‘Full Drop into the Body’A Conversation and Public Discussion*Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and Susan Kozel

Susan Kozel: One of the striking things about Margrét Sara’s work is that she does not just use somatic practices to train the body before setting a choreography upon it. What Margrét Sara does is work with somatic practices as a meditative myofascial release to create bodily states. Those states are then choreographed. Reflecting on this unique approach to bodily practice as choreography, a two-fold question arises: Firstly, can you explain your specific practice, called Full Drop into the Body? And secondly, can you describe how this leads into choreography?

Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir: In 2010 I began to research a certain bone visualization meditation, which induces a deep myofascial release. My first encounter with Beginning of page[p. 132] this visualization meditation occurred while I was working for another performance-maker, together with my friend, the German dancer and fascia therapist Anja Röttgerkamp. When I had confessed to her that I was tired after rehearsal, she replied: ‘Just lie down on the floor and melt your bones. It will ground you and when you stand up again you are going to be full of energy; I use it as a warm up before performing.’ However, what happened to me was very different. I laid down on the floor, performed the meditation, and discovered I could not stand up again. Instead, I became deeply in touch with the incredible exhaustion of my matter and spirit, which in turn totally changed my life and interest in body and dance work. I therefore spent the next three years on the floor practising this meditation, up to five hours a day, and experiencing all kinds of full-body states, rhythms of inner systems, and inner movements. In relation to this, I noticed a strong wish to cease performing and to decondition my hyper-professional dancer’s body. I came into dialogue with my tissue regarding exhaustion and a resistance to performing in this achievement-oriented society, which had caused me to use the force of my muscles and the force of my will to get what I thought I wanted to achieve. Although my career as a dancer and maker has been conducted within the experimental field of contemporary dance, I trained as a gymnast as a child. You can imagine how much conditioning had become normal to me since that time: to push through and over all my limits, in order to achieve and succeed on all levels. I began this meditation in 2010 and it has been my practice ever since. Of course, it has also developed tremendously since then. I discovered new tools to enter ever more deeply into dialogue and intimacy, both with myself via the body, as well as with and through the dancers I work with. Getting in touch with the tissues of a burnt-out body Beginning of page[p. 133]— an alienated, isolated, disconnected, and non-sensing body — directly reflects the sociopolitical situation we live in. This is a society of speed and isolation, where identity and self-value are built on personal achievements and competition, not unlike in professional sports. We are all in this space, and it expresses itself and is reflected in the matter of which we are made. In response, I started to develop a practice of utter surrender. Of not doing anything. Of letting go of control and basically not moving until something else did: something more than my will and my conditioned body moving habitually through muscular force or my dancer’s body memory. Out of this practice I discovered multiple inner rhythms. Once you stop doing and start listening, you develop a whole new relationship with yourself, because you have developed a sort of neutral observant eye upon yourself that can, through its neutrality, guide you into sensing and being with yourself in much subtler, deeper ways, and in nondualistic terms. Another reality of yourself opens up to you. I researched the tides and the rhythms of the tides, some of which cranio-sacral therapists also work with. I got in touch with that inner breath that is the biorhythm: a certain type of autonomous rhythm in the body that never stops and has its own timing, as well as a lot of other rhythms that are constantly beating in your body without you feeling or recognizing them in your daily life. So, it is a form of hyper-inner-listening that I started to practice. At a certain point something moved me, and it made my body move without my consciously controlling the movement or knowing where it was taking me. This became a breakthrough into recognizing a certain type of inner movement that can actually animate your body visibly. I began to train myself in how to get in touch, on demand, with these inner movements, and I discovered the modes of different speeds and pathways within the body.Beginning of page[p. 134] When I eventually shared this inner listening and started teaching people how to connect with this inner movement, I noticed the tremendous amount of presence it created. This presence was very touching for me in the way it demands one’s attention. I work with it consciously in my performances.

In 2013 I was commissioned to do a graduation performance work for the BA dance students at the DOCH, Uniarts, in Stockholm. As I believed it necessary for me to have a common language with the students in order to complete this work, I decided to teach them this practice of inner listening. The piece was titled Step Right To It, and the process was both beautiful and also represented my own beginning of sharing and developing this kind of practice with others. Previously I had been doing the practice solely by myself, away from the context of performance-making, and in order to step out of the exhausted professional dancer’s body and to release it from its conditioned body memory. This is how it started entering my choreographic works and how it has developed alongside other artistic themes since.

