READING THE ROOM -
Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves
“If I die in the next few minutes, you can put on my gravestone: “Objects shimmer without mechanical input” .….. to me, the default of art is dancing and the default of dancing is called being alive.” - Timothy Morton
We rest on the pleasure and saturation of relating. The outside is already inside, and an improviser’s sense of choice takes shape within social and biological matrices of an audience. We are always already an ensemble. The feelingful ecologies of the body are already multiple, in a process with other people. Informed by the contemporary psychoanalytic dyad and its preoccupation with subjectivity, we engage verbal, visceral, and affective dialogues. Analysis is an action, and during improvisation, the action is performance.
We contextualize our movement in loops of listening, attunement, and “failed unison”- a method for resisting universalist, utopian shape seekings. Edging the sublime and the monstrous, our live choreography fetishizes thick beginnings and deep friendship as materiality.
Politsteatern residents Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves will host a series of experimental events January - June 2023.
DAGES JUVELIER KEATES (she/they) is an artist born in Chicago in 1980. Working with and through the materiality of their body as a somatic space for holding paradox, their transdisciplinary praxis spans performance, choreography, dramaturgy, writing and pedagogy. Deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, they carry out a queer feminist study of the subjective body as an accumulation of unanswered questions; a carnal, poetic, ephemeral archive entangled within and between “others.” Keates’ performance credits include works with Faye Driscoll, David Gordon, Noemie Lafrance, Amanda Turner Pohan, and Sarah Cameron Sunde and her choreographic work has been presented in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the USA.They have recently led classes and workshops at PARSE Research Conference (SE), Paideia European Institute for Jewish Studies (SE), University of North Carolina (USA), Ariana Reines’ Invisible College (USA), and The Royal Institute of Art (SE). Dages holds a BA in dance from Bard College, a transdisciplinary MA from New York University (2014), and an Advanced Masters from Sint Lucas Antwerpen (2022). They live and work between Stockholm, Sweden and New York City.
ALEXIS STEEVES (1979) is a dance artist based between New York City and Stockholm. Steeves pursues ongoing research in live solo and collaborative performance praxis. Her work as a choreographer and teacher is nourished by 18 years as a licensed, therapeutic bodywork practitioner (LMT, SI). She is currently conducting graduate work in the New Performative Practices program at the Stockholm University of the Arts as a scholarship recipient and holds a BA from Bard College (USA). Steeves’ is deeply informed by her exchange with Rosalind Crisp (AUS, EU), and work with the NYC based performance collective HAM (high art moment). Her questions emerge from a substrata of long-term, interdisciplinary dialogues and the relational ethics and emergent practices upon which they can co-create and sometimes rest. Her artistic work has been presented in Estonia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the USA and UK. She has taught contemporary dance, performance and composition at the Tallinn University (TLU), Fine5 Dance Theater, Noore Tantsu Festival (NoTaFe), Bard High School Early College and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). Since 2003 Steeves has worked as a licensed and certified massage therapist and, from 2013, specializes in Structural Integration (ATSI, manual fascial work of Ida Rolf).
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT EVENTS WILL FOLLOW.