MANUAL FOCUSMETTE INGVARTSEN
The Museum as Performance
Performance
MANUAL FOCUS (2003), 25'
'Manual Focus' is turning faces one-80, arms and legs upside down and swapping the front with the backside of the body. Exchanging bodies from animals, disorganized creatures to headless humans and other unnamed categories. Masks of old men on the back head of three nude women transforms them into a 12 legged organism, crossing out their identity by covering their real face with the artificiality of a mask. It isn‘t the monster in itself but rather the monstrous connections between nude/masked, artificial/real, male/female that produces an unfamiliar gaze at the bodies we already know. Monsters are not a species that you can get familiar with, they disappear and slip away unfocused.
Concept: Mette Ingvartsen
Created & Performed by: Manon Santkin, Kajsa Sandström and Kaya Kolodziejczyk
Produced at: P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), 2003
Related
Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. From 1999 she studied in Amsterdam and Brussels where she in 2004 graduated from the performing arts school P.A.R.T.S. and holds a PhD in choreography from UNIARTS / Lunds University in Sweden.
Her work is characterized by hybridity and engages in extending choreographic practices by combining dance and movement with other domains such as visual art, technology, language and theory.
Her early pieces, starting with her first performance ‘Manual Focus’ (2003), which was made while she was still studying, question affect, perception and sensation in relation to bodily representation.
An important strand of her work was developed between 2009 and 2012 with ‘The Artificial Nature Series’, where she focused on reconfiguring relations between human and non-human agency through choreography.
By contrast her later series, ‘The Red Pieces’, inscribes itself into a history of human performance with a focus on nudity, sexuality and how the body historically has been a site for political struggles.
In 2019, she premiered ‘Moving in Concert’, an abstract group choreography, that focuses on the interlacing between humans, technological tools and natural materials.
In 2021, Mette Ingvartsen presented two new projects: ‘The Life Work’, an in situ project with elderly people in the Ruhr region in Germany which addresses migration issues. And a new solo, ‘The Dancing Public’, inspired by a fascination for dancing manias throughout history.
‘Skatepark’, a large-scale performance for skaters, dancers and local skatepark communities, premiered in 2023. And for 2024 Mette Ingvartsen is preparing ‘Rush’, a solo performance for Manon Santkin that draws on 20 years of collaboration.
Ingvartsen established her company in 2003 and her work has since then been shown throughout Europe, as well as in the U.S, Canada, Australia and Asia. She has been artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels (2012-2016), Volksbühne in Berlin, and associated to the APAP network.
Besides making, performing, writing and lecturing, her practice also includes teaching and sharing research through workshops with students at universities and art schools. She has collaborated and performed with Xavier Le Roy, Bojana Cvejic, Jan Ritsema and Boris Charmatz, as well as invested in collective research projects such as the artist platform EVERYBODYS (2005-2010) for which she co-edited everybodys publications, but also the educational project Six Months, One Location (2008) and the performative conference ‘The Permeable Stage’.