︎︎︎Green asphalt, grey bark
︎︎︎ fictions, stitched
︎︎︎ Steps: A choreographic novel
︎︎︎ Threaded bodies
‘Green asphalt, grey bark’ is a site-specific movement and text work by Maia Means and Max Wallmeier, that will take place 2025-2026.
We search for small details and occurrences – a piece of tape perhaps left behind years ago; a quick change of clothes before the next station. We invite you to listen. With eyes closed, with steady eye contact, with drifting attention. We look at the texture of moss on the shaded side of a building and feel how the air is slightly drier today. We hear what a father says to his daughter as they walk by, and we repeat it. We move along a path and then backtrack, taking the same number of steps.
'Green Asphalt, Grey Bark' is a site-specific movement and text work presented in four rounds – between fields in rural Skåne, in a small town outside Stavanger, and twice in Copenhagen’s Sydhavn. Focusing on the shifting city/landscape, Maia Means and Max Wallmeier create a performative universe where movement, text, and sound intertwine. Words become a choreographic element, and the dance is experienced with the intimacy of storytelling. The work invites the audience to experience a different rhythm, where seemingly insignificant details come to the forefront, forming an everyday poetry. In collaboration with local artists from various disciplines, a series of workshops for local participants is also held. The project will be conducted in collaboration with Sydhavn Teater (DK), Milvus Artistic Research Center (SE), and Regional Arena for Samtidsdans (NO).
Choreographic Material
On daily walks through the city/landscape, the choreographers gather impressions from conversations, hidden details, and movement patterns. Instead of documenting with a camera or audio recorder, materials are archived through memory and repetition. Some impressions occur repeatedly, while others vary with the weather, or following set schedules, or by chance. On stage, a performative archive is woven together from the local area’s environment, inhabitants, and hidden ecosystems.
The text in the performance works with multiple layers of narrative: dry descriptions, storytelling, blends of actual spaces and fantasy worlds, and poetic-rhythmic experiments. The work's movement material reflects how bodies orient themselves in landscapes and public spaces, expressed in fragmented and cyclical movements that mirror the changing seasons in tandem with the text. Layer upon layer, an unpredictability is created that allows the viewers' imagination to fill in the gaps and experience a shared landscape of stories.
Summer permeates the first work period, shaped by impressions from the landscape in Skåne with the abandoned shoe factory and the local pizzeria. During the next work period, new material is built from the urban environment in Sydhavn during late autumn – but with the Skåne summer beneath the surface. With each performance, the performative archive becomes more complex. The recognizable elements from the local area are tangible, but underneath, the viewer gets a sense of other places and times.
Local Anchoring
‘Green Asphalt, Grey Bark’ immerses itself in changing environments and is anchored both methodologically and content-wise in local contexts. During each work period, a workshop is held where a local artist is invited to share their unique perspective on the local area and relate artistically to the project's themes. The workshop helps develop new material for the project in meeting with local participants and artists from different disciplines, all of whom contribute their expertise and strengthen the project's local and interdisciplinary anchoring point.
Artistic Team
The project is carried out by Max Wallmeier and Maia Means, two artists with international experience in choreography and publication. In recent years, Wallmeier has created dance performances characterised by specificity in movement practices and a sensitivity to complex spatial compositions. Means has explored the potential of the meeting between publication and dance, both as a designer, writer, and performer. In their collaboration, they combine their respective skills and use strict methods for collaboration to create the space, movement, text, and sound. Their working method has been developed over several years in a range of projects and contexts, resulting in a performance, two books, a collection of postcards and ‘traveling dances,’ and a time capsule buried in Cretan soil. Common denominators for all parts of the collaboration are poetic precision, dry humor, and curiosity about the yet unknown.
‘Green Asphalt, Grey Bark’ creates contact points between different artistic practices, skills, and experiences in both its workshop structure and in the artistic content presented. The project has dramaturg Naya Moll as a continuous dialogue partner. With her experience in site-specific performances in Hvide Sande and Djursland she can contribute important perspectives and inputs on how to cultivate conversations with locals and place their work on the premises of the site.
Vision and Future
The work is closely connected to the question of sustainability. Instead of following the art field's norms for accelerating circulation, some of the project's central concepts are slowness, reflection, local context, and specificity. The project proposes a deceleration in tempo and rhythm, moving along with the landscape – all travels are made by train, bus, and boat, which helps anchor the project in the landscapes it encounters. At the heart of the sustainable perspective they use listening as a primary action. The performance structure enables local specificity where the art marks – and is marked by – the local contexts it passes through.
In the future, the performance structure and the mobile archive can be implemented and continue to develop in various parts of the Danish/Nordic landscape, helping to manifest the theater's important role in the shared understanding of our surroundings.