| Recidency center | |
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| Recidency type | |
| Art form | |
| Time of residency | June 2025 |
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| Contact info | tanya.rydell@live.se |
| Definition of artistic practice? | My practice explores endurance as a negotiation between resilience and vulnerability through vertical dance and site-specific movement. Engaging with shifting environments and gravity, I investigate how bodies adapt to uncertainty. Influenced by Rosi Braidotti’s ethics of joy, I seek movement languages that prepare us—physically and emotionally—for an unknown future, where vulnerability becomes a source of agency. |
| