Mia Habib choreographer, CSC Movement Research for Parkinson

This signal went into MAX/MSP, and we were finally ready to start experimenting with the sound. Gruppo Nanou’s basic choreographic formula and simplistic sound editing is antithetical to the rich choice-making within Davis’ ensemble improvisations and compositions. If the company wants to silence his voice, they should at least demonstrate they understand what he was trying to say. Dance Festival featured works from Oslo-based Mia Habib, NYC-based Colleen Thomas, and the Italian company Gruppo Nanou.

The way the objects, the room and the performers are available to the spectator before and after the performance erases the lines that separate layers in the event. Unlike most objects exhibited at museums, the installation at IKM can be touched, moved, changed. The artists are there not only as artists, but as complex subjects, in connection with their environment beyond the institutional context.

Bassano, for the Dance Well dancers in Bassano del Grappa, presented in Bassano in August 2023. Designed for practical use more than theoretical contemplation, this quickstart guide is just 5 pages long, and will get you started in no time. Enter your details below, and we’ll email a download link to your free PDF.

The installation grows from the centre of the room into the audience, branches and fabrics becoming ties between audience members and between performer and spectator. For a moment of beauty, we are all part of the same construction, a shared constellation. The duet “ a couple dance” uses the stage as a space of possibilities to unfold, discover and subvert the complex layers in a relationship between two people. The relation, and Mia & Gui who create it, constantly changes appearance and lingers in a multiplex play between fiction and reality. With keywords such as apartheid, gender identity, aging, disability, immigration and Black Lives Matter, six solos offer different perspectives on ecological grief, cultural panic and the feeling of collapse.

It was less than a week before the premiere that we finally managed to get everything together. After working with gathering the equipment and making the patch, it was very exciting to test everything in practice and see how it worked with the dancers and the drummer. Øyvind Hammer and Henrik Sundt helped with getting the NoTAM MIDI controller to work with the sensors. The chords from the IR-receivers were connected to the inputs of the controller. When a signal was detected from one of the receivers, the controller sent a MIDI message with the corresponding channel (1 or 2) and a note-off message.

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’s How to Die, Inopiné

Habib’s All – a physical poem of protest presents a walk-on cast, pulled from a previous Movement Research workshop and/or three days of development at La MaMa. The group circles the stage, and eddies form within as those closest to the center slow down while those on the outside speed up. Occasionally, the cast establishes a shoulder-to-shoulder ring around the stage’s perimeter as they wait for someone to restart the perambulatory pattern.

The difference is mostly that in the Laser Dance project, a sound is more a tool for the dancers to work with, than a musical piece. It soon became clear that the visual beams were not good for motion detection. Henrik Sundt at NoTAM suggested using pairs of IR-senders/receivers instead. When the sender and receiver are in contact with each other nothing happens, but as soon as the signal is broken the receiver sends a pulse. The sensors were quite cheap consumer electronics and when we tested the equipment at NoTAM we found that the reaction time was somewhat slow. This triggered some nerves because the Mia Habib whole project would not be much worth it if the sensors were not capable of detecting fast movements from the dancers.

• This might be an iconic image of how contemporary dance settings and bodies look today on major Western stages.
• Bassano, for the Dance Well dancers in Bassano del Grappa, presented in Bassano in August 2023.
• In his last chapter, Haga analyses a dance-music performance where he points out the excellent synchronicity between the music and the gestures used by the dancers.
• 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.

Mia Habib / Rani Lavie 2012

After working with this project, it is tempting to draw a parallel to Egil Haga’s (1999) Master’s thesis about sounds and actions. Using the term synchronicity he refers to the concept when a physical action and a sound gesture is believed to be generated from the same action. He points out that most films contain soundtracks generated in studios, and he is critical of examples where the synchronicity is imprecise and poor. Further, he mentions the fact that cross-modal perception results in greater stimuli. For example, it is easier to understand a person talking if you can see the lip movement. Ellen Stewart Theatre’s upstage double doors open into a distant room, revealed only when they are flung open to haul a performer in or toss them out.

On the last day at IKM, I arrive early to the finissage, a potluck where the community is invited to bring a dish and mingle throughout the first hours of the evening. To my luck, I end up attending the last Stranger Within performance by Habib and Hindi in Oslo for now, a closed outreach event for a group of migrants newly arrived in Norway. During the dinner, Sina Seifee spontaneously gifts us with his impressions of the project.

A text by Thomas Ryckewaert

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Thus in Limbo, Oslo-based choreographer with Iranian roots Roza Moshtaghi intricately plays with intertwinement between codes of her ancestral culture and dominant Western aesthetics. Through movement, live video and music created by the performers on stage, two bodies travel through different landscapes in a white space, in an attempt of relating to each other. The setting is a installation made of objects collected during the duo’s tour, spread on the wooden floor of the exhibition room.