Mette, you are returning to Moving in November with a poetic work that you developed together with your daughter. Could you tell about the starting point of this project and how you worked together?
For me a work usually begins from a constellation of several starting points, and some of them I only properly see or identify later in the process. But there was a moment when Iben told me that she wanted us to work together. I remember that I was quite astonished and at the same time I found it really sweet. She was only nine years old at that time, yet it seemed like a real proposal. Then it still took some time before we started to work on what later became our piece. It was clear to me that her desire wasn’t about ‘being on stage’ in the first place, it was the process of making something together she was drawn to. That we collect and share things, that we start to build a world for ourselves from these exchanges, and then little by little start to uncover what the piece could be. Conversation was the guiding principle throughout the process, both in how we moved from one thing to the next, and how material was generated. It was important for me, taking our difference in age and experience into account, that we found a way of working where we could tune in together. We were speaking a lot, doing and figuring things out together. And we were learning new things. It’s an interesting relation, because although it is not about us as mother and daughter, or intergenerational relations, that is of course also there in the room and probably what made this process possible in the first place. It felt to me like we were not approaching our process from the outside, we were already inside.
The work borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also known as The Moon Chronicler, a conversation between the Moon and a painter. In this dialogue, the Moon describes her nightly travels around the globe, suggesting that the painter might paint her words. How do you think about the power of imagination, which is often a key element in your work?
Iben discovered the book Live d’images sans images by H.C. Andersen in a Japanese manga series she was really into at that time and she was very inspired by the story. The book became an important refence and source for us in the thinking about what we were making. The conversations between the Moon and the painter could also be our conversations, how we tell each other things so that the other can imagine them, and this is how we build our world together. This works also for the performance itself, how we share something with the audience for them to imagine and build worlds – to make their own ‘book of images’. We read the book in French, as that was Iben’s reading language, and in French they use the word image, ‘a book without images’. The English translation of the title is A Picture Book Without Pictures, but we kept the French title. We found that ‘image’ was more fitting for our purpose, it’s more open as a term than ‘picture’. The word ‘image’ comes from ‘imagination’ and refers to reflection and internal images in the mind. And this is so important for me when making work, how to open spaces in the imagination, how to invite the audience to connect to their own internal journeys in their minds and beings. The conversations between the Moon and the painter are important here, she tells and describes, and he listens. I think of dance and performance as an art form that engages all the senses, not only the visual and what we see in front of us, there are other senses also involved, such as listening, feeling, remembering. An audience is never passive but opens itself up, more and less, to receive something when attending a performance. One could think of it as a form of conversation.
For this year’s festival edition, I’ve become quite curious in the ‘how’ a story is told, what artistic tools are needed or used to build a performance. Your artistic roots are in choreography, yet you often use other art forms in your works. This performance, for instance, exists in three forms: vinyl, paper and live performance. What motivates you to use different tools and forms when creating a work, and how do you decide which ones to use?
It’s true, I often look to other media or art forms when making work. But it is always in relation to dance and performance as an art form and specific situation. The meeting between the different media creates something, asks other questions, and that brings something new or different into the process and the performance. The record (vinyl) we made for this piece offered another space for us, it has other capacities, if you will, and require a different process of making. What is interesting then is how the different media work together, what possibilities and limits they give. I have been working with language and voice for some time now, and when we started working on this piece, I was interested in our voices together. I also wanted to work with the relation between the acoustic and the recorded voice for the live performance, as well as other kinds of sound recordings. It was a new tool in that sense. The idea of the vinyl was there very early in the process, so it’s very integrated in the making of the work. The vinyl is an interesting object. It’s a physical thing, we can handle it in our hands, it has inscriptions on it that we can play back and listen to. It produces something different than playing a recording of a voice from the speakers via the computer. The record is very concrete and magic at the same time. It’s a document and its own space. It has a certain presence.