Hållning

A body-based platform for collective learning and action.

Today, at a moment in time marked by deep transformations, the call for “hållning” continues to pierce through the most diverse debates on how to live and act together on a global as well as local scale. This call for “hållning” comes as a reminder of values and norms that can both hold us together and tear us apart, as an invitation for action and resistance, motivating participation and change. However, “hållning” has shown it can also be in danger of entering slippery ideological grounds, exhausting itself in moralism and claim-making, sometimes being used (and misused) to install empathy but also otherness, creating fear and hate based upon generalising and stereotyping terms.

Against this backdrop, Hållning takes on the question of what it takes to stand up, to stand in for something, from a practice- and body-based perspective: how is the social and political stance that we take, individually and collectively, made by performative and aesthetic means? How are the norms and values that hold us together or tear us apart related to how we imagine, experience and sense ourselves, others, and our environment?

Hållning is a Swedish word and holds the meanings of posture, position and attitude offering bodily, political and ethical implications. It is also our chosen name for this body-based platform of collective learning and action, at the intersection of dance and performance, education and civil society initiated and curated by Sandra Noeth. Hållning is grounded in collective learning, and has an international and trans-disciplinary ambition and is evolving in exchange with an international group of guests and their respective practices.

Hållning comprises various activities, including a freestanding course in collaboration with Stockholm University of the Arts/The Dance Department, two study circles in collaboration with ABF Stockholm, an online study group and a concentrated programme of workshops, lectures and performative proposals that take place from June 10-13 at MDT.