Dance residency 2017
Mirjam Sögner

During her upcoming residency at Montréal’s Circuit-Est studios this October, realized in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, the Austrian-born Berlin-based independent choreographer and performer embarked on an interdisciplinary project, FOAM, involving the exploration of froth seen as a “sculpture-light-machine.” 

By Philip Szporer

Dance artist Mirjam Sögner is fascinated by the inherent properties of billowing clouds of fluffy, soapy foam. During her upcoming residency at Montréal’s Circuit-Est studios this October, realized in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, the Austrian-born Berlin-based independent choreographer and performer will be embarking on an interdisciplinary project, FOAM, involving the exploration of froth seen as a “sculpture-light-machine.”
 
Drawing on this mass of minute bubbles, Sögner, who interrogates “the materiality and the physical of the body itself,” says she will, along with longtime collaborator, lightning designer and visual consultant Sandra Blatterer, be developing methods of how a material with such a dynamic texture and specific life span can act as a performing agent with its own aesthetics, rhythm and movement quality.
 

Visual perception and spatial orientation are key to this new investigation, an iterative process whereby the choreographic content informs and is informed by the interplay with lighting-colour-video interventions and interactions. In a project statement, she states her goals include her “body… being swallowed by the massive sculpture, informed and reprogrammed in its behavioral patterns, foam… being animated by flickering lights and [her body’s] locomotion. There is no distinguishable initiator anymore and yet everything is in constant flux.”
 
Sögner is curious about “the contrasting juxtaposition respectively the intermixture of living organisms and seemingly dead matter – the meeting of the material landscape and my body,” which, she suggests, raise questions of intercultural representation in relation to the mediation inherent in the work. She asserts the staging of the body is a building of a theatre experience that configures the parameters and borders of performance, and its influence on the perception of one’s own body; more specifically, to enhance and evaluate the relationship between the practitioner/spectator experience. One of the objectives, Sögner states, is to guide the viewer’s eye and felt experience to lead the audience to an increased sense of the body with kinetic, albeit ephemeral images that resonate in the mind.