Tove Salmgren, Manon Santkin & Moa Franzén
We Happen Things #3 — a meeting

­Moa Franzén – prɑpər ˈspiːtʃ

prɑpər ˈspiːtʃ departs from the idea and practice of “proper speech” and how the linguistic norms and laws that it abides under has its roots in ideology and the idea of civilized discourse (as opposed to the “primitive” sounds of the “sub-human”). The piece takes an interest in the relation between speech and body, how the mouth is schooled by incorporating the practice of proper speech, how the movements of the mouth is tied to the plays of power, and how the learning of proper speech is a way to exercise power over the bodies of the speakers by making them incorporate and internalize a linguistic and grammatical structure.

The score discusses and defines what proper speech is and what it demands. Being written in phonetics, it is also an instruction, spelling out the correct way to utter and pronounce the words.

By problematizing what kind of practice speech is – ideologically as well as movement-wise – it makes room for a faultering speech.

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Tove Salmgren – Objects and Speech

In Objects and Speech trust is recognized as something lost in the communities we make happen. It’s a score that questions what authorship and ownership do (concepts understood as products of an individualistic and alienated time). As a ritual, a process and a performance, it suggest ways to distribute trust, it wants to try generosity and our ability to trust as a fundament of being together.

“What is it about?”… is a common phrase and words often outspoken in relation to a performance/art work. A question and phrase understood as situated in a tradition of knowledge, it seems to rely on expertise and social hierarchies to exist. Objects and Speech meets this tradition with a ritual that aims at something opposite of its traditional purpose; to turn into a multiplicity of specific, irreplaceable and personal questions and dilemmas.

Objects and Speech is a score with many potential materialities and shapes. Language, things and movements, a mean for empowerment and making of new histories. They connect, disconnect, establish and confuses. Structured by a trust in many personal matters, no one more valid then another.
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Manon Santkin – Unexplained Dances

Let’s attempt to dive into the worst dualism history has known: splitting the mind and the body. The score of Unexplained Dances sets the body and the mind in two parallel actions, performed simultaneously. The principle couldn’t be more simpler: the body does the dance and the mind reflects about Dance. Through a sequence of simple tasks, a dancer performs a genuine reflection while engaging physically in a dance of their fancy. The attention is split between caring for the movement’s own non-verbal logics and the logics proper to speaking and making sense. Soon enough, the speaking and the moving will feedback on each other. The words and the movements will become one dance and we will lose track of which one originated the other. In a forceful attempt to confront self-reflection, the score of Unexplained Dances produces physical monologues where our attention is taken many places and the gaze wanders around minutely, oblivious of the question of being right or wrong.

Moa Franzén (b. 1985) is an artist and writer based in Stockholm. Her practice encircles writing and performance and places itself in and between visual arts, choreography and literature. Franzén’s work evolves around the relation between language and violence, rethoric and ideology, body and power, and often uses low valued and contradictory and complex acts and expressions – like silence, absence and stillness – as tools and expressions for agency and resistance, by directing attention to and displacing hegemonic narratives, acts and forms.

Franzén has a BA in Visual Arts from The Royal Institute of Art and Kunstakademiet in Bergen, and a MA in Choreography from New Performative Practices at DOCH. She has shown work nationally and internationally, as well as curated a range of performance events and seminars and has been published in a number of publications and magazines. She also works editorially for the literary magazine Kritiker.

Tove Salmgren works with performance, dance and choreography, as an initiator and collaborator in various artistic contexts and formats. She is active as a dancer, choreographer, curator and educator and has an MA in New Performative Practices from DOCH, Stockholm. Her artistic practice is about activating a critical discourse on subjectivity and power, which often happen through a laboratory mode of adressing hegemonic structures within the field of dance and choreography itself. She is involved in various artistic collaborations such as with The Blob (Anna Efraimsson), where play/institution/critique are being coupled, in the curatorial collaboration We happen things with the artists Manon Santkin and Moa Franzén and together with the artist Kajsa Wadhia she is runnning Köttinspektionen Dans, a platform and venue for experimental dance and choreography in Uppsala, Sweden.

Manon Santkin (b. 1982) is a freelance artist. She works between Brussels and Stockholm. Within the field of the Performing Arts, she operates as a dancer, choreographer, artistic advisor, process assistant and writer.

She graduated from P.a.r.t.s. in 2004 and recently finished a Master in News Performative Practices at Doch, part of the University of the Arts in Stockholm.

She has been collaborating with choreographers Mette Ingvartsen, Salva Sanchis, Xavier Leroy, Sidney Leoni, Eleanor Bauer, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Daniel Linehan and Leslie Mannès. She also develops projects with sound artist Peter Lenaerts and with designer Nicolas Couturier.

Manon regularly takes part in the processes of other artists as a mentor, advisor or dramaturge and sees her role as an interpreter morphing into that of a facilitator of collaborative processes. In her current works Manon revisits the notion of ‘interpretation’ in terms of an ecology of practices and intelligences, self-organization and interactive agencies.

Francine Agbodjalou is an actor and artist active in Europe. Her practice is multidisciplinary and revolves around the intersection between the unspoken and communicative in different power structures. She is currently studying at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and is working in parallel with a variety of freelance work.

Concept and scores: Manon Santkin, Moa Franzén and Tove Salmgren. Performers: Manon Santkin, Francine Agbodjalou, Moa Franzén, Kajsa Wadhia and Tove Salmgren. With support by Stockholms stad and in collaboration with MDT Stockholm and Köttinspektionen Dans. Administration: The artist cooperative Interim kultur. This presentation is part of the project [DNA] Departures and Arrivals, which is co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Commission.