mono.kultur 41: “Meg Stuart”

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 American choreographer and dancer 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.

Meg Stuart’s work 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.

Interview by Göksu Kunak / Works by Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods / Design by Eva Gonçalves & Maria Nogueira