When I ask Marie about her relationship with improvisation, she explains that she uses improvisation in a the sense of how to enter the core material, as well as specific ways of relating to how the gaze is used and how the mind wanders. Another crucial element in Marie’s work is the weight distribution and the translation from how her body feels and how she works with her emotions in the moment. That is something which is constantly in transformation. 

– Since I know the movement vocabulary, the shapes, the “parkour” of the work, I can let myself be held by the music. All elements are alive. 

Marie believes that in order to be creative, you need to analyze what you’re doing ahead of the act of performing. The goal is to create a choreography that has so much clarity that you, as a performer, can spend your time being busy with the present moment.

– Maze is co-signed by Julia Giertz, and is created as a meeting point between our artistic practices. It is the second of three pieces, of which the third and final one actually premieres in Copenhagen in May.

– This time we really wanted to step away from the choreographer-led process, to challenge our practices.

The two of them have worked together for a long time, and have developed dramaturgical tools on the way. Marie says they are really getting to know themselves through the process of crafting these pieces. As Maze was made with the idea of being a durational installation, the process was built in the way of simultaneously building the instruments, the environment and the situation, Then they wanted to create choreographic material that could be equalised with the other elements, and the whole process has been a very close collaboration. 
Julia has built all the resonators and instruments. She has her own artistic practices and processes which she has continued developing since the premiere of another collaboration of theirs, Oceanic.  

On her website, I read about Julia’s relationship to sound:  – To listen is not only an auditory process; it sharpens and shapes our attention, a subjective translation of information. Listening is a continuum of relationships.

Marie tells me that Julia uses string instruments, and often works with multi channel projects. Oceanic premiered at Atalante in 2020, and was presented in a classic blackbox-setting. In the work with the trilogy, the duo wanted to bring the audience closer, to create a fuller immersion into the embodied listening that the work offers. Marie explains that the physical, choreographic material really came out of the experience of being in this soundscape. As much as it moved her physically, it also stirred her inner journey. 

– It wasn’t the easiest process from the start, with the distance between Stockholm and Copenhagen as well as having small children to take care of. It was difficult to work that way… – in fact it was a logistic nightmare, she laughs. But the duo got support by Milvus, who have supported them before as well, something she expresses a lot of gratitude towards. – MARC [Milvus Artistic Research Center, run by Rachel Tess, based in Knislinge] provided a space to meet somewhere in the middle, to develop Maze, which premiered in 2023. 

The first piece of the trilogy, Labyrinth, was made in Copenhagen and premiered in Dansehallerne 2022. Marie, who had struggled with the conflicting feeling of being pregnant during covid, experienced a strong realisation when the theaters finally opened again.

– When I experienced [art]work, as well as the thinking that I could dwell in through these works, I felt so grateful. I felt reborn as audience, in terms of being grateful for the experience and the thinking these spaces can hold. In these difficult times it can seem like “why do we do this?” But I deeply believe that it truly allows another kind of thinking. 

Marie thinks that the kinds of spaces that art offer are becoming more and more important, as a counter balance of the development of the digital and artificial intelligences.

–  The ability to focus, to allow yourself to fall into deeper knowledge, the action of being together and respecting each other and holding a space together…
To make work, to try and figure things out and doing it together as a group… I find it deeply touching.

She thinks that art is becoming more and more important also politically. As so many of us, Marie started out just wanting to dance, just wanting to perform. But that drive has turned into something much bigger. 

– At this point, our human ability to focus is so destroyed that theatre is one of the last spaces that we can get away from our phones. And that is SO important. That is really something that drives me. 

– In my work I can be personal and emotional, even private. That puts the work in a high risk zone. It’s not a high pace, and you need to allow yourself to get into it as an audience member, and some people can’t and some don’t feel invited enough unfortunately, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I need to keep practicing this way of navigating through the unknown and figuring it out, because I don’t like it when the conclusion is already there. 

In Maze, one of the elements Marie uses is eye contact with each audience member. The practice of dancing and the way the sound resonates in her is how the installation is constructed.  Julia is also present, she is playing the installation live, and there is a sensing between them which derives from their shared practice.