Sara Koluchova and Modris Opelts**

This is unedited transcript of an open conversation and it was an editorial decision to keep the conversational mood of the language in the transcript. Authors’ interest was to make open conversation, to stay honest and respectful towards what and how things were said. We find it important to capture the way of persons thinking process, that unfolds in the moment of sharing the thoughts.

Intro

In early April, Sara Koluchova and Modris Opelts connected virtually with the dance maker Israel Aloni for an insightful conversation about dance. I. Aloni shared their reflections on the field and exchanged insights about their initiatives, one of which will involve the Latvian dance artists collective LAUKKU.

How did your journey into dancing begin?

I think I was dancing before I came here. I feel like dance, for me, is something that started before my physical presence, in the sense that I think I come from generations of dance and movement.

When I was very young, I expressed a really passionate connection to dance. I used to perform to anyone, anywhere. I participated in any possible talent competition. In kindergarten, I would make the kids sit around in a circle and I would dance for them.

On one occasion, when I was about four years old, my parents didn’t have a babysitter for me. My sister had a dance class that day, and my father asked the dance teacher if I could just sit in the corner whilst he went and did something else. Later, when he came back to pick us up, I was in the front row of the dance class, dancing.

I think the experience of corporeality was something that really captured me right away. I felt like I really belonged there. When I was maybe 13, I decided to do it (dancing) a bit more seriously.

How was your experience of transitioning into a more professional approach to dance?

I went to an art school called Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, in Israel. There, the system works in a way that makes it possible for people to go very deep into their art practice while they’re doing their regular high school studies. Inretrospect, I can say that the level of both intensity and content of the program is equivalent to a bachelor’s degree program. In my last year of school, I was already doing different projects and I had sort of a transition period when I was studying and working for a dance company.

I feel that from about the age of 13, I knew that this was my life devotion, and that, I think, changed my priorities in life.The school I went to was very demanding. It started very early in the morning and finished very late at night. It was about an hour and a half away by bus from where I lived. It was three years of very hard work, but also, I’m one of very rare people who look back at their high school years and go like, I’ll do it again. It was really good.

As you progressed in your career from a dancer to where you are now, what other aspects of the field have you found yourself drawn to?

I identify as a fluid being, and fluidity, for me, is a term that I sort of landed on because I think it manifests in my gender identity, it manifests in my national identity and it manifests in my chronological identity. It manifests in all my identities.

I started as a performer, as a dancer, from a very young age. And very quickly, I’ve become aware of the dissonance and even the contradiction between the kind of work that I was interested in making and being part of, and the way in which the work comes to life in terms of production mechanisms.

I started in a ballet company, then I worked one year in the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. When I was 18, I was invited to join the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company in Sweden. So, I was 18 and I was joining my third company…

After three years in the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company, I got permanent employment at the Gothenburg Opera.

When I was around 23 years old, I realised how detached the whole thing was from reality. It’s like a temple. You perform to like 1500 people in the Opera House. But you have no idea who they are. They don’t know who you are. They don’t even know what cast they’re going to watch. And then you get injured. Someone else will learn the part. You just become part of this ecosystem that has no specificity in a way. You become generic and then it doesn’t matter how incredible you are. I was part of a mechanism that for me wasn’t motivating.

12, almost 13 years ago, we started ilDance which is an independent production body that is dedicated to contemporary dance.

The intention was very basic, to try and create the environments in which we want to make work. So, it’s myself and Lee Brummer. We know each other since we were teenagers, we’ve been good friends and then we started being collaborators and artistic partners and then we decided to start the organisation together. In the beginning it was just about creating environments in which the practice could also be practiced in the way that we felt it needed to be practiced.

But, from the very beginning, we started creating environments for sharing, for artists to come together and try to offer some kind of remedy to the solitude and the burden of being an independent artist. We’re speaking 13 years ago when back then it really felt like a lot of the emerging artists were fighting the whole world on their own. And I was like, if we’re all fighting the same fight, why won’t we fight together?

This is how we started the International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo)***. It started 12 years ago with the intention to create an environment in which artists can share both the burden and the advantages. Sharing costs, but also sharing knowledge and ideas. Literally, the question was: what would happen if we shared? It’s like to offer alternative economies, an economy that is not just a trade of goods, that is economy of care, that is economy of kinship, that is economy of togetherness.

Could you provide more details about your own practice that you’ve developed?

