Published: April 2021 
List Price: £17.50
Format: ~ Paperback - 180 pages
Size: 16 x 16.4 cm (landscape)
ISBN: 978-1-913743-24-6
Tags: movement, dance, somatics, embodiment, choreography, performance, intermateriality, Suprapto Suryodarmo, Amerta Movement
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Related titles:

Attending to Movement
​Body and Awareness
Covert
Nine Ways of Seeing a Body
Embodied Lives
Body & Performance

See our other titles in:
Movement & Somatics
Mythogeography & Walking
People in Society

Readership:

Teachers, students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of somatics and movement, dance, choreography and creative and performance art, and intermateriality - and others who have dealings in/with site, body and space/place, including architects, walking artists and human geographers.
The design and printing of this title was funded by:
Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR), Uniarts Helsinki
Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke), Uniarts Helsinki
Publications Committee of the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki
"...Suomenlinna//Gropius is a touchstone of a book – the kind of book you can return to again and again. It orients us to ... the richness of the spaces in which we live, the profound opportunities we have to work through the sensory resources of a body, to attend to the intense and multiple layers of the environments in which we dwell."
​Extract from Alys Longley's review in Journal for Artistic Research  Read all reviews of the book

Suomenlinna | Gropius
Two Contemplations on Body, Movement and Intermateriality

Paula Kramer


How can we dance here – so the aliveness of everything past and present can surface and shimmer?
 
​Paula Kramer’s beautiful, evocative and touching ‘contemplations’ take us on a double journey that starts with Site (one in Helsinki, one in Berlin), moves to Practice and concludes in Performance.
 
Based on a 3-year site-based research project – a post-doc at Uniarts Helsinki’s Centre for Artistic Research – the book explores her embodied research into intermateriality. It addresses the question that guided her research: how does movement and choreography emerge in collaboration with site? More specifically: how do bodies, materials, sites, organisms, history, tuning, training, phenomena, events and the weather intermingle and speak, bringing forth what we later might call movement, dance or choreography?
 
The two sites are Länskäri – the wildest and least populated of Helsinki’s Suomenlinna islands – and the South Side of Martin-Gropius-Bau, close to the line of the Berlin Wall, a neighbour of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters and across the street from Berlin’s House of Representatives.
 
The book explores narration, poetry and theory born out of specific experiences of moving-dancing, being, eating, choreographing, performing, in and with the two sites. The author speaks alongside others – experts in history, geology, performance – and invites us to see and experience sites, dance and movement differently.
"This book is a testament to the living body in the way it assimilates all that is inscribed upon it. It makes the body familiar and safe in sharp contrast to the way writings on techniques of the body tend to alienate us from our bodily selves. " Preethi Athreya, Choreographer
​
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Contents: The book can be approached from either direction.

Introduction

Site: 
SUOMENLINNA – On Your Rocks I Lie 
The Slippery Rocks of Suomenlinna / Björn Kröger
Islands in Time / Annette Arlander

Practice: 
SUOMENLINNA – Practising Movement

Performance: 
The Feather / Annette Arlander
SUOMENLINNA – On the Surface of Time
Placement Upon The Surface of Time / Kira O’Reilly

IF YOU SAY– a poetic contemplation 
On Intermateriality

Performance: 
GROPIUS - This is not a performance
STATE OF MATTER - Assembled memories of not being an audience / Jagna Anderson

Practice: 
GROPIUS – Practising Movement 

Site: 
​GROPIUS – You Are My Layering
Südplatz: 1910, 1936, 1954, 1984, and today, 2020 / Ulrich Tempel 

Introduction

Contents: The book can be approached from either direction.