A Dance Mag - Issue 04: Structure

Issue 05, Flow, moves like water through rupture and release. Guided by the I-Ching, we drift into synesthetic rope rituals in Germany, spiral through Taijiquan in Canada, sway in sacred dances under Ethiopian stars, and lose ourselves in the rapture of Krishna Vandana. Here, flow is both a political current and a state of surrender. From Gabriel Semerene's meditations on faith and protest across Gaza and Brazil to Nerda Khara's navigation of societal constraints in Pakistan, these pieces explore how movement becomes both resistance and surrender. Tejaswini Loundo ponders flow states in Indian classical philosophy while Erika Mattio finds unity in the sacred dances of Lalibela. Shanny Rann discovers spirit in Taijiquan's slow power, Antje Brockmüller maps synesthesia through rope flow, and Anna Chwialkowska questions ghosts’ choreography. Each piece paired with its own hexagram, creating a map of emergence and dissolution. Maria Harfouche's photography dissolves structure into motion where edges blur and time becomes fluid, capturing the moment when form gives way to flowing energy.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice. 

A transdisciplinary investigation and a choreographic performance, between Umeå and Oslo, about ecological grief, cultural panic, and a feeling of collapse.

How to Die – Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå. They host a working process and encounter external informants. The goal is to displace oneself into the unexpected. This publication, two years in the making, engages with the challenges of translating a choreographic process into the space of a book. It both documents the project's development as well as offering the reader-doer different modes of thinking-doing, from somatic practices to proposals for a curriculum. Experiments in writing, mapping, and moving are played with, all engaging with the question, "what is the future of displaced thinking?"

Published following the series of eponymous events held in Umeå, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik in 2019-2020.

Contributions by Harald Becharie, Mia Habib, Jassem Hindi, Asher Lev, Marie Kraft Selze, Namik Mačkić, Ingeborg Olerud, Anna Pehrsson, Ashkan Sepahvand, Nina Wollny.

Jupiter is the monograph of the artist Andreas Sell by the curator Joel Mu and the outcome of their collaboration. It includes a selection of Andreas’ work of the last fifteen years, an essay in five parts by Joel and a poem by Alice Heyward. Andreas’ work often coincides with his life story, composing both a material and immaterial narration. Joel shares biographical and autobiographical stories in his writing about Andreas’ work. The narratives intertwine.

Personal experiences, memories and relationships take shape with matter, images and words trying to make sense of the world—its social conditions and politics, other people and life itself.

Jupiter is about Andreas Sell’s ‘Life Performance’ as the title of the book suggests; it explores life performance from the constant position of a foreigner, from a viewpoint on the side. Andreas and Joel reflect on identities and challenge categorization; they seek for a more inclusive sense of belonging and defend the multiplicity of oneness. Jupiter also defies categorization; it is a monograph, but also a biography, an autobiography, a catalogue, an artist book, a diary, a collective work on one person’s work. — Text by Galini Noti

 In an era when many “radical” theorists were seeking out the peaceable expression of politics in “everyday utopias,” Joshua Clover stressed that politics was always, at root, a fiery confrontation with the powers that be. To these ends, he not only helped bring together a new generation of young communists but also pushed them to engage directly with the rising tide of class conflict, understanding full well that the street and the shopfloor are the true classrooms of the partisan.

Heatwave is, in a sense, an attempt to embody this spirit at a larger scale. Like Joshua, we hope to serve as an engine of engagement, linking our readers to their own history and to one another. Like Joshua, we adopt a principle of ecumenicism, refusing the false dividing lines inherited from the long dissolution of the last global communist movement. At the same time, like Joshua, we also insist on a theoretically rigorous approach that invokes the real complexity of revolutionary theory and history, actively seeks evidence for its claims, and engages in good faith with opposing positions. And, like Joshua, we maintain that the partisan project is inherently incendiary, requiring confrontation with the rulers of the world, rather than gradualist compromise or secessionist retreat. Finally, communism requires an unambiguous commitment to internationalism. Although our project is currently anglophone, we recognize that elaborating a partisan politics requires learning from the self-activity of the dispossessed at the global scale.

The name "Heatwave" echoes that of an old Situationist magazine ("Britain's most incandescent journal" of 1966), but with added urgency in an era where every summer is the hottest on record. While the statistical certainty of catastrophe is inescapable, "revolt" names many species of conflagration, including that peculiar variety we call communism. We must sift through the ashes to find it.

This most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York–based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives, and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer’s artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs, and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer’s art and the multiple histories of modernism.

Includes texts by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle A. Jackson, Alhena Katsof, Kristan Kennedy, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.

Copublished with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
Edited by Alhena Katsof, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. 
Design by Dante Carlos.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.