I call the practice The I. Aloni Experience because I’m interested in the very experience of having a body. The fact that we can’t actually take the body for granted, and even saying things like “my body”, the fact that we think that there’s someone owning the body, who has an ownership or a possession over the body, and then there’s someone who is dancing, and someone who is being a spectator of it, rather than the dance actually happening in both the fantasy of the spectator and the attempt for the creation of the performer. It’s a collaborative project. The body is never objective, it’s always a subjective body.

When we think about ability and capability, it’s often informed by what it is that we perceive as our body and if we feel incapable, we can actually give ourselves a different body with different capabilities, and that connects with the fluidity. We don’t really have a lot of language to talk about it. And we don’t have a lot of environments that really address that dimension of what it means to be a dancer. In my practice, movement is one of the main, what I call strata**** on which we are working, but also psychology and philosophy are equally important because I think we can definitely borrow language from other fields of the humanities to actually try to explain what it is that we are experiencing when we dance. I read a lot of books in my life. I heard a lot of people talk. I’ve seen a lot of people move. I still don’t think that speech and writing can really describe what is happening when we dance.

I spent a period of my life being a tool in someone else’s hands, because also I come from that generation that was still hearing that this is what the dancer is, a tool in the hands of or in the imagination of the choreographer. When you work with three or four different choreographers at the same time and you do around 12 different productions in one year, your body is not yours anymore.

And then what does it mean?  I have a lot of respect, appreciation, and love for a lot of the artists that I have worked with.But at the same time, part of me knows that they didn’t see me at all.

And the way that I work as a choreographer, I feel is also very much addressing that. I don’t think choreographers make dance. I think it’s a misconception. I think dance is only made by dancers because dance is only danced when dance is being danced by a dancer. Because if a dancer doesn’t dance the dance, where is the dance?

I think that’s also part of who I am and what I am and what I’m interested in. For me, the role of the choreographer is not only the person who makes dances, it’s actually the person who supports dancers in making the dance.

Could you share an example of a distinct aspect of your practice?

It’s a work in progress. And it’s always progressing.

It’s always situated in the time and place with the people that I work with. We do sessions. This is what I call them. It’s a session, and it doesn’t matter if the session is, like conventional terminology would say, is a class or rehearsal or performance or whatever people call the things they do. Because I think that it’s either you are in session and you’re working or you’re not working. These are the options. Already to change the hierarchy there, that you are not working differently because you are performing, and the piece is supposedly being performed that suddenly you are working differently. So already there we are starting to create a certain dynamic in the hierarchy. Who is this for? Why are you moving at all? It’s very important for me to liberate dancers from the subjugation to serving a role in someone else’s process, whether there’s someone else is the choreographer or the company, or the curator, or the programmer or the audience.

At the same time, how do we embody? The purpose or the role of a dancer, which for me doesn’t start in mid previous century, North America or central Europe for me, my dance started like 5000 years ago in the desert. People danced to either celebrate or mourn or ask for something on behalf of the community. For me dancers were able to embody psychological, political, social and environmental processes. This is what makes us dancers because we work with corporeal consciousness. How do you allow yourself to lose yourself, which means how do you let go of the image of yourself so you are not working in order to accomplish a certain idea of yourself, but that you are somehow accessing the world, which is also our own creation?

We work with the idea of notice, claim, repurpose which is what we do with information.

So when I use the word information, I also hyphenate it as in-formation. It’s the thing that puts something in-formation. When you’re working towards creating some kind of utterance, then you need to consider certain filters. So how to create that thing that you want to create? So how do you connect to a certain desire? Can you identify your desire and then that would be the basis on which you make your selections which is your repurposing.

You know the body needs to embody the material, so there’s always a process of negotiation of data, which is bits of information. How do you process the information? Meaning that you always make choices and decisions.

What gets really interesting is the psychology of it. The misinterpretation of freedom as the lack of specificity where actually, in my perspective, specificity is precisely the practice of freedom. The only way that we can be free is if we are free to choose because even politically and socially, people who are not free are those who cannot choose. So those of us who are free, especially in a moment of dancing, the ability to hyper specify what we’re doing is precisely how we can celebrate our freedom.

Every few weeks I ask myself why I do this? Why am I not somewhere trying to cure cancer? Why am I not feeding injured or hungry people like, why am I in this world doing this? And the answer is still strong enough to convince me every time that there’s something about kinaesthetic empathy that if there’s any hope for humanity, it will be that, if we can actually practice genuine empathy, which goes of course beyond the huWOman experience.

How does your perspective and approach shift when transitioning from being a dancer to taking on the role of a choreographer?

