PANCOR POETICS

A DOG CALLED DRAMA

In "MOPA – The Last Stand (Sky)", Pontus Pettersson looks both forward, back and beyond. Here, dancing is a myth in the making. Like a photocopy slowly developing in the darkroom, while the image emerges, we ask ourselves the question: How can we find our way back to collective thinking and dance as doing?

"MOPA – The Last Stand (Sky)" is the third and final part of the MOPA trilogy, a trilogy which has been in the making for ten years. In this work, choreographer and artist Pontus Pettersson returns to the classic choreographic tools: time and space. His cat and water practices, two practices he has worked on for a long time, shape the work’s stories, bodies and choreography.

The first part of the MOPA trilogy "Preparing for Battle" made between 2009-2012, was a set of six solo works performed by Pettersson and five other dancers, premiered at Dansens Hus in 2012. In 2013, the second part of "MOPA, a lecture performance – I disappear in Darkness" – premiered at Weld. 10 years later

During the the pandemic of Covid 19 Pontus started playing the accordion, a solitary practice and vibrational endeavor, both spiritually and physically, seen as the motion of waves and breath, a perpetual drive.

A Dog Called Drama is Pontus research project on water "All Departures Are Waves", cast in singular form through Pontus own history, practice, and dance. Somewhere between a concert, auto-fictional writing, and ah, yes, choreography. In the solo Pontus plays and tells stories from aqueous embodiment and desires, vibrating the space, as to move the audience from inside out. The flesh becomes one.

If the performance has a shadow, it will lead us to a male figure, yet, like wet paint it moves with gravity, becoming material, far from an image. At night, when the shadows dance in the absence of the sun, sounds like vibrations, a wavy sphere is created from which the calling of the ocean is imagined, conjuring the past to move forward.

“Out of the Binary/ Is a Read” as part of the group show ”Sensual Politics, Stars Around Scars” curated by Ashik Zaman and Koshik Zaman at Tredje våningen for Gibca Extened. The work is a hanging poetry sculpture consisting of mirror stencils from Pontus project "Writing Wounds to Heal". 

Viveka Kjellmer writes: "Like a poetic and glittering wall, Pontus Pettersson's 'Out of the Binary/Is a Read' (2023) hangs, a curtain formed by interlinked mirror pieces with letters. Together, they form words and sentences, but the entirety also becomes a partially transparent barrier where glimpses of the exhibition can be seen through the gaps. The reflective effect draws the viewer into the work – their own reflection is constantly present, a reminder that understanding always depends on who is reading, observing, experiencing, and that we ourselves are always involved in the process of interpretation."

My Wild Flag is an annual dance and choreography festival in Stockholm, happening in early September since 2017. The festival offers international and local acts working with experimental formats and intersectional perspectives. The festival is curated, organized and produced by Karina Sarkissova and Pontus Pettersson. MWF can be seen as a choreography in itself, where different communities engaging in social choreographies as well as works made for the stage.

MWF is a nomadic and artist run festival meeting in a new context and space every year. The festival wants to expose and address urgent themes: bodies, thinking and beings that disturb and embrace the ways in which we perceive the world.

My Wild Flag has joined forces with the organizations and theaters such as Weld, Danscentrum Stockholm, c.off, ccap, MDT, Hallen i Farsta, Dansens Hus, Uniarts and The Blob as well as showing works by artists such as

Ewa Dziarnowska, Vaginal Davis,

Marga Alfeirão, Tiran & Nkisi, Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, Louis Schou Hansen & Karoline Bakken Lund, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Tamara Alegre, SERAFINE1369, Museum of Impossible Forms, Suutoo, Adam Seid Tahir, Rip Me, Jafar The Superstar, Galerie, Hellfun, Dinis Machado, Frédéric Gies, Deborah Hay, Florence Peake, Eve Stainton, Adham Hafez Company/ HaRaKa Platform, Performances for Pets , Florentina Holzinger, Jen Rosenblit, Michele Rizzo, Ceylan Öztrük, Nadja Hjorton, Angela Goh, Paula Chaves Bonilla & Thais Di Marco, Rani Nair, QUARTO, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, PRICE, Maryam Nikandish, Netti Nuganen, Ligia Lewis and Sorour Darabi

Delta started in 2019 as a platform for participatory dances, a series of coming togethers, a place where choreographic and performative work can be shared and exercised, a place to share work by doing the work. A container for participatory projects, dancing, exchange, publications and choreographic inquiries. Delta is organized by Pontus Pettersson and Izabella Borzecka (PAM).

Delta – An Ocean Call (2021-2022) , is a publication devoted to water histories, narratives and practices. Contributors Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson, and Alice MacKenzie share their multi-layered practices, writings, memories and scores on water.

Delta - The Page as a Stage (2023), is a two-day exchange and coming together arranged, with the intention to discuss, reflect and share how choreography is practiced and manifested in printed matter, how text and publications can be understood as formats for choreographic inquiries, and how they can be seen as works in themselves. Made together with Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen & Simon Asencio), Paloma Madrid, Sara Kaaman, Stina Nyberg, Tova Gerge, Litó Walkey, Delta (Izabella Borzecka & Pontus Pettersson) Reading Edge Library, Index Foundation.

Up to 60% of your body consists of water. It is a molecular fact, a material fact. No known forms of life can sustain itself without it. Still, water is an anomaly, puzzling today’s scientists as they have for centuries, one of the most peculiar substances found on earth. Swiftly changing shape and state, still so common, inside and outside of us.

In 2018, Pettersson created the choreographic installation ‘Bodies of Water’ based on the text Hydrofeminism; Or, becoming a body of water by phenomenologist and gender scholar Astrida Neimanist as well as texts about communist love by Russian Marxist and feminist Alexandra Kollentai. This work became the beginning of a larger collection of work including the choreographic installation and durational performance ”Bodies of Water”, the physiological and relational dance practice ”The Water Practice”, the auto-fictive accordion solo ”A Dog Called Drama”, the minifestival ”Water@ Weld”, the cinematic installation and collaboration with artist and filmmaker Salad Hilowle ”Hydra”, the collaboration and sound installations ”The Rain Room” and ”Clepsydra” together with composer Hara Alonso, a numerous amount of fountains and text, and much more.

In the research Pontus have worked on the theme of water being a life-bridging material, searching for an ethics inside of dance that bridges dance to life rather than spills onto the stage. Complicit or implied, water can suggest a different ontological understanding of the communal, but also individual embodiment. As Neimanis tells it, for a posthumanist phenomenological understanding of water, one could argue that individualism or collectivism must be rearranged to fit this thought. This puts dancing in its current state of hyper individualism on a threshold to something a bit different. In the long run, different patterns of movement create different patterns of thought. Pontus believes there are ways we can learn from water about our dancing. That’s both dancing from a long time ago and dancing that is still not here, yet. 

Chest is a choreography at the intersection of ecology, animality, and masculinity. It is the third part of an investigation of the assholeness of humanity by Swedish choreographer Stina Nyberg

In an attempt to imagine a different world, Chest brings us closer to the collapse as a common ground from which new creatures can emerge.Creating hybrids that are not cars, but creatures simultaneously moving and being moved, embodying the myriad properties of protagonists, landscape, and atmosphere.

Chestis a choreography at the intersection of ecology, animality, and masculinity. It folds practices around seeming binaries such as hard and soft, flaccid and erect, hairy and bald, into contradictory landscapes, switching between atmosphere and personhood in trying out ways of being nature to each other.

Pettersson is part of the crew as a performer together with Stina, Robert Malmborg and Stephen Thompson

Trailer by Senay Berhe

The Cat Practice, a recurring performance, originated around 2012 and coincides with the rise of internet cat culture and a period when contemporary choreography sought inspiration beyond dance and theatre for novel production methods and alliances. Pettersson examines the potential for blending, accentuating, or playing with the feline characteristics inherent in humans, aiming to generate ruptures that give rise to new social dynamics. Catscan be described as time-hacking, pleasure-seeking, parkouring urban entities that exist close to humanity. They serve as companions, witnesses, or shadows to humans, existing as a social phenomenon and a body that is neither entirely human nor alien. This unique relationship fosters a distinctive curiosity and presence for the performer, as well as a reimagining of the gaze and the politics of attention, emphasising the power of the present moment not as an infinity but as a series of radical shifts in focus and intention.