During the years 2014–15 I worked on the Blind Spotting Performance Series: placing the burnt-out, broken, exhausted, apathetic, imploding body of the achievement-oriented society and the anonymous multitude on display in front of red velvet theatre curtains. My deep and artistic desire for the series was to build a space on the contemporary stage for the antihero, especially in the context of dance. We do not need any more polished, controlled, or aesthetic bodies to watch: we have these everywhere around us on billboards. Instead, we are talking about resistance and about placing more importance on what things feel like rather than what they look like. It is also about highlighting topics such as vulnerability and overexposure, as well Beginning of page[p. 135] as the need for intimacy and dialogues with inner, physical, psychological, and emotional pathologies and realities. Between 2015 and 2017 I decided to create certain conditions, for myself and the dancers I have worked with before, by conducting a two-year research period into opening up a new branch of my practice, while still keeping focus on the introspective body: moving away from the exhausted, broken, and emptied-out body, into a more energized, private, emotional body. I wanted to work with the expression of the pathological inner symphonies of the private, emotional body with which we are all constantly, albeit mostly unconsciously, in dialogue. The dancers and I started to work on how to dive into the subconscious and unconscious, and we reached a new and intense territory together. We used meditation to tune into hidden realities — blind spots, so to speak — in order to allow unknown knowledge and states to appear to us through the matter. As a result, a new work entitled Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES premiered in November 2017 at the Sophiensaele, here in Berlin.

Kozel: I would like to ask you to speak, from your choreographer’s perspective, about your choreographic sensibilities. Once you have worked with dancers who have done this practice for a very long time, and you have identified pathological states, then you need to shape them into a piece that lasts roughly sixty minutes, such as Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES. Can you describe how you make the transition to the conventions of the professional dance production world, while still remaining faithful to the energetic forces of the meditative practice?

Guðjónsdóttir: As you can imagine, it is quite a job to develop choreographic processes when beginning from the position of dancers lying down on the floor. They are Beginning of page[p. 136] experiencing a lot sensorially, and coming into incredible intimacy with themselves, along with undergoing a kind of widening of the recognition and awareness of themselves through their own matter. However, very little of this wild inner life and experiential field is visible from the outside. The dancers lie on the floor, in ecstatic states at times, and yet I see nothing: no expression and no movement.

For that piece Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES, I set out to research an artistic topic that required a certain type of body and movement vocabulary (the hyperstates) on stage to convey it. I would then compose these hyperstates as if they were notes in a musical score, because each hyperstate has its own colour and feeling, just like musical notes do. My inspiration for conducting these two years of research was to discover more animated, complex, and interpersonally linked states that could arise not only from autonomous inner body systems, but also from the subconscious levels of each individual dancer. They were unique expressions of the non-expressed but highly active component of a person’s being. I have called them ‘hyperstates’, since they are coloured by emotional and formerly lived experiences. What I discovered during this long working process was that, eventually, all sorts of physical states arise. This is because an increasingly deep capacity to surrender to what is there develops, along with a perpetually deepening access to your inner depths. As a desired result, this performance became very different from the others, and of course it also brought into other territories such as the archetypes of the common unconscious. These explicitly became the main topic of my newest work, premiering at the Sophiensaele in November 2018, titled Pervasive Magnetic Stimuli.

In Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES we searched endlessly for openings. We asked: How can Beginning of page[p. 137] inner, personal, private, subjective, sensorial experiences and inner realities reveal full body states? How can they be visible from the outside? How can the audience feel it in their own bodies? We work with activated and ‘volume-ized’ connective tissue movements, and if you experience these performing bodies live on stage the connectivity stretching from body to body is palpably present in the theatre between the dancers and audiences. Actually, you can create a direct physical connection with the audience, and they will feel what is happening in front of their eyes but now within their own bodies. This point has always been very important for me: How can I reach this level of ‘communication’ through the performances? How can I make a performance with this kind of oozing energetic body, while at the same time talking about its tragic state? My wish is to reach a kind of mirroring of this togetherness, an opening and a letting happen, so as to give space for these topics of shared realities to emerge through the body. I worked on these hyperstates during 2015–17. It was a process of stepping out of my extremely precise director’s position, up to a certain degree, and collectively discovering inner pathways and keys to stage full, authentic body states, via very personal and new types of dialoguing with the dancers. The dancers could then access these states again and again. The primary goals were to truly live in these states in front of the audience, as well as that the states would create their own animated movements or static positions, each with different types of flavours, timing, colours, and autonomous hyper-privateness. Based upon these experiences I have been able to expand the vocabulary of the Full Drop into the Body practice, and ultimately create the performance Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES out of it.

