︎︎︎ green asphalt, grey bark
︎︎︎ fictions, stitched
︎︎︎ Steps: A choreographic novel
︎︎︎ Threaded bodies
︎︎︎ On top of things
Steps – a choreographic novel is a project by Maia Means and Max Wallmeier. It takes the shape of a book and a series of travelling dances.
Steps is an experimental project that lies at the intersection of choreography and fiction. The project started out as a collaboration where we channeled our knowledge from working as dancers and choreographers into writing books. Our focus on working with bodily practices seeped into its pages and took a multitude of shapes. We have also developed sound material and movement phrases that correlate with the drawings, binding and fiction of the books.
During the making of the books, we worked with a strict set of rules for the collaboration. We followed a detailed pre-set calendar with times for each part of the correspondence - book-deliveries, postcards, mails and binding-sessions. We never talked about the artistic work while creating it. Instead, we replied to each material it through the books themselves – by picking something up, neglecting it, copying it and so on. We developed a caring and respectful method for dealing with each other’s suggestions and found a way of making sense of what we did through the making itself and not through conversations about it.
The entries were gestures thrown into the open, picked up by the other and transformed. Applying these methods to materials that don’t reside on a page, but in a body and its surroundings, we created a series of ‘travelling dances’, where artists Tuuli Vahtola, Litó Walkey and Karen Eide Bøen carried and transformed dances. Travelling between different cities, the dances became capsules of the times and places they passed through.
Throughout the process, we were interested in how words shape the way we can perceive physical realities. We extended the methods used for creating the books into making and transferring the dances, observeing the meeting point between fiction and choreography in the meeting between bodies.
Read an interview about an early stage of the project from a research residency at MARC:
https://madmimi.com/p/cb29921?pact=367-163950736-13459678046-3c15734aed82a6c1418e2a714058406455ac7d17