With slowness and great intensity Marie Topp has pulled me into her work repeatedly. This time, with the ending of her trilogy, True Random, an investigation of the balance and limits between care and violence and how the two are intrinsically intertwined. Drawing on imagery from the antiquity, infused with modernity, Topp shows a precisely executed production as spellbinding.
Karin Hald [KH]: Before we dive into your latest work, True Random, I want to start at the beginning. You have 10 productions behind you, and you are a seasoned dancer and choreographer. But how did you get into performance, and how did you come into your artistic language?
Marie Topp [MT]: As I teenager I was a part of the youth company at Dansescenen (now Dansehallerne). At the time the project commissioned contemporary choreographers to make work for teenagers. This was how I was introduced to dance, through making performance, through the artform not ‘just’ as dancing but as a technique, skill or training.
Later, I was educated as a dancer at Den Danske Scenekunstskole – at the time a very old-fashioned education. After finishing my education, I spent some years re-educating myself and started to make my own work. Dansehallerne had a platform for choreography called Spot On. I made a short solo in the context of that format and that solo was selected for Ice Hot Nordic Danceplatform in 2012. The artistic director from K3 Tanzplan Hamburg saw my work at Ice Hot, and 2 years later I was granted that residency program which is 8 months residency plus full production with premiere at Kampnagel.
I spent 7 months alone in the studio in Hamburg, researching, developing and getting to know myself. It was an extremely confronting time, but I left Hamburg with a clear direction in my practice. The production support from K3 also allowed me to invite Julia Giertz to make music and Mårten K. Axelsson as lightning designer for the performance The Visible Effects of Force.
During my stay in Hamburg, I also met Igor Dobričić, he was my mentor during the residency and has been joining my projects as dramaturg since then. I’ve continued to work with these wonderful artists for the last 10 years and have developed my artistic practice in very close collaboration with them.
KH: True Random is part of a trilogy, where The Labyrinth and Maze have exceeded True Random. All three works deal with, what you call, inner time – how did this interest manifest in you and what does it mean in relation to your work?
MT: The experience of time is an interest that has been present in all my works, also before this trilogy. I wanted to create performances where the audience could dwell and get lost in time. To create situations where real resonance could happen.
In 2021, In the middle of Covid and after the birth of my second child. I suddenly experienced a transformation of my personal relation to time. It felt like time was speeding up. Like life was no longer something in front of me, but the space between birth and death moved closer together.
I guess it’s the most normal midlife realization you can have, but it was overwhelming. It was an extreme, embodied experience, and it became the starting point for The Labyrinth. To work with time is to work with the most fundamental, existential questions. Time is life. It can sound banal, and maybe it is, but to work with understanding time, is to work with understanding life. And the further I move with my practice, the more I feel the need to be brave enough to work artistically with these fundamental experiences in life.
Inner time is how I use to describe the personal experience of time. In short you could say that all three works in this series work with the movements between past, present and future, but The Labyrinth evolves from thinking about time in relation to birth. Maze evolves from thinking about time in relation to life cycles and how every short moment also contains eternity and True Random evolves from thinking about time with a closeness to end or death.
KH: When I saw True Random, it seemed to be dealing with violence within care or care within violence.
The performers were in equal part trying to support each other as well as restrain one another. This was something which stood out for me in relation to the previous works and seemed to be connected to a sensation of how the abyss was nearby. Is this a negotiation that you want to focus on in relation to everyday life – that life is balancing on uncertainty?
MT: As a starting point I wanted to work with the notion of gravitas and with the inner time that exists in love and in long relationships. To understand what it means to move through life together. To carry each other. To unfold the complexity of a deep relationship. That the deepest love also comes with the deepest pain.
From the time I started thinking about True Random and until the point we started working on the performance the world just became increasingly mad.
The feeling of disorientation and being ungrounded in the world was, and is, very present. It feels like potential violence is everywhere, but also the choice to care. I wanted this complexity to be embedded in the performance. The urgency to create a work that reflects on these topics grew.
Most of the dance material in True Random comes from a practice of transformation through touch. It’s a further development of some of the movement practices of the gaze that I’ve worked with in previous works. From this practice came intense images that shifted in the most fascinating way between being violent and full of care.
Constellations of people, bodies and objects that oscillated between proposing clear narratives and total abstraction. For me it’s important that True Random can be read in many ways. It’s about the world, but it’s also about family. It’s about relationships and kinship.
True Random, also in the understanding that some things are not possible for humans or even a computer to create. You must connect with something spiritual; borrow some noise from outer space or the movements of butterflies to create true randomness. In a way that I can’t really explain, this creates a meaningfulness to me, the faith that something will continue even though we are balancing on the edge.
KH: How do you work to create the intensity which is so characteristic for your work? In my opinion it is a rare trade to be able to create intensity in a performance where the performers are so relatively static in their movements.
MT: I think the intensity comes from the many layers that are operating in my practice. Even though the work can appear static, I am extremely busy with crafting very precise dynamics inside of the slowness. There is the practice of dancers, how their inner emotional journeys evolve through the performance, sometimes this is in contrast with the actual choreography of movements, sometimes it goes together. The movement material needs to be transformable. It might look static, but it’s constantly changing.
Then there is also the dynamics of the whole performance: The artistic collaboration between composer Julia Giertz, lighting designer Mårten K Axelsson and me. The way we compose the choreography, music and light together. How we work with precision. How all the elements are constantly moving in relation to each other.
I think we are working on this on a very advanced level by now. In terms of choreographic craft True Random is the most advanced work I’ve done so far. Every image is composed and everything needed to shift all the time, otherwise the intensity would drop because of the void in Hallen – the large stage at Dansehallerne, where True Random premiered.
You can´t create this kind of intensity without working with very skilled performers. The intensity is created through the ability to both work with precision and awareness about your body, your gaze, your imaginations and your emotions. So, I’m looking for these qualities beyond anything else, when I invite people to join my projects.
It can be extremely scary to be on stage and perform this work; you are so exposed and cannot hide yourself behind impressive or fast moves. It demands a capacity to be totally present, to sense the space, not to fall into the trap of representing emotions or pushing the narrative to the audience. To stay open, soft and trust the choreography. To constantly listen while you are performing. It might sound basic to a trained performer, but it’s not everybody that can deal with the insecurity and self-awareness that it creates. This time I was lucky enough to work with Emilie Gregersen, Snorre Elvin, Karis Zidore and Alexander Montgomery-Andersen.
