Choreographer Marie Topp and Julia Giertz started to collaborate in 2014, and have been working together closely every since. They have a shared interest in the sensing body, moving through the less known landscapes of perception. In Scandinavia today, feminism and gender equality are considered cultural defaults, therefore we see urgency in addressing the remaining blind spots, touching parts of our common body where we still cultivate inherited prejudice.

This coming research is part of choreographer Marie Topp’s new trilogy “Soft Space Vision”. It sets the premises that if the sight is blurred, other senses are activated in a higher degree in the bodies of the audience, and hereby also the production of other kinds of knowledge. Topp is interested in the potential I experience in the blurred vision, a gaze that is not able to focus sharply on the body – hence not able to objectify it. In other words in this series of works I will use blurriness as a feminist emancipatory strategy.

Sound artist and choreographer Julia Giertz is mapping bodily and structural responses to vibration, by drawing on music, physics and our perception of sound. Her focus is on the tactile aspects of hearing, where the skin of the audience becomes an interface and the movement of sound resonates through the whole body. She explores the hierarchy of the senses with an emphasis on the perceptional disturbance in which hearing and touch meet.

Topp and Giertz previous collaborations include:
2014 Topp created the solo “Forerunning”, with music/sound by Giertz
Developed in Dansehallerne Copenhagen and Workspace Brussels.

2015 Topp was artist in residence at Kampnagel K3, Hamburg, where Giertz created the music/sound for the solo “The Visible Effects of Force”.

The research for the current collaboration “Soft Space Vision” has so far taken place at MDT (Stockholm), Atalante (Gothenburg), Milvus Artistic Research Center (Kivik) and now in April 2017 at Inter Arts Center in Malmö