As with each of my works since 2010, I still use my ‘eagle eye’ to spot, distil, and then mould and direct the Beginning of page[p. 138] material in very concrete ways. This allows it to be able to serve its artistic purpose, and for it to be received as fully as possible, as well as to be performed on demand within a detailed and composed performance. I spent the last fifteen years in this busy pursuit and it is quite important for me to now share this reality with people, and to see what kind of repercussions and cognitive shifts occur as a result of that sharing. My interest lies in finding ways of developing the capacity for cognitive plasticity through activating the fascial body.

Kozel: Can you say something about the broken body, because you speak a lot of pathologies and choreographing through them? And also about the way the dancers’ bodies are mirroring what you are seeing in the world?

Guðjónsdóttir: [directing the question to the audience] What do you think? What do you do with your blockages? Sadness? Incapacities? Your exhaustion? When dancers follow this inner listening I propose to them, I can observe through their bodily movements clear expressions of blockages in certain areas, as well as incoherencies in amplitude, rhythm, and the direction of movement of internal and energetic systems. Pathologies. I have developed a keen eye for those bodies as well as the wish for them to be visible, spoken about, choreographed, and worked with in the dance sector. My piece Step Right To It (2013) was the first performance where I used my practice as a working tool. I wanted to work choreographically with bodies that appeared to have no awareness of being the servants of a larger political power, which wants them to be and behave in a certain way. They are almost like cold, empty, numb bodies participating in actions without thinking. These are the generic young bodies of the digital millennium generation. I was placing emphasis upon total isolation, as well as upon the alienation of those bodies. They were spiritless Beginning of page[p. 139] and disconnected from themselves, from the outside, and from each other. In the Blind Spotting Performance Series (2014–15) I focused on showcasing and working with the exhausted broken matter of the burnt-out body, which perhaps was more directed at the bodies of people in their thirties and forties. These are the bodies of people who became overwhelmed by neoliberal society’s demands on the individual. They are extremely slow, darkly flavoured bodies, incapable of reaching out, reacting, moving, or being vibrant in any way. Imploding, and overflowing with too much information — oozing, peeing, drooling, unable to keep things in anymore. Bodies without life energy.

In order to choreograph performances about these topics, you require bodies that embody these states, rather than bodies that showcase their dance control. I direct the material by stripping away all referential or habitual movements, directions, and the tonus in the body that does not support these states when they are observed from the outside. This undoing of the physical habits of the dancers I work with requires a lot of work. At all times I need them to look very pedestrian and non-composed, and I place great focus and emphasis upon this, so the crafting of the material and simplifying of a lot of gestures and movements becomes the hidden acrobatics of my work. What appears to be very natural timing is in fact completely composed, in order to create that effect on stage.

Choreographically, I specifically work to offer the audience the most precise, detailed, and clear propositions possible. I do so by stripping away everything that does not serve this purpose, to create maximum clarity, in order for the audience to have as much freedom as possible to perceive it. The work therefore does not dominate the mind and its reflections, but rather determines the audience members’ physical experiences, which also serve to Beginning of page[p. 140] hold their attention. This occurs if the audience allow themselves to fall into the physical dialogue that is resonating so strongly in the room, due to the physical practice. What the dancers’ practice, and what I myself strive for as the performance choreographer, is to offer an experience where one can fully surrender to the physical, sensorial experience of the event, while at the same time maintaining an extremely clear cognitive clarity and awareness. Contradictions always exist inside each other.

Question from the audience: You were talking about tissues and the connectedness or connectivity between people and the dancers. Do you think there is something like this connective tissue between persons, or between a dancer and their movements and the space around them?

