Q&A - Oda Brekke and Izabella Borzecka

Ahead of the performance and publication release "dead dead document" on MDT 22 & 24 March 2024, Izabella Borzecka, initiator and curator of Reading edge, sat down to talk with Oda Brekke, who choreographed the work and wrote the publication "It Absorbs: on Dance as a Porous Art Object". Read below.

In “dead dead document” you approach dance as ‘a porous object’, which suggests that dance is not confined within strict boundaries but rather interacts with its surroundings, absorbing and reflecting various influences and traces from those surroundings. Could you tell us more about these surroundings and traces that have been important to the work?

When I say I propose a porous dance I mean a dance that has holes, and therefore has openings where the surroundings can enter. In that sense I focus on these dances as containers that hold rather than movements that permeate other things.

Throughout the work the question of value has been recurring. What is worth looking at? What is worth doing? What happens when we are still or do nothing? Will we notice or relate to other things? What can these things teach us?

The collage of notes that is part of the work comes to mind. I did not plan to make it, but I tried to organise my notes, and it was messy, so I cut out the most important notes from my notebooks. Afterwards I ordered them in a useful way. I wanted to get an overview of the chaos and reorganised them through an index. After cutting them out I was left with waste and I had to consider what to do with that material. I needed to ask myself why it was worth less than the things included in the collage. These bits became the cover image of the performance and is now the first thing people see.

In one of your texts about the work that you shared with me, you describe “dead dead document” as a work that addresses the shortcomings of dance including its inability to maintain its object status over time. How did you work together in the studio to address this issue?

During one of our rehearsals in the studio at Höjden, me and Lisa Schåman, my collaborator and one of the performers were doing a score called ‘Shifting Position’ where the performer  stays in one position for a long time, observing it through a range of layers. Noticing what it can offer in terms of perspective and perception. The task is to insist on including tactile and visual sense when staying in a position, and after a while you shift. Lisa said something I found very interesting and that I remembered when you posed this question, I will find my notebook, two seconds. 

She said,“The previous position is a negative form that I bring into the next position. It exists both in the past and in the present”. I asked her if it could be understood as a negative, like for analogue photos. But then she explained that it's not an image she carries with her, it is a 3D form, an empty space, a hollow. 

We take a lot of time for conversation where we discuss what we have been observing and experiencing when doing a task. Often we translate the phenomena and problems that come up in our conversations into instructions for the coming dance. 

How do you view the performance’s accompanying publication, ‘It Absorbs: on Dance as a Porous Art Object’, as a format and material for dance? Can the publication also be read as a porous dance?

I don’t understand the publication as dance. Instead I think it works as a material that dances can depend on and live on through.If we wanted to put it simply I guess we could say that the dance is living and the trace is dead, but I think it is far more complex than this. dead dead document attempts at meeting this complexity– the life of materials beyond human control. 

The publication includes reflections and observations as well as problems I have faced during our work. It is written during 2023 with distance to the process I shared in 2021 and 2022 with my collaborators Tuuli  and Lisa, who are also performing in the work. I think this distance can be felt in how the text takes on an analytical approach. It feels crucial to add that the writing comes out of a break in the production of a performance, a stop in activity. Writing is a very accessible means of artistic production because you can do it alone and without a budget or studio.

You work extensively with memories/traces, and it's nice to see that you generously share references, sources of inspiration, and sources where you first encountered practitioners, methods of work, texts, and similar in your text ‘It absorbs’, which is published in the publication. How do you relate to personal memories versus collective ones in your work? Are they woven in different ways? Do you handle them differently? 

In an economy where artists are forced to brand their identities I think it is even more crucial that we insist on showing that dance does not derive from individuals, but from our interactions and entanglements with the culture we inherit and are part of making up. There is a lot of focus on this within the educational contexts of dance, nothing new, but I am interested in how the scene can support this more– connecting contextual work with making performances! I am interested in hearing people's interpretations of works, this is something I get mainly from conversations with friends and I desire more public contexts for this purpose.

How do you wish for the publication to circulate after its release at MDT? Do you have thoughts on how it can be reused, practiced, or in other ways serve as a basis for further reading and sharing?

Most of all my desire is that the publication can lay ground for discussion and co-thinking. I am genuinely interested in critique. There are many things I open up in that essay that could be developed, problematized and specified and I am interested in doing that through exchange with peers. The publication will be placed in the Reading Edge Library as well as Shelf-Publishing, the mobile bookshop at Skogens library in Gothenburg. In both contexts, the publication will be accompanied by other publications on dance and choreography and be in proximity to art making, studio work and public presented performances. I think these libraries are so important because they give attention to text that is central in many dancers' practice but rarely given space and value in the public part of dance production.