Book Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods

Let’s Not Get Used to This Place // Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, born 1965 in New Orleans, USA, and her Brussels-based dance company Damaged Goods, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. Ten years ago, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet? (ed. Jeroen Peeters), which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart’s career. 

In Let’s Not Get Used to This Place, the choreographer dives into more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores and exercises, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by close collaborators and intimate strangers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book’s title, gleaned from one of Stuart’s recent video works, ties together these multifaceted sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know.

This publication also coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of Damaged Goods: a perfect way to celebrate this remarkable legacy.

‘For years, I have been calling out the word ‘change’ to dancers, so that they move from one improvised state to another without attachment or preparation. The more I propose this task, the more I discover that what remains is more significant than the change itself. The change reinforces not only the quality of letting go, but also the commitment of the attention we give to the state or physical idea we let go of. Abrupt changes mark where we are, what we have to leave, and what it takes to let go and open up again.

In another exercise, we hold a person tightly, and keep holding onto the trace of this physical contact after we let go of them; then we move with the trace and shape of this person. You can also do this with objects. Every lived experience leaves a mark. By tracing the shape of this mark, we take the experience with us to the next place. I believe that time is not one singular flow. You can always retrace and reframe. Past events are not fixed; they are a process that is still unfolding. You can write letters to people who have died, for example. It shifts your relationship with them. I have done this.’

Meg Stuart

Edited by: Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester

Graphic design: Sean Yendrys with Björn Giesecke

Contributions: Jean-Marc Adolphe, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Tim Etchells, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Philipp Gehmacher, Ezra Green, Astrid Kaminski, André Lepecki and Eleonora Fabiano, Jeroen Peeters, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Maria F. Scaroni, Meg Stuart, Jeroen Versteele, Jozef Wouters and many others.

Distributed by: les presses du réel

Language: English 528p., 16.5 x 23.5 cm

ISBN: 9782960320718

Price:

€45 regular price

€38 discount for former students of long-term courses at Forum Dança

More information and pre-orders at forumdança@forumdança.pt