PROJECT

Language is a way for us to name the world, to understand it. It is a reduction that functionally gives us so much, but which also limits us. Language is violent, violent to the body, to identity and communication. But we are not devoid of agency, we can act within, against and through language. We can force it to change. Language is a tool and a prison at the same time. In embodying language through choreography the same thing happens, dance is not without semiotics. No one can avoid language or its production, whether it is the audience, the choreographer or the dancer who puts words to movement.

So how do we trick language? How do we, as observers and actors, become interested in fooling away the sanctity surrounding the certainty on which language rests? Playing with language can be a way of playing with identity, with function, with the predictable. Playing with language is playing poetically. Choreography embodies language, writes language with the body while writing the language into the body. It is a way of interacting with the politics of identity and for Björn Säfsten a speculative philosophical experiment. Making a body in ways that are rarely permitted, or creating bodies that we have not seen before, is for Björn acting within body politics. Do we know that we are making bodies all the time? Do we know that we tend to take upon us bodies that we can identify with? What happens if we dare to create a body whose political implications we do not yet know? Taking and giving body is owning agency in relation to something, creating an object for investigation and criticism. Nor is it entirely possible to separate having a body and acting with a body, but in its politics the action can change the assumptions surrounding what representation is allowed to mean. Striving towards a choreo-poetry.