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Biography
Mårten Spångberg Mårten Spångberg is performance related artist living and working in Stockholm. His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in multiplicity of formats and expressions. He has been active on stage as performer and creator since 1994, and has since 1999 created his own choreographies from solos to large scale works which has toured internationally. The solo Powered by Emotion (2003) for himself has become a modern classic.
A thorough focus on concept in pieces such as “Avantgarde” (99), “Recent Works” (00), “All All…” (02) and “Artists’-talk” (02), has later transformed into a stronger focus on the dancing body and the production of experience.
Starting with “Slowfall” (2007) his interest as a choreographer has shifted towards a more detached form of performing and he has developed a unique practice that over the last few years has gained international reputation, especially with the 2014 production “La Substance, but in English”, commissioned by MoMA PS1.
“The Internet” (2015) for three performers investigated post-internet phenomena and developed further ideas around landscape dramaturgy. In 2016 “Natten” premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts – a seven hour long dance performance that took relations between experience and dance to a different level. “La Nature IRL” from 2017 was a performance that investigated form in order to generate an experience where the distance between audience and performance was diluted and where the understanding of dramaturgy and organisation was collapsed.
“Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le theatre” (2017) was the first piece where talking was introduced next to Spångberg’s advanced highly complex choreographic language.
He has worked as a dancer and collaborator with among others Xavier Le Roy, Christine De Smedt/Les Ballets C de la B, Tino Sehgal and Jan Ritsema.
With the architect Tor Lindstrand he initiated International Festival, an interdisciplinary practice merging architecture and choreography/performance, thus understanding choreography as a means of organizing time and space. International Festival created contexts specific projects spanning from situations, to cinema, installations, public interventions and buildings.
In 2007 International Festival directed and produced their first full-length feature film “On The Town” commissioned by Performa ’07. SWEAT the movie was produced in collaboration with ImpulsTanz Vienna summer 2008.
From 1996 Spångberg has organized and curated festivals in Sweden and internationally. Panacea Festivals Stockholm (96-05), BodyCurrency/Wiener Festwochen (98), CAPITALS Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon (02-03), International Summer Academy Frankfurt (02/04) and later 2012 e.g. “Choreography As Expanded Practice” at Tàpies Foundation and MacBA.
He initiated the network organization INPEX in 2006, and has since supervised projects such as The Swedish Dance History, published in four issues spanning in total 5000 pages and 9000 copies, distributed world wide 2009 – 2012.
He has edited and published a number of books such as Post-dance, Agora, Movement Research.
As a writer he has published texts in numerous magazines and books. 1990 – 1997 he functioned as dance/performance reviewer for Dagens Nyheter, in Stockholm. In 2011 he published Spangbergianism and in 2016 Natten.
He has thorough experience in teaching both theory and practice among other places P.A.R.T.S, Ex.e.r.ce, ImpulsTanz, SNDO. Between 2008-2012 he was director for the MA program in choreography at the Univ. of Dance in Stockholm. He was guest professor at the institute for applied theatre studies at University Giessen, 2002, 2011 and 2017.