Guest performance
22.5.2025, Španski Borci Cultural Centre
With and by Mårten Spångberg
Music: J.S. Bach
Co-produced by Tanz im August
Thanks to Kaai Theatre and P.A.R.T.S.
Organisation of performance in Ljubljana: Jana Jevtović, Dragana Alfirević, NDA Slovenija
With the help of: Zavod En-KNAP
In partnership with: DUM - Društvo umetnikov
Mårten Spångberg has performed the solo Powered by Emotion every year since its creation 21 years ago. The choreography remains unchanged, set to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, while the dancing body ages – accumulating time, memories, wrinkles, and physical transformation. Simultaneously a hopeful experience that functions as a sanctuary that, although fragile, protects our ability to breathe.
Emerging from a strong connection with the improvisational work of American choreographer Steve Paxton, Powered by Emotion seeks to listen to the autonomous whisper of dance. Perhaps it’s precisely because it’s “just a dance”—a dance that neither aims to show nor to tell—that it can unfold gentle environments. A time that asks no questions, that demands no decisions. One that, instead of vying for attention, becomes a landscape where the spectator can rest, wander freely, and dwell with loss.
22 years ago, I spent some months reconstructing Steve Paxton’s improvisation to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould and filmed by Walter Verdin, first published in 1992. I lacked the skills but decided to learn the dance without support. It took time, but in August 2003 a piece entitled Powered by Emotion premiered in the context of Tanz im August. A year or two later, Steve saw the piece and we spoke. Then, in 2008, he asked me to perform it in New York, at Judson Church. I was nervous—but it worked out.
I’ve danced the piece for an audience almost every year since. Each time I recall it, the dance becomes a strange, distant, yet physically present reconnection with Steve. An asymmetrical friendship. Though we never danced together, we’ve shared a dance—one Steve improvised once and never again, and one I’ve repeated thousands of times in the studio for more than a third of my life.
Perhaps the sensation is amplified because Powered by Emotion is completely set—parts of it extremely familiar, yet on other levels still, after two decades, mysterious, elusive, resistant to knowing. We once spoke of the possibility that I’d keep dancing the piece for many years. For no particular reason, I decided on 30. 65 felt like a good age to retire. For me, it’s not an easy dance. Each time, I must work it back into the body for at least a week. It's curious to struggle with something after so long. Almost irritating that it still challenges me—each time, still, a learning.
Recalling 2003, it was a time when everything seemed possible—dance, art, life, a career just beginning. I don’t miss the “good old days,” but over time, the dance has become a trace through life. Normally, we document dance. In this case, the dance has become a document—of time itself, and of a body in the process of aging.
Half a year later, Steve Paxton passed away on 21 February, 85 years old. For many reasons, it felt urgent to visit the dance again and share it with an audience. I rehearsed it for a small week finding new paths through the movements, realising that this dance is always new and different, simultaneously neutral, somewhat remote and endlessly present, not exactly experimental but genuinely committed.
During all those years I’ve felt Steve Paxton’s presence when dancing. His spirit has been looking after me offering me a zone through which my dance has been allowed to reverberate. Last spring, Steve was also there with me but in the middle of the dance I experienced a strong tremble, a sensation without words that let me know that from this moment on I will have to protect the dance and hold a space for it. It came to me through layers of sadness and hope, without tears but with the dryness and whispery tone of Steve.
This spring, my father fell ill and passed shortly after. In search of a space to mourn, I decided to organize a small, informal tour—dancing the piece in places I cherish, for people I hold dear. Sharing loss and mourning with the audience, tacitly and when felt through conversation.
Strangely enough, a piece that began as a reconstruction has become something intimately personal. It is my hope that the personal carries an invitation to spend time with the vulnerabilities that accompany loss and mourning.
Mårten Spångberg is a Swedish choreographer, curator, and writer based in Berlin and Stockholm. Working across dance, writing, and visual media—particularly painting—his interdisciplinary practice approaches choreography as an expanded field. Through experimental formats, he explores the intersections of aesthetic experience and ecology, focusing on thresholds between body and knowledge, sensation and value, identity and anonymity. His performances critically examine the entanglement of Western aesthetics with extractivist capitalism, especially in relation to the gaze and power. A dedicated cultural critic, he has published several books and remains a vital voice in contemporary discourse.