Suomenlinna | Gropius: Two Contemplations on Body, Movement and Intermateriality

Summary

How can we dance here - so the aliveness of everything past and present can surface and shimmer? Paula Kramer's beautiful, evocative and touching 'contemplations' take us on a double journey that starts with Site (one in Helsinki, one in Berlin), moves to Practice and concludes in Performance. Based on a 3-year site-based research project (a post-doc at Uniarts Helsinki's Centre for Artistic Research) the book explores her embodied research into intermateriality. It addresses the question that guided her research: how does movement and choreography emerge in collaboration with site? More specifically: how do bodies, materials, sites, organisms, history, tuning, training, phenomena, events and the weather intermingle and speak, bringing forth what we later might call movement, dance or choreography? The two sites are Lanskari - the wildest and least populated of Helsinki's Suomenlinna islands - and Martin-Gropius-Bau on Berlin's Sudplatz, a neighbour of the Berlin Wall, of Berlin's House of Representatives and former home of the first Stasi, and of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters. The book explores narration, poetry and theory born out of specific experiences of moving-dancing, being, eating, choreographing, performing, in and with the two sites. The author speaks alongside others - experts in history, geology, performance - and invites us to see and experience sites, dance and movement differently.