Lake Studios Berlin

MADE IN BERLIN – Senat funded residency

hey! my name is Am Ertl. I work as dancer and am at the moment based in Berlin and Stockholm.

i spent the time at lake studios attenting to my dancing. it was an extreme luxury to give time and space just to the practice of dancing.
it was almost like i was knocking on dance’s door with curiousity who would open everyday.
in that process i made many different scores, games, tasks. some of which i threw away, others to which i returned again and again.

one game i made i call The D and The M. its a game that plays with the relationship between music, dance and language. it is very simple:

the basic instruction is this:

DANCE _______ MUSIC

then fill the blank with different words like:

TO
FOR
THROUGH
WITH
INSIDE OF
INTO
TOWARDS
BECAUSE OF
THE
DESPITE OF
NEXT TO
UNDER
OVER
ABOVE
AGAINST
AWAY FROM
OUT OF

i play the same song over and over again. each time i step onto the dancefloor, i embody a different relationship with the song. dancing from a different position, through relation.
to be affected, to attend to my dancing and the track, the music. characters emerge, stories appear. how i listen to the song changes each time, depending on what words i have given myself as a task – depending on what story i dance.

there is something about repetition that is just great. playing the same song over and over again gives me a frame to work within, a structure to relate my movement towards, a cluster in which i can jump move dance feel in, a box to shake. each time it plays, i get to know it better, different. i start to recognize details, nuances, layers. its a meeting. handshake

repitition in this way makes it possible for me to recognize what has changed. to attend to change by reapeating.
it makes me think of this exercise i learned, where the task is to repeat the same movement. but u always repeat the version of the movement u just did. that way it completely transforms, changes. u have to be super attentive to detail.
also it makes me think of disintegration loops by william basinski. i love that album. he used old tapes of his compositions and cut a part of them, then glued that part together (a literal loop) and put it in the casette player. one track is around 1 hour long and while you listen the tape breaks a tiny bit each time its being played. slowly the repeated loop is changing, like clay reshaping. disintegrating… i once made a movement score based on disintegration somehow. we moved from breaking apart on the inside bit by bit.
now i also have to think of my collegue Morgane, didn’t you make an exercise in school that was similar? i remember seeing the videos from the class dancing to one song they just listened to, but in the studio there’s another one playing – it looked very funny.
and of course now i also think about stina nyberg’s piece splendour!

coming back to this game The D and The M – what i found when playing this game dance was that my dancing grew into – i dont know how to call it – characters, personalities. i felt certain feelings depending on which word i chose. whole worlds opened up to me through this game. worlds in which i was on a mission of some sort. courting, digging, pushing, hiding, pretending, glorifying, denying, dying, burying, mourning.

heres a list of songs i used in this game:

prizewinning by julianna barwick
otherside by perfume genius
good ones by perfume genius
golden hours by brian eno
to the moon and back by fever ray
formwela 1 by esperanza spalding
wait a minute! by willow smith
in the air tonight by phil collins
saint claude by christine and the queens