Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance. 

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

Published by Xing & Varamo Press
XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)
First edition, September 2023
Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen
Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve
Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A performance text by Jozef Wouters, The Soft Layer traces and proposes visions and words that enfold the historic building of Dar Bairam Turki in Tunis like a cloak. How can we imagine possible futures for such a place and the community inhabiting it, beyond nostalgia and the spectres of the past? Several voices muse in three languages (Tunisian, French and English) on renovation and history, destruction and cleansing, the limits of science-fiction and the soothing quality of aloe vera.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition May 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN 978-82-691492-4-1

"[…] this new poetry will not serve the taste of the prosperous class. which only represents a minority. The people who populate this earth find the right to live at the end of a constant struggle. Like everything else, they also have a right to poetry, and it will appeal to their taste."

Three friends —Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat— followed this principle as they were composing their "odd" poems. Their aim was to write poetry for everyone, about everyone.

This books gathers the poems Orhan Veli published with his friends in Odd (1941), the manifesto he wrote for this new poetry, and the foreword he wrote for the 1945 re-edition.

A chronicle of the genesis and creation of Memoria, the new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After visiting Colombia in 2017, Apichatpong chose the country as the location for his first feature shot outside of his native Thailand. In the following two years, he returned for several visits and travelled extensively, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way. The book 'Memoria' gathers the memories he collected, in the form of photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers* (2022–23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making this publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during their residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments – on paper, between pages.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.