Dear Friends,
it’s not much of a summer to speak of in these latitudes, but that won’t stop us from releasing our summer issue anyway, with American dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart taking us right into the whirlwind of energies and patterns running through her work.
Delirious, vulnerable bodies running, stumbling, sliding from ramps, crashing into each other in full flight; whirling dancers in states of trance and abandon; traces of patterns emerging and dissolving: the work of Meg Stuart is an enigmatic and dazzling experience of dance as a multisensory attack, distilling harmony out of chaos, grace out of roughness, moments of intensity out of daily rituals and gestures.
Meg Stuart’s work is not about the elegance and beauty of dance, or at least not in the conventional sense. It is about exploring the outer edges of movement, where bodies age, fail, and surrender, where individual spaces disintegrate and bleed into each other, where physical memories are exposed like open wounds.
Her oeuvre is located at the vanishing point where dance meets visual arts. Within just two decades, Stuart’s dance company Damaged Goods, which she founded in 1994, have produced a lengthy and diverse list of projects, ranging from countless full-length feature works to multi-disciplinary dance installations, improvisations, and films that spread far beyond the theatre stages of the world, into museum spaces, film festivals or the wide open street.
With mono.kultur, Meg Stuart talked about her first physical memories, the healing power of dancing and the thrill of disorientation.
Following Meg Stuart’s interest in abundance and complexity, the design discards all notions of top or bottom, left or right, with text and images set in different and ever-changing directions. A magazine as a physical object that wants to be handled and turned. Reading as a dance.
Available as ever through our online store mono.konsum or, at the trusted book dealer of your choice very soon indeed.
Enjoy and all our best,
mono.kultur
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mono.kultur #41
MEG STUART: MAKE THE FIRST MOVE
“I have always felt very comfortable with being upside down, off balance, and ungrounded when I am dancing.”
Summer 2016 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 48 Pages
Interview by Göksu Kunak
Works by Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods
Design by Eva Gonçalves & Maria Nogueira
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