Guðjónsdóttir: I do not separate the dancers from the inner movements and full body states that they dance with and which dance them. And yes, the space where the happening of the performances takes place, between the dancers and the audience, can be filled with connective tissue energy/movement. The physical performance is infiltrating the body of the audience, which happens through the connective tissue. This has been experienced time and again by different audience members and critics who otherwise do not know anything about myofascial work.

Kozel: In my experience and research into Margrét Sara’s practice, she uses language very carefully to communicate and to give choreographic guidance to the dancers. She has developed a way of using words to nudge them back into a particular state if they have happened to slip out of it. Indeed, when the dancers slip out of an energetic state, the field collapses; it is just not there anymore. This observation opens a direct link with the different kinds of energetic forces that we are discussing today at this conference. Energetic forces have a clear somatic validity.Beginning of page[p. 141] They are not only visual or sensory; rather, these forces invite different ways of using language in choreographic processes. In the case of Margrét Sara’s work, this language is fascinating because it ranges from recognizable terms for bodily states and emotions (such as hate, love, or ecstasy), but also includes less definable qualities (like black slime, trauma, possession, and hesitation), figures (like snowman, sculpture garden, and Jesus-woman), and actions (like flavouring, puffing-up, crushing, and becoming). This curious use of language borders on the affective and imaginary. Margrét Sara, can you say more?

Guðjónsdóttir: I think a very big part of my work is that, with each and every person that I work with, we have to create our own vocabulary of understanding in order to find ways of describing our inner subjective experiences, and that is why it takes so long. By now I have a large knowledge of possible reactions and states that can be experienced by people who do the Full Drop into the Body practice. These elements and processes are something that I can teach and guide people towards, but there are also the hyperstates, which are the newer branch of the method the dancers and I searched for during the last two years. These are personal, individual states and trips, which the dancers experience, and many of them feel amazing and yet at the same time look like nothing. At times you cannot observe the experience in the/of the body from the outside. So it is strenuous work to do, and it takes a very long time to work in this way, and especially in order to create a performative outcome. But when you witness someone in front of you actually living something profoundly deep, you recognize the process that it kick-starts in your own being. Then you realize that this is a very strong thing, and that is why I dedicate my time to this kind of work. And now I am of course very trained in how to bring something into focus Beginning of page[p. 142] in the studio, in terms of dialogue, state, and movement material.

This work we are actually busy with is not about shape, nor is it about a spectacular movement quality. Rather, this type of full presence and these magical physical qualities that appear through the practice are used choreographically in order to carry a larger message — emphasizing physical communication and the activation of new states, thoughts, consciousness, and realities for both the viewers and performers.

These working processes are very private, which has become apparent ever since I started to work with long-term collaborators in 2013, and those dancers have a lot of experience with the method by now. When you work like this, you make the decision to go into depths that exceed professionalism. It becomes a private and personal journey that you nonetheless share with the group, no matter what happens. In our long relationship, my collaborators and I have discovered that the work goes together with friendship, and that is very important. Additionally, I have also developed ways to give classes and workshops to professional dancers, as well as to people outside the artistic field. Separating performance-making from the practices, and using my own experiences with the practice to create a safe space for inner listening and myofascial release, creates conditions for people to come into intimacy with themselves and with their tissues, which is the main priority.

Audience: I would like to ask if you could say something about the sound in your performance, because I was deeply intrigued by the sound. I had the image in my mind of listening to inner body processes, while watching bodies performing them.

Guðjónsdóttir: To ‘colour’ the performances, I use the experimental and very sensorial music of Peter Rehberg —Beginning of page[p. 143] who is an electronic musician originally from London and now living in Austria, directing the record label MEGO. I have worked with Peter since 2010 and when we devise the performances I guide him onto certain paths. Together we make it work, but the music is mostly created and worked on separately.

Audience: And does the music have the function to trigger certain states?

