mono.kultur #41 Meg Stuart: Make The First Move

“I have always felt very comfortable with being upside down, off balance, and ungrounded when I am dancing.”

Delirious, vulnerable bodies running, stumbling, sliding from ramps, crashing into each other in full flight; whirling dancers in states of trance and abandon; traces of patterns emerging and dissolving: the work of American choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart is an enigmatic and dazzling experience of dance as a multisensory attack, distilling harmony out of chaos, grace out of roughness, moments of intensity out of daily rituals and gestures.

Meg Stuart’s work is not about the elegance and beauty of bodies age, fail, and surrender, where individual spaces disintegrate and bleed into each other, where physical memories are exposed like open wounds. Within just two decades, Stuart’s dance company Damaged Goods, which she founded in 1994, have produced a lengthy and diverse list of projects, ranging from countless full-length feature works to multi-disciplinary dance installations, improvisations, and films that spread far beyond the theatre stages of the world, into museum spaces, film festivals or the wide open street.

With mono.kultur (Berlin), Meg Stuart talked about her first physical memories, the healing power of dancing and the thrill of disorientation. Honouring Meg Stuart’s interest in abundance and complexity, we treated the issue as a physical object that needs to be handled and turned: with text and images set in different and ever-changing directions, the issue makes for a wonderfully dynamic and dense reading experience, and so it should. 

48 Pages, 15 x 20 cm, softcover, mono.kultur (Berlin).