn't say: "it's not my cup of tea" - that
kind of review is too short and I had to put something out. To force articulation
is interesting, I think, and I was forcefully articulating also what I am not
interested in. I set up situations that force you to not maintain yourself as
yourself, to not be able to produce belonging. That was quite extraordinary,
and I had to do it 4-5 times a week.

When I was writing I was quiet often accused by dancers and

choreographers, coming to me and saying: "Marten, you really don't like
dance!". However, I think being a critic is not about being a dance lover; it's
much more about loving it so much that you can also say "no". a dance critic,
like a teacher or a school director, is an ambassador for dance, and if that
means being endless benevolent than that's a bad idea. The dance critic has
also a responsibility to say: "you know what, you are a nice guy, but this piece
is not very good. And I have to let you know about it". So the ambassador for
dance is somebody who has a long term perspective.

There was this great dance critic in Sweden, somewhere in the late eighties,
who wrote extremely good reviews - both in the sense of good texts but also –
and that was the problem – he only wrote good reviews. In 50 or so many
years someone will come and study the dance in the eighties in Sweden and
think dance in Sweden must have been amazing. Being a critic is also to have
a responsibility to the community to change it into whatever, to work for its'
changing.

The statement that you made of the dance critic's responsibility takes us
to the etymology of supervision or control that the word 'critic' has in
Hebrew. How does the dance critic decide what's good or bad? Who
sets up the criteria?

A critic who knows what good judgment is should stop. The work of the critic,
especially after 1960`s , is very much about staking out territories, it’s a matter
of becoming intimate with the practice, and listening to where it is, and sort of
filling these provisional spaces with articulation and terminologies, being in
friction with practice as a way of organizing. It's a kind of gardening,
cultivating, the critic is sort of organizing cultivation.

I think critic is not about making law. Critic is not about the execution of law
but it's about the testing of laws, testing how we can feel about something,
how we can understand something. When it comes to dance, there are
basically two modalities; for some critics, the job of the critic is to write the
same review every time, the same critic every time – in the sense of format,
so their personality as a critic doesn't stand between the reader and the work.
For others, this is not about representing what was there in a kind of
transparent or objective manner, no - on the contrary, it's about writing as
subjective as possible, in order to produce confrontation, to produce difficulty,
to produce turmoil.

Was this approach accepted by the editorial?

When you get some money from the art council you don't get it for what you
want to do, but for what they want you to do. And still your job is to do what
you want to do. So it's all about undercover business, it's all about
Camouflage… I think that it's important in times of neo-liberalism, and in
whatever position you are in the practice of art making. There is a moment
when it's too nice to identify with scarcity, with too littleness.
In the 90` I worked a lot in an institution for rehabilitation medicine, and I was
very close to a professor of physiotherapy. One thing that is problematic with
physiotherapy is that the patient identifies with his or her symptom: it feels
good to identify with the pain, because it also makes it possible for me to say:
"can you take the groceries for me?" or "I can't go hiking in the mountains
because of my elbow". So a lot of the work of the physiotherapist is to give the
patient confidence to give up the identitary capacity.

It's the same thing with our work - how can we give ourselves the confidence
to not identify with our subordinate position? It's so easy to identify with the
minoritarian practice of dance and choreography. Fuck that- as long as we do
this, everybody else is going to be super happy, because then I am always
begging for it… To be self announced "underdogs" is a very comfortable
position.
Complaint is also a way of saying: "it wasn't me, don't blame me, we were the
underdogs, so we don't have a stake here".

I can really see the connection between your approach as a dance critic
and your educational manifesto.
I live in fear of neutrality, of this notion that as a critic you are not suppose to
have an opinion – and isn't that the critic's job, to have an opinion? I am more
interested in writing with my pants down, so it's clear that it is an opinion,
it's my opinion, and I am not going to cover it up.

It's the same thing when it comes to education. So often I have heard people
say that my education is so biased, so political, it's not fair for the students.
Here, again, I am not attracted to the idea of passing knowledge; I am
interested in passing this (specific) knowledge or more so, I am interested in
certain modes of us producing heterogeneous landscapes of knowledge.

Let's say when I go to driving school, I want to pay as little as possible to get
my license as fast as possible, so I ask them to show me how to do it and
imitate . Then, if everybody has the same driving license traffic security will be
better. Now, turn it around and say: in choreography, if all the students come
out with the same knowledge it will be a very boring thing, because obviously
also the dance will be the same. Moreover, if the programmer for the venue of
contemporary dance comes to choose the best student, but since they are all
the same, he could only choose by their looks or rich family or whatever.
Education has to make it difficult for the one evaluating, so that when the
programmer comes he will need to take all the students, since they are all
different he couldn't choose only one of them. When it comes to choreography
or artistic education, it's a matter of making each student explore or invent
their own specificity or their own being-special.

Another aspect of dance education is that as dance people we don't have

enough discourse. It is important to have theory classes and have somebody
to talk with us about Walter Benjamin or whatever, but we shouldn't do it in a
lecture space, we shouldn't approach the dance student or ourselves as if we
should also be philosophers, we should do this in the studio, sitting in an
embracing dance circle. We shouldn't invite professor Mr. so and so because
he is so fucking prominent, but we have to do it ourselves. What the student
needs to do is not to say: "ahh, I understand" - that's a bad moment, when the
student understands he puts it in a luggage compartment and forgets. The
important thing is to infect the student with thought.

Think of this image of the students open the studio door, take off their bag of
theory and leave it outside, and then they go in and start to do phrase work…
The question is how we can make theory be in everything, so when we come
into the studio we are not using theory to judge or to justify, but it sort of sticks
on us. We shouldn't have a library in our school, but we should put a lot of
books in our studios, and the first section of the dance library shouldn't be
dance composition (that we will read anyway) - what the library should have is
all the other books.
Where does your own work as an artist come in?
The question that shows up is: "it's your work, but for whom is it? And in what
ways is it for whom?"
But of course I don't give a fuck about my audience; I do the work because of
myself, because of what I am interested in, full stop. If I start to negotiate my
audience, then it would become a service, and it's important that the artistic
production has some sort of autonomy, which is a blurry object in itself. But
even though I don't care about my audience, it doesn't mean that my work is
necessarily personal from beginning to end.

I see so many choreographers and artists who work for their own expression.
My work is highly individual, but is also always there for The Expression, not
for my sake. I am passionately involved in dance, not in my dance, but in
Dance. By expression I mean dance as an expression, dance as a modality of
moving towards somebody, or bringing something forth. I have my specific
perspective in this production or in this particular dance, but it's still there for
the expression – I am working for Dance.

© Ran Brown

http://maakaf.co.il/