Guðjónsdóttir: The dancers can reach these states without the music, due to the way we work and train together. It comes from a deep listening to the body. Actually, the music is there for the audience, and I use it consciously to embrace the audience, or to confuse them, or to guide them into a slower rhythm. For me, it is a choreographic question of how to use the music in each piece, and I operate with the music in different ways. Sometimes it is intended to make it harder for the audience to be with the dancers, or sometimes easier. Often it is to add a colour and a topic for thought in relation to the visuals, so to speak. Most of the time I work conceptually with the music, but the sound of course has a very sensorial as well as a referential quality.

Audience: I would like to ask you again about your use of language, since I am wondering if you address affects in particular and/or do you verbally create and figure landscapes or images like, for example, flowing water? Summing up, my main question is:do you address affects directly or do you use other imagery to stimulate them? Or do you look for something other than affects?

Guðjónsdóttir: I use visualizations that trigger the participant’s fascial system, which leads the way to a meditative practice. What you discover through this practice is your own immense sensorial subjective experience field of inner listening. In this way the work differs greatly from Beginning of page[p. 144] practices such as hypnosis, trance, past life regression, Mysore yogic meditations, or other ways of getting in touch with the energies of the subtle body, the subconscious, and beyond.

Kozel: I find it fascinating that it was so hard to ask that last question on affect, because what you [the questioner] are navigating is the distinction between somatic states and affects. These overlap and swarm around each other, and as much as we need to ask ourselves to define them and distinguish them, they sort of collapse together again, making the work of understanding them analytically even harder. I have a feeling that Margrét Sara, and each of us who experiences her work, might be able to come up with our own senses of where the affect resides in relation to the somatic, and how these are materialized through the processes. But this is a shifting terrain, because affects are, as far as I understand them, exchanges of intensities. They are already there, they are generated, and they exist as potential. Affects exist above and beyond the emotional body: they exist as vibrations.

Guðjónsdóttir: I just want to say that when you work in the way that I am working, you leave a lot of space for the subjective sensorial experiences that are unique to each person. That is why the mapping of working in this way is particularly exciting and difficult.

Audience: I am very, very fascinated. Thank you. I am wondering how much care goes into this — the ethics of it. There is a lot of exposure in this work. My question would be: It seems to be incredibly difficult to navigate a line between these melting bodies crying, and then choreographing them. For a performer, it seems to me to be extremely difficult to then re-impose form on this, so that you can re-perform it on stage. Do you see what I mean? It is of course relatively fraught, or very, very difficult ethically.Beginning of page[p. 145] I find this very fascinating, but it is probably very hard. How do you do it?

Guðjónsdóttir: I will explain. When you work with this Full Drop practice, it is deeply healing. This is very clear between those of us who work together. We seek to elevate the performer’s capacity to be in the here and now, to be with the whole of herself, increasing presence. I create working conditions for ceasing active doing, in order to come into full presence through self-exploration. This becomes a task where there are no boundaries between the private and the professional. That has been clear from day one, and the people with whom I work joined the project due to that same desire. It is a trip, as well as a massive self-exploration and deconditioning, and a freeing of matter through work on structural adjustments, changes, and integration. The dancers I work with are all professionally very experienced performers, and I would say that what we do is impossible if you are not a professional dancer, since the type of analysis and awareness we are currently working with is quite advanced. This is what enables us to make a performative stage work from it, as well as a personal practice. They go on stage without feeling exposed, since the framing and crafting of the performance work protects their autonomy and their privacy. As a viewer, you also feel their power in what they do, making it impossible to feel like you are some sort of a ‘Peeping Tom’. I work consciously and clearly with this topic, and control the outcome in that way: the work is thoroughly composed. And that is, of course, my deepest desire as a choreographer: to make work where you can talk about this overexposure and intimacy without exploiting anybody in that performance space, being in the rawness of that topic and reality nevertheless. That is a very political issue for me and is deeply important. If you could experience the pieces you Beginning of page[p. 146] would understand better what I am talking about. What you observe is the darkness of the topic being addressed in each piece, but working on it is deeply healing, and even pleasurable. Many of the states in my works perceived from the outside as very dark are actually experienced by the dancers as incredibly enjoyable in their bodies, even if they are drooling and peeing. It is a wonderful thing to heal directly through artistic processes. It is deeply humanistic work.

Audience: My question concerns your strong ties to a philosophically phenomenological approach and aesthetic. I am wondering about your scientific sources, or other material you refer to in your body work, especially about your fascia knowledge. To what degree do you bring the knowledge that we currently have about fascia to your project? I would be curious to know more, because it is probably not a bibliography. So what kind of sources were you looking for to sustain your research?

