Mania, pornography and dog barking: Inside the mind of Mette Ingvartsen

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Mania, pornography and dog barking: Inside the mind of Mette Ingvartsen

By Stephanie Bunbury

In 1518 in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament now convenes, one woman’s frenzied dancing in public set off a chain reaction in which somewhere between 50 and 400 people danced, seemingly out of control, over a period of months. It wasn’t an isolated incident.

Eruptions of choreomania were repeatedly recorded in medieval Europe, baffling contemporary physicians, priests and city fathers who saw participants dance until they collapsed with exhaustion and dehydration, their feet bleeding; these episodes still resist explanation although, says Danish choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen, they seemed to coincide with periods of crisis such as plague or famine.

“Basically, you can dance with anything,” says Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen.

“Basically, you can dance with anything,” says Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen.Credit:Bea Borgers

“That’s what I’ve been interested in: how in times of crisis, people are more inclined to lose it, to lose these frames of control or normality and act outside those norms,” says Ingvartsen, who relates the story of the Strasbourg outbreak as part of her solo piece The Dancing Public. “For me it is very problematic and painful but, at the same time, there is a sort of liberatory energy in it. There is a society that frames how bodies should act and behave and how public space should be regulated so, when these moments occur, it is also – in a way – a revolt against something.

“In 1518 there was a food crisis in France, where peasants didn’t have enough to eat, although the church actually had lots of food. So these conflicts are connected. If you don’t eat, your body is weakened, but it also for sure becomes susceptible to mania.”

Ingvartsen is tall and imposing, with the tree-trunk legs of a footballer and the combative spirit of a Viking. She came to dance from sport – “football, handball, basketball, I did gymnastics, I think I’ve been around everything that was possible where I grew up” – when she realised that dance combined the athletic with the artistic. Hip-hop was her way in.

“I’m hyperactive. So from when I was just under 10, I was doing something like hours and hours of physical work every day.” So she never had the little-girl ballerina fantasy? She almost flinches. “No, no, no. NO!!” She saw, however, that to be taken seriously as a dancer, she would have to learn the disciplines of ballet. It wasn’t easy for her to bend to that yoke. “It was very difficult! But then I was lucky.” A teacher arrived who was schooled in Merce Cunningham’s cerebral but vigorous modern dance. “I loved those classes.”

It was at P.A.R.T.S. school of contemporary dance in Brussels, however, that she found an idea of dance as broad as the world she wanted to explore. There were daily classes in ballet and contemporary dance, but also yoga, theatre, philosophy and sociology classes.

“I think there I found out that, actually, working with the body is very connected to thinking processes. And that from the beginning, the distinction between thinking and doing – between thinking and dancing – was the thing I’d been trying to get rid of. The brain is part of the body. It also dances. And the voice, which is why many of my solos use language as a choreographic material. Basically, you can dance with anything.”

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The Dancing Public is enthralling from the first moment, partly because Ingvartsen’s energy is so dazzling – she never seems to draw breath, let alone pant – and partly because everyone in this room, empty but for three small platforms and a mixing desk, is implicitly part of the performance. Dance music is pumping well before she appears, gyrating through the standing crowd like the raver she used to be, eager to get to the centre of the action.

Some people start to shuffle in time. She dances for a few seconds with anyone who looks up for it, meanwhile speaking in time to the beat, telling us just how much dancing she will be doing over the next hour, how her fingers will be dancing, her ears will be dancing, how the animals in the neighbourhood will be dancing. A palpable excitement ratchets up the tension in the room.

Mette Ingvartsen in The Dancing Public, part of this year’s Rising festival.

Mette Ingvartsen in The Dancing Public, part of this year’s Rising festival.

“I am all the time dealing with this contamination,” she says. “Because the dancing manias were all about contamination or how a movement would spread from one body to another, so while I am trying to infect the audience, I am also being infected by the audience.” Between stories, she will not only dance but convulse, gurn, laugh grotesquely – a reference to another historic compulsive group mania – and bark like a dog. Does anyone ever bark back?

“Indeed, sometimes people bark, sometimes people dance like crazy, sometimes people stand completely still, also. Sometimes people don’t want to be infected. And all those reactions for me are part of the show.”

