Dance Well creations: “How to A score. Bassano” by Mia Habib Movement Research for Parkinson
As the first part of the performance vanishes, we are then invited outside the theatre. Around bonfires, the performers recount personal stories of colonialism, rhizomatic organisms or genocide to propose paths connected to the excessive earlier action. Suddenly, over a cup of hot chocolate, still fragile after the energetic impact of the performance, a sense of injustice invades my body; one insignificant part of an all-encompassing organism. Each year, Springback Academy graduates have the opportunity to attend a live meeting at a dance festival. This year it was the first weekend of the CODA Oslo International Dance Festival, where we also participated in a workshop on collective writing by the Norwegian Performing Criticism Globally project. This might be an iconic image of how contemporary dance settings and bodies look today on major Western stages.
Guilherme Garrido / Mia Habib (
After growing accustomed to the running pattern, the eye searches for more subtle choreographer Mia Habib relationships among the performers. Unfortunately, their internal gaze cuts them off from one another, despite their physical proximity. As part of the festival “The Present Is Not Enough – Performing Queer Histories and Futures”, HAU initiated an open call for artists based in Berlin, who were invited to submit proposals for their Manifestos for Queer Futures. Ali Chahrour will present his dance performance “Iza Hawa” as part of the festival “Love is a Verb”. A conversation with HAU curator Petra Poelzl about politics, grief and love. Luckily, the Mac did not crash and the sound turned on and off as it should, every day.
The performers face the audience, each other and the space in a series of minimal repetitive movements that seem fragile and powerless to stop the inevitable. The claustrophobic feeling is supported by a sound designer, hidden in the corner of the stage near the exit, whose presence slowly becomes audibly and visually prominent. Suddenly, movement strikes her like a bolt of lightning, forcing her to the floor and leaving her again. This captivating and at the same time obsessive solo develops in the rhythm of the dancer’s inner journey and demons. It has been performed in a church, in a squat, in front of PKK fighters in Iraq, in Israel, in Turkey, in Madagascar… Missing in Action juxtaposes the images of the body as terrorist-stranger-oppressed to point at the human face of fear. Poignantly, Mia Habib also shows the plurality of the body and identity, which are far more than the sum of the ideas and images they are meant to represent.
The first two investigate possibilities for community amid rising global tensions, while the third sorely mishandles the revolutionary compositions of jazz legend Miles Davis. With essays by LASTESIS and Dilar Dirik, video contributions by artists and activists, a portrait of Carolina Bianchi, a music playlist and illustrations by Sadhna Prasad. Working with choreographer Mia Habib, I created the piece Laser Dance, which was shown on 30 November 1 December 2001 at the Norwegian Academy of Ballet and Dance in Oslo. If but the sun came up asks too many questions and All asks too few, the creators of we want miles, in a silent way didn’t ask any. The work claims to investigate the “choreographic language” of Miles Davis’ albums Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, and Bitches Brew by “silencing” Davis’ voice within the music. That is, removing the trumpet from the compositions to find out what’s left over.
Co-producers in Norway
Three dancers (two male, one female) were on stage, “trapped” within the light beams. During the 15 minutes long performance, they worked their way from silence to sound climax to silence. Spotlights were used to create massive, cascading effects in between total darkness.
Mia Habib is a Norwegian dancer, performer and choreographer based in Oslo. In choreography and dance pedagogy from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. An overriding goal for her work is to investigate the agency of choreography in social, political and artistic spaces; to ask how a choreographic project can blur these different spaces, interact with them, and create new spatial ecologies. She further seeks to transform the research process into an ‘open practice,’ exploring interdiciplinary approaches to sites, places, and various conceptions of publicness. Its striking opening image – Geir Hytten and Jakob Ingram-Dodd, silently wandering around the black box stage with transparent nylon backpacks full of grass and soil – is both dystopian and poetic. The only noise is the sound of water in the rubber boots one of them wears; the only object, an oversized black pillow – a Chekhov’s gun that will fire at the end of the piece.