THE COORDINATES
A choreographic album by Sigrid Stigsdatter and Antonia Steffens
The Coordinates was Sigrid’s first graduation work at SNDO, it premiered at Veem House for Performance March 2017. Amongst other it has been shown in Ufer Studios, Berlin, Jacuzzi Amsterdam and in different smaller forms and formats.
Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen and Antonia Steffens as
THE COORDINATES
used to indicate the position of a point, line or plane
The Coordinates, investigate, and give existence to, the incomprehensible, allowing themselves to be touched by it. Following the structure of how we listen to an album, imagining and imaging with a touch of amnesia, they constantly find themselves in new places.
The Coordinates slowly reveal a future that already happened and a past not yet known.
Credits:
Concept and idea: Sigrid Stigsdatter
Creation and performance: Sigrid Stigsdatter and Antonia Steffens
Music: Madonna “what it feels like for a girl”, Nils Beck “Helga Natt” “Shame”, Game of Thrones “title melody” by youtube allstars.
Production: SNDO and Veem House for Performance
Photos: Machiek Sado (1.9) Nellie Boer (2-7)
“While working on my latest piece The Coordinates together with Antonia Steffens. I proposed to work inside a structure of creating an album.
The piece it self was shaped in the format of an album, that was the base of the structure that we could play around with. It’s made up by different scenes/tracks that has different roots but it creates a whole when seen one after the other, as well you would be able to take one scene and just “listen” to that.
This interest of working with album making came from my own need to be able to sample my self and my own work. Understood as how I can take my own material and reuse it, reshape it. This so that I can have continuity inside my work and also give materials a chance to develop depending on the circumstances they are put in.”
- Excerpt from Sigrid’s thesis
Drawing by Antonia in Sigrid’s notebook.
The OMG Dramaturgy device.
“This device detects all the things that appear in a process or in the studio that are just totally OhMyGod.
The initial idea was based upon a working ethic which never excluded any seemingly “random” materials that appeared during rehearsals and allow a space where those materials would map and create their own environment.
I began to develop this way of working into a method of producing choreographic materials dealing with the perspective on art economics and ethics.
We allow for images, scenes, objects, sounds, dreams ect. that appear by coincidence or is brought in by one of us, but for no seemingly logic reason to take space in the work. The “randomness” starts to unfold hidden logics, unforeseeable connections and creation of meaning. I work this way to create an economy of care where each material asks from me what it needs, rather than me being sucked into the demands of a capitalist dynamic asking me to discard materials for the favor of others. It becomes a collection of products that can re-imagine systems of value.
The OMG dramaturgy device can be thought of as trained intuition or a specified intuitive way of collecting material as well as a state of being, it detects the things we couldn’t have thought. It pushes me to constantly think and rethink what performance is, where is belongs and who it is for, as well as what medias I use within the work, because if it is OMG, it goes. This can be soft, small, big, hard, round or pulsing. Though just because something is OMG doesn’t mean I don’t need to question it, but it does not call or need any explanation. I embrace it as it’s own. As a gift.
This is a constant having to pay attention to details, by giving attention, we give importance and it becomes meaningful, even if there is no meaning.”
-Excerpt from Sigrid’s Thesis.
At that moment the device was called Practice of Giving Existence, later in collaboration with Andrea Zavala it changed name to the OMG Dramaturgy Device