Ingvartsen will perform A Dancing Public as part of next month’s Rising festival; she will also perform a piece made in 2017 called 21 Pornographies, using her own body to convey the muddle of desire, abuse and plays of power expressed and distorted in extreme ways. She mimics eating faeces; she touches her face with her own urine – “which I never in my life imagined I would do until I made this piece” – and evokes the gaze of a male porn director. A final section, inspired by the sudden appearance of armed soldiers in the streets of Brussels after a terrorist attack, deals with the pornography of war. It doesn’t sound like easy viewing.

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“I try to bring people into places where perhaps you don’t want to be,” she says. “It’s a way of saying we have to look at those things – and we have to be able to feel what those desires are in our own bodies, because if not we can’t understand how to act in a world that is actually extremely violent.”

Not that she wants to moralise about desire or dictate what is acceptable, referring back to the Marquis de Sade’s view that fantasy has no limits. Her own opposition to censorship is absolute and resolute.

“In a way, I think 21 Pornographies is partly about that, saying well, what if we opened the frames of what is imaginable?” she says. “At the same time, it is also a critique of the kinds of pornographies that are objectifying women’s bodies in a particular way.” She found some of the source material extremely difficult. “But it is the job of art, at least in my opinion, to also confront us with all those things that we don’t want to look at, that we don’t want to exist in the world but that do exist.”

In all this, she maintains a certain distance. She devises the work, she performs the work, often solo, but it is not about her. “I’m someone who prefers my private life to be private and my art to be the public side of what I do,” she says flatly. So while she can be entirely comfortable dancing naked, she is reluctant to tell me the name of her partner of 15 years.

“It’s no secret, obviously. We have two children! It’s just because we are so public, both of us, that if we have no spaces of being private then we have no space to be private.” Small confessions are just as much of a stumbling block. After an hour talking fluently and authoritatively about art, politics and history, she freezes at the first question on the Take 7 questionnaire.

Take 7: Mette Ingvartsen reveals a bit (reluctantly)

  1. Worst habit? Hmm. Loving excess!
  2. Greatest fear? I’m not the scared type, that is for sure.
  3. The artwork you would like to own? James Turrell does these amazing abstract light paintings … well, things to hang on the wall. So beautiful and very abstract. 
  4. Biggest regret? This is the personal part where I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to do this.” What is in the past is in the past. I try to learn from my mistakes and I always find something good in the thing that I regret, you know? So that’s a transformative thing.
  5. The line that stayed with you? I don’t know. I had so many conversations with Carolee Schneemann before she died. She was an American feminist who was famous – or maybe infamous – for her explicit nude performances in the ’60s ... she was really good at one-liners, so I’m trying to remember some. I’m really bad at them, in the sense that I don’t retain them. I retain concepts but I don’t retain phrases. That could be my answer. “I don’t retain phrases”. What time is it?
  6. Favourite room? My kitchen. I work at my kitchen table.
  7. If you could solve one thing… All the violence of the world? I’m sorry, I’m so bad at this. This is terrible.

“I’m so bad at this,” she sighs. All her answers, I point out, are attempts not to answer. She laughs; it’s true.

Likewise with the work: historically, she says, women’s solo work was often autobiographical. That was never going to be her bag. Ingvartsen is 41; when she was a student, she remembers, “authenticity and biography were being contested. Like my teachers were saying ‘the author is dead’, you know. So I think I’m not someone who has this autobiographical way of working. But, of course, everything I do on stage, I have to do. It’s my body. And it often connects to things I have done. The Dancing Public is about my hours and hours on the dance floor at rave parties. I’m not sure I would have made this piece otherwise.”

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Her frustration with the pandemic also shaped the piece as she was making it. “Not being allowed to move, not being allowed to party, not being allowed to touch: that’s very violent for a dancer. For everyone, but that is basically what I usually do every day.”

Her image of herself, however, is as a vessel for ideas. “Often I work with historical materials and of course they don’t come from me, because they come from when I was born,” she says. “A lot of it has to do with connecting to a longer history of struggle in which my body is a continuation, in a kind of lineage. Working with nudity, too, I think it’s important to me that it’s a political and social project, not just a personal one.

“But then I had a friend, a visual artist, who said all work is autobiographical and I thought that was an interesting way of thinking. Even the most abstract work: what does it say about you?” And she does have an answer for that. “Working with questions,” she says, “that is my way of being in the world.”

The Dancing Public is at Melbourne Town Hall on June 8; 21 Pornographies is at the Meat Market, North Melbourne, June 1-4. rising.melbourne

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