Guðjónsdóttir: I will go into this topic more in the workshop immediately after this talk. By now it has been proven that the bones are compressed fascia. Basically, we have a tremendous amount of fascia in our body that is either very compressed or completely liquid: it is all the same. You carry your whole life with you in your tissues. Everything you experience. The fascia does this. Say you fall off your bike or somebody hurts you emotionally: your tissue is reacting to it, leaving tightness, blockages, or scars. Mostly, if you do not react to it instantly, you carry it with you in your body from then on, wherever you are. That is usually what people call ‘old people’s bodies’, which are actually just an accumulation of hardened fascia, and people closing their bodies more and more as a naturally protective physical device. When you start to work with this matter, which is focused on initiating movement and unblocking areas that are blocked, you will address the Beginning of page[p. 147] fascia in the body and then anything can come up or out. And that is why it is an intensely physical and intimate journey with yourself when you work on the matter of fascia. Does that answer your question a bit?

Audience: I was curious as to whether you are exposed to scientific literature, and if this is important for your work. Upon what physiological knowledge is your work grounded, and what kind of knowledge do you use, based on what we know today about bodily, mental, and affective states of being in the body, or with the body? That is a big question. I was wondering which direction you would go through, primarily, or what do you choose as your path?

Guðjónsdóttir: My main focus is on the ‘Perceptive Pedagogy’ branch of the Danis Bois fascia therapy method. Danis Bois is a French osteopath who has made many discoveries in the field of the connective tissue over the last thirty years. I have been studying his method and am also a manual therapist in the method by now. This knowledge is incredibly useful for my work with the dancers. It is about supporting people to move forwards, away from their former biographies and into the present. The work is conducted through the subjective and sensorial experience of the body. It is amazing to have that kind of knowledge while working with dancers, and to be on this kind of artistic journey together, as well as to know how to be with people in the best way possible in these intensive situations that we have passed through in the work. Personally, I study manual therapy, meditation methods, and the science of the subtle body so that I can get in touch with and discover the real meaning of cognitive plasticity, with a focus on deconditioning and listening to a person’s biography.

Audience: I saw your performance Conspiracy Ceremony — HYPERSONIC STATES in November 2017 at Beginning of page[p. 148] the Sophiensaele in Berlin and was very impressed. I was really impressed by these energies around the dancers and the resonance that I could experience between myself as audience member and the dancer. I could see that there is a kind of relation between the dancers on the stage. My question is: how can this state become a choreography and how — if you do — do you train this resonance between a dancer and yourself as a choreographer too?

Guðjónsdóttir: We emphasize the distinctive reality of the connective tissue dialogue that exists between us as human beings, which can be palpably felt when we remain in a clear and aware resonance with it. It requires a lot of training and meditation and intimacy with your own tissues to be able to do that: that is the expertise I am training with the dancers through the Full Drop into the Body practice. I have been practising, processing, and exploring the practice through my own body all these years, alongside the dancers, of course, and before starting to work with others on it as well, as you know. I am one of the practitioners. One major goal that I set for myself when I started this journey as the choreographer was the desire to work with bodies like these and topics like these: diving into them to then reflect outwards the inner realities of the social-political body of our times, as well as the ancient knowledge that we also carry from generation to generation within our bodies.

It is not a re-enactment or representation. Indeed, it is not a representation or a presentation. Rather, it is a fully lived physical state and a tuning-in to rhythms of inner autonomous systems, which produces certain types of movements, imagery, presence, vibrations, and a certain type of sensorial flavour for the audiences and the dancers. These particular states that we worked with came up during the working process and research (and we discarded many,Beginning of page[p. 149] many others that emerged but did not fit the topic of the performance). I tried to crack them open and ask: what is it that makes them resonate so strongly with the artistic theme? And how does the dancer relate to them? How can you talk about them together, in order to try to examine them more thoroughly? Can the dancers reproduce them on demand? And then how? Et cetera. In that sense, it is a very acrobatic and complex process. For instance, I could never have done the last piece we made if I had not had two years of time and incredibly dedicated people.