For me it’s all one. Also, the fact that I’m the director of an organisation, the fact that I come up with ideas of these massive projects. I conceive really large corporation projects, because I think about them as choreography. It’s a choreography of ideas. It’s the same thing. It’s people, time, space. That’s all it is.

I’m saying it like this. It’s not that simple, but I feel like project management is a choreographic work. Like a lot of things in life are choreographic work. I think that if we involve movement, dance, and choreography in the practices that are made available for people who plan things, we will have very different experiences in our civic areas.

Given your discussion on empathy and its role, you have initiated projects where people gather to collaborate. What is iCoDaco? How did this initiative emerge?

Initially what happened is that we did it more as a small festival where people were presenting different work. While traveling with this festival we were sharing, spending time together, learning about each other’s practices and so on. Then gradually it became more and more interesting to co-create. The more we started focusing on co-creation or collective creation processes, the more the problems of authorship, of leadership, of hierarchy, of identity, and of power dynamic started arising.

We identified a very interesting dimension in the project, on one hand, you want to advocate for democracy and non-hierarchical processes. But how is that relating to artistic practises, where artists are also devoted to their own integrity. How do you keep things integral and have non-hierarchical processes whilst maintaining the artists’ individual artistic integrity? What is the logic then that puts things together? And then if you find the logic, if you find a formula, it already makes it hierarchical in some way.

In 2018 we already had some support from the European Union for a small corporation project. We worked with artists from Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Wales and Hong Kong. And there was one collective, the artists were put together just for this project, and they were working on a Co-creation over two years. They had residencies in each location. They learned about each other’s context and each other’s culture and on the way, they created the work and then they went back to all of these places to share the work that was developed and throughout the whole project they met with local communities in various ways.

We thought that it would be the last time that we do the project because it became very big. It had started with artists coming together to share, and suddenly it became an European cooperation project with a lot of do’s and don’ts and must and must not. And then we were thinking, are we departing from the authenticity and the intimacy that was so important to us.

I started getting a little bit uncomfortable with the big proclamation of the title of the project, the International Contemporary Dance Collective.

In the 2018 to 2020 edition of it, we also published a book that is called Push: It Will Come Later.  The book is divided into four chapters. We looked at internationality, what is internationality? What does it actually mean? How does it actually work? Contemporary, what’s so contemporary about what we do? What is the meaning of contemporaneity? And then how does it manifest in the work? And then dance, the big D word. What is dance? Who is dance? Why dance? And Collective? We looked at the tension between democracy and integrity or democracy and artistic integrity more specifically? It was very captivating for us.

I started asking, why do we call it international? What’s so “international” about six people from different countries coming together? International is such a bombastic word that suggests that there is collaboration or cooperation between nations, and we use it all the time in dance and in the arts, we say “international collaboration” a lot.

On one hand, speaking about us being contemporary artists but using practices that are really old. Dance is not really fresh in regards to the way that we think about it and how we make it. You know, make a production and tour it, OK, how innovative is that? It’s not innovative. We’ve been doing it for centuries.

At the same time we all say that we are really concerned with the environment. But, how can we say that we are concerned with the environment if we still depend on touring, and we still depend on international residencies? People travel from one country to the other just to have a space to work. So how is that sustainable?

So rather than changing the title of the project, we thought: can we try to actually make an international contemporary dance collective?

After a long process or thinking and researching, we landed on a new model. Basically, instead of having one collective, it is now a collective of collectives.

There will be nine collectives in nine different countries, one of them is Latvia. All the collectives will be working simultaneously. All nine collectives will be questioning, researching and experimenting with a specific concept, each concept is one component of contemporary dance. We call these concepts – Tiers. We will have about 60 artists across Europe spending one week meditating for example on space. What is space from the perspective of contemporary dance? Across all the way from Georgia to Portugal.

At the end of each week the collectives will have to present some kind of thought. We’re not expecting any conclusions, but rather a sharing like “we spent a week reflecting on space, and this is what we think…”

There will be 15 weeks of residencies spread out over two years. Each week with a different tier. And then there’s what we call the encompassing collective, which are three people. It’s myself and two other artists, Sebastian Matthias and Lee Brummer. The three of us will try to identify trends or dynamics that occur from the contributions of the collectives, from a sort of a bird’s eye view. We are there to identify relationships or relations between different knowledge and circumstances, what we are interested in is how different circumstances might support certain processes in certain ways,and maybe guide them to certain outcomes.

At the end of all of this, there will be a manual. Not a manual how to make dance, but a manual of what to think about when thinking about making dance.

