Efva Lilja

Professor Efva Lilja

University College of Dance, Stockholm

Dance – For Better, For Worse

A presentation in and of dance, words and video,on Pleasure, Revulsion, Expectations and Other Things that Make Life Worth Living

Working with movement until it can convey its own expression and honesty is a process which, of necessity, has to expose the ego and make use of it. It is an inevitably personal journey through mind, body and feeling – in which questioning plays a vital part. The body’s way of experiencing is different. I am alive and in motion. My movements convey my thoughts. My movements are my thoughts and feelings. I am my work. This is why it all becomes so touchy, so fragile and yet so marvellous! There is nothing as glorious as that moment when some element of the inexpressible suddenly becomes visible and is revealed. Nothing is as awful as the moment when the work has left me to go to meet its audience, and the loss is felt immediately. Emptiness is a vacuum without taste, smell or sensation. That is when you immediately have to punch holes in whatever barrier is closest to you and let in air, new ideas. That is how I survive. I throw myself into the next life-sustaining process.

In what we call reality, I stumble between strange states and events. Moments follow one another in a long unbroken succession. High and low, long and short, fast and slow, clamorous and silent. For me, composition is a means of bringing order to chaos and creating meaning from all the tumbling fragments. Choreography creates new contexts out of what is old and familiar, or old and unknown. Movement is always there to be lived.

The knowledge generated by work in dance takes the form of new insights and is made available, as such, to the world around. It is my responsibility to ensure that the work is presentable. You judge what is presented on the basis of whatever the needs are that apply at the time. You locate the work and evaluate it from an external context: style, history, aesthetics etc. Here is the point at which I have to be ready to accept jubilation, rigorous criticism, drivel, eyes that are open or those that are fawning, flattering. I never am.

Society’s fascination with the creative process is often discussed in experiential terms. The market can see the possibilities in a new form of exploitation, as people become increasingly willing to pay for experiences that transcend the every day. The “experience industry” tries to capture creativity in new production processes and put it to use in the form of objects that can be capitalised upon. Similarly there are those who try to make use of the idea of art from a utilitarian perspective – legitimising financial investment in art on the basis of its functional benefit.

Contemporary art is always unambiguously political as it relates to contemporary life itself. You cannot after all work outside your time or your social context. Working conditions, social and cultural paradigms, political ideologies… it all hangs together and has an affect on what I do. It affects how my movement is interpreted, how the work is presented and made use of. The fact that I do what I do – has an affect.

Seeing the everyday as the very essence of life is a challenge. To see the moments follow one another in a succession of possibilities and let out with the breath all the words that can be wiped away. What is real?

There is space in the everyday for all the peculiarities, and much of the mystery, life has to offer. Secret rooms open up with new insights, and an unexpected meeting can suddenly provide exactly what was needed to make progress with an idea or something that has not yet been articulated. I take what I have experienced – together with my expectations – into that space where anything can happen. The hours in the studio become the break that is needed if the process is to move forward. On the way out, I collect myself, take a deep breath and then set off to make my way across that terrain where you too are to be found. Stumbling on some days, moving resolutely forward on others.

Perhaps my habits resemble yours. My needs most certainly do. What does differ is the way we express our needs, and how we make them plain to the world around us. I have no intention of waiting.

The everyday is saturated with images of every kind. The encounter with dance arises in a cavity, in a timeless interval. You leave behind everything that has been and return to what will be. In-between comes the moment we will share without reservation. I hope you can find your way there.

Choreographer Efva Lilja, Artistic Director of the E.L.D. Dance Company and Professor at Stockholm’s University College of Dance, is a powerful and singular voice in the world of the contemporary arts. All her work bears a deeply personal stamp and its highly individual aesthetic underpins a true poetics of dance. A compelling sense of the dramatic and a marvellous feeling for form allow her to show us the way to an entirely new experience of what is remarkable and strange about human life.