Thoughts on “dead dead document” by Oda Brekke

What traces do we leave behind us? Bread crumbs, an empty cup with dried up coffee at the bottom, a sock, a mark on a white wall, a smell? Archiving in this way, as something we involuntarily create and do through living and purely doing things, could be history in its truest and most unmanipulated form. We leave a trace. That trace tells a story, creating in its wake a cultural heritage. A story that is up to the perceiver, the person who picks it up, to interpret. It’s minuteness, however, means that it can also just as easily be swept or vacuumed away. 

Oda Brekke suggests a porous dance, “a dance that has holes, and therefore has openings where the surroundings can enter”. A porous dance suggests  sponge like abilities:  to absorb  and release  through the  openings in the structure itself. Porous as in breath moving through our lungs: inhaling and exhaling; sucking in and pushing out. Even through involuntary movement the breath uses muscles for both of these actions, underlining its almost mechanical nature. 

In the publication "It Absorbs: on Dance as a Porous Art Object” the choreographer writes about cleaning, dirt and Modernity’s promise as a “choreography of endless progress and control”. The publication touches on the spaces where dance studios are situated , the history they often hold and how these specific spaces affect the porous dance. Much like the studio spaces used today at MDT for the performance, old torpedo missile testing rooms, underground in an older part of Stockholm, on an island that formerly was used as a military base and before that as a joyous island escape and festival like area for the royals. 

These buildings as well as identity rely on the same patterns in society and history as the lungs, however often curated out of chosen pieces in cultural heritage and memory. Power driven and manipulated pieces of history, pushing each other. Evidence that is tangible, tactile, preservable. The thought is that not everything can be archived, but who chooses what the rules are of which traces we can and cannot keep for the future? Can we still have pieces that are beyond the scope of progress and control? Glimpses of sunlight in the bunkers of volumes stored to secure a society? 

They write on papers what they see, what the dancers perceive as chosen to leave behind. In choreography the past, empty space of the previous movement depends on other mediums to be remembered outside the dancer's body. The form of words, images, painted pictures or drawings, sound and film. But everything, all of these traces are perceived through the sunglasses of the informant, the communicator and the communicated to. The true forms and original meanings are always disappeared and shattered into the traces left behind. Involuntarily manipulated and interpreted by the perceiver. Like a passing wind it is gone and so is the beauty of its true form.

Written by Vilma Sohlberg 

18th of April 2024