We’re trying to offer an alternative to the idea of a score. That is, being authored by a single maker, but rather than creating a score and then having interpretations of a score, we want to involve everybody (all the artists in the collectives) in creating that way of “thinking about making dance”. At the end of these 15 weeks of residencies, all the collectives will be invited to make a work based on this manual, to see how it can be interpreted, used and repurposed.

The other part of the project is that all the information, all of the knowledge that will be produced in this project, will be put together in an open access digital platform.

The idea is to revolutionise what kind of knowledge we have access to in order to create knowledge and who gets to formulate it? At this point, we have politicians developing agendas that are translated into cultural policies. Many of us, artists, are operating within environments that offer us resources depending on these policies.

So, in an indirect but very influential way, politicians decide what we can or cannot do. That’s one thing. Another important thing in dance making is academia. But academia is not artistic. And I’m allowing myself to say that academia is precisely “standing outside” of art in order to be able to reflect upon art from a relatively more objective perspective.

We are hoping that having an open access digital platform will make it accessible for people to meet knowledge that is developed by artists with artists for artists. So, anyone with internet access can actually have access to this pool of thinking ways. Wherever they are, they can either follow an artist, follow a collective, follow an idea, follow a concept, and then get some tools, inspiration, advice, triggers and provocations. It will be multi-format, meaning that there will be videos, texts and visuals, whether it’s diagrams or images, as well as sound files, in order to be an online creative collaborator.

From the disposition that dance cannot be transmitted online. What can be transmitted is information, but it needs to be transmitted online in a way that inspires physical practice. With the hopes that people will travel less to access information about dance.

At the end of this whole initiative, which is going all the way until 2027, we will do mini festivals. These mini festivals will have both live and digital experiences that present the different works that will be developed during the project, as well as demonstrations of how to use the digital platform. We also think that eventually the digital platform will be used by people who don’t work with dance. It can be used by teachers, architects, etc. and bring a dance perspective on the way that we live our lives.

What drives you to continue to do what you do?

I have two references to support me in my answer. One is the concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis which relates to desires and how we desire things. The good metaphor for it is the horizon. We feel like once we get to the horizon, our life will be great, but as we travel towards the horizon, the horizon travels with us so we can never get the things that we think are what we need.

And at the same time there’s a great book called The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, which is about Sisyphus, the person pushing the rock up the hill and then down the hill and up the hill… Camus speaks about the absurdity of life. What’s the point in life? And it’s an absurd thing because it doesn’t matter what you do.

I do the thing for the thing itself. And if the thing itself in some way is accessing a moment of empathy, that’s enough. For me, empathy is borderlessness.  It’s not that I’m able to connect to something that is not me, but that I feel that me expands or shrinks. Then it, this me, becomes borderless in a way that my experience becomes more than what my cognitive self (the ego) can hold.

This is why I hope that I can focus on the hands on the rock and the feet in the soil and just notice the sublime, mind-blowing, beauty in the sense of that which which gives satisfaction to the senses.

Israel Aloni

Dance-maker, choreographer, educator, performer, writer and provocateur.

Aloni’s choreographic practice is vigorous and contextualised within contemporary theories and social-political movement. Their work has been presented around the world and their artistic voice transcends boarders and conventions.Currently, Aloni is developing a new modular and site-specific work for archeological sites in Serbia, Italy and Spain as part of the large European Cooperation project – Dancing History(y)ies. Their new durational dance performance piece, Boys Just Want To Have Fun, will be premiering in September 2024 at the Pride Theatre Festival in Belgrade, Serbia.

Aloni is the Artistic Director of ilDance, an independent production body which is dedicated to contemporary dance and performance art, operating from Gothenburg, Sweden; Architect and international project manager of International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo) which is co-founded by Creative Europe; Artistic Director of COMPASS – a national infrastructure for the support and presentation of contemporary dance by emerging artists across Sweden; Aloni is the researcher in the European project – Cultural Transformation Movement Project which is led by Trans Europe Halles.  

Both in their artistic practice and the ways in which they initiate and manage international projects, Aloni promotes democratic, horizontal and equitable practices in intentional opposition to the widely spread regimes and governance which increasingly threaten our liberty and safety.

**Sara Koluchova and Modris Opelts

Sara Koluchova is an independent dancer and researcher from Czechia. Modris Opelts is a dance dramaturg and poet from Latvia. Both are based in Dresden, Germany.

***iCoDaCo http://www.icodaco.com

****strata = layer/part

Featured image: Isarael Aloni, photo by Hedda Axelsson