69 positions

source: metteingvartsennet

Excess, nudity, orgy eroticism, ritualistic pleasure, audience participation and political engagement, all expressions of the sexual utopia particular to the counterculture and experimental performances of the 60’s. This guided tour through an archive of sexual performances, serves as a filter for Mette Ingvartsen to explore unresolved issues about sexuality in contemporary practices today. In doing so, her body turns into a field of physical experimentation and uncanny sexual practices emerge in relation to the environment that surrounds her.

69 positions leads visitors through a space with performances, books, films, texts and images brought alive through movement and speech in order to experience the connection between the intimate sphere and public space.

With this solo the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen starts a new cycle of work, where she places sexuality, the relation between the politics of the body and structures of society, in focus.

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. From 1999 she studied in Amsterdam and Brussels where she in 2004 graduated from the performing arts school P.A.R.T.S. Her first performance “Manual Focus”(2003) was made while she was still studying. Since then she has initiated several research projects and made numerous performances, among others “50/50” (2004), “to come” (2005), “Why We Love Action” (2006), “It’s in The Air” (2008) “GIANT CITY” (2009) and “All the way out there…”(2011).

Questions of kinesthesia, perception, affect and sensation have been crucial to most of her work. Recently her interest has turned towards thinking choreography as an extended practice. Starting with “evaporated landscapes” in 2009, a performance for foam, fog, light and sound, this interest has led to a series of propositions that extend choreography into non-human materials. In 2010 she worked on several site-specific propositions, also dealing with notions of artificial nature. “The Extra Sensorial Garden” was presented in Copenhagen and “The Light Forest” was open to be visited during Szene Salzburg in July 2010 and 2011. Her group work “The Artificial Nature Project” (2012) reintroduced the human performer into a network of connections between human and non-human actors. This work concluded the series on artificial nature.

In 2014 she started a new cycle of work entitled “The Red Pieces”. “69 positions” opened this series and questioned the borders between private and public space, by literally placing the naked body in the middle of the theater public. In the second piece, “7 pleasures”, a group of 12 performers confronted notions of nudity, body politics and sexual practice.

Mette Ingvartsen is artist in residence at the KAAITHEATER in Brussels from 2013 till 2016 where she has presented her work since 2004 and is associated artist to the APAP network. Between 2017 and 2022 she will be part of the artistic team at Volksbühne in Berlin, under the direction of Chris Dercon.

Besides her performance work she is engaged in research. Her practice involves writing, making, performing and documenting work. She teaches and gives workshops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices. Since 2005 she has been working on “everybodys”, an open ongoing collaborative project based on open source strategies, aiming at producing tools and games that can be used by artists to develop work. She worked as an editor for everybodys publications from 2005 till 2010.

In 2008 she participated in “6Months1Location” initiated by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejic, a project experimenting with education, structures of production and artistic exchange. During the 6 months she worked on the YouTube project “Where is my Privacy”, infiltrating and utilizing contemporary communication tools as a way to rethink choreographic production. As an extension of 6M1L she took part in organizing the festival Inpresentable 09 in Madrid, on an invitation by Juan Dominguez.

Mette Ingvartsen is finishing a PhD in choreography at UNIARTS in Sweden. She is in this context researching the relationship between artist writing and artistic practice, using her own work and writing as a way to experiment with these relations.

She has worked as a performer in projects of Jan Ritsema / Bojana Cvejic, Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz.
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source: flashartonline
At the beginning of Mette Ingvartsen’s 69 Positions, the audience enters an open, steel-tube cage lined with various performance documentation from the 1960s. Dressed in a long maroon shirt, jeans, and matching Adidas trainers, Ingvartsen gathers us around her.

This will be a journey, she says like an expert docent, from unresolved histories of the body to a future proposition for sexual and participatory politics. The succinct introduction concludes with Carolee Schneemann’s email response to Ingvartsen’s request to recreate Meat Joy (1964), using the original performers. Our ecstasy was a response to the political anguish of Vietnam, Schneemann writes. Don’t limit yourself; find what bodies, old and young, mean today.

Throughout the three-part performance essay, Ingvartsen plays multiple personas simultaneously, creating an intimate sphere between sex, history, and ideology that is activated by bodies, hers and ours. In her deconstruction of The Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69 (1970), she bounces throughout the space with spontaneous rapture. Her running commentary pokes fun at the anarchic performance, adding candor to her invitation to join. Ingvartsen is disarmingly capable as both playful mischief-maker and pedagogue, and as she strips down to her trainers, a nearby monitor reveals that her re-performance is an expert homage to the orgiastic original.

Except for her sneakers, Ingvartsen remains naked for the remaining two acts. Standing in front of a monitor playing her performance 50/50 (2004), she twerks while lucidly explaining that the goal of go-go dancing is “haptic vision,” which synthesizes touch through sight. Next, she explores erotic socialization, building an “orgy sculpture” around herself. It was not easy to discern what anyone felt while Ingvartsen gently conducted four people through close-range pantomimes of tongue-to-clit, finger-to-butt, mouth-to-ear, and sundry other more and less intense comings-together. In this palpably exciting, open, messy, and hypersensitive moment, Ingvartsen builds trust—rather than merely suspending disbelief—by embodying different power positions. If desire doesn’t belong to the individual, but rather to the social, she says, then it only exists through human relations, and is therefore a political agent.

In 69 Positions’ final act, Ingvartsen tours us through contemporary and historic fetishes. Bondage and mummification, electronic or musical stimulation, the molecular gender-hacking of testosterone gel—Ingvartsen uses these sexual practices—and texts, speech, histories, sneakers, etc.—to sublimate the boundaries between private desires. It is against this exploratory sexual space that we can judge her thesis, that politics is contingent on how we share the public body.