Knot Body

Developed in artistic residence at: Uferstudios Berlin, MDT Stockholm, Inkonst Malmö and Cullberg Ballet.

A pragmatic and philosophical research involved with a Knot Body.

The body has for centuries been and still is associated with certain fields of history: memory, class, utility, gesture, gender, etc. It is a construction that is linked to a representation of a social order (which strives for functionality as a means for behaving within the norms), that in it self is already an imposition to embody.

Considering that our attention lies in the experimentation between body and a 1000m long rope – rope-body, body-node, empty-body, body-knots – as an attempt to escape from the bodies daily attributes and give it an unsuspected meaning, beyond the understanding of a representative body/object relation. Thereby, what is provoked with the KNOT (the experimentation with the KNOT/entanglement) seems radical for us, because it intends to abandon some recognizable forms, movement and choreography that have been dominant, and points to a path outside the historic domination, while dealing with an object that is one of the oldest and most important inventions of mankind: the rope, the knot.

Knot Body is revealed in the moment we experience it entangled in the rope, where the limit between body and knot is defuse. Precisely in this place we witness the creative potentiality of the body through liberating it from its social representations, such as gender, identity and pre-established ideas of what a body could be. The KNOT seeks to produce a space, an image, and a fragment where the body is involved with the rope: winding/unwinding, tangling/untangling, pulling, ravelling and then unraveling it again. This leads us to the driving questions: how do we go beyond the significance previously attributed to the body? What problems appear in this relation? Where can this research lead us when trying to re-signify the relation between body & knot?

Choreography & Concept: Anna Mesquita & Leandro Zappala.
Performance: Leandro Zappala.
Video: Palle Lindqvist.
Light design: Daniel Goody.
Sound design: Palle Lindqvist.

This project is co-produced by MDT, Inkonst and the Cullberg Ballet and is part of the framework of the “Life Long Burning” programme supported by the Culture 2013-2018 Programme of the European Union and the Cullberg Ballet.

Supported by: The Swedish Arts Council, Stockholm’s Culture Committee and The International Dance Programme – The Swedish Arts Grants Committeé’s International Programme for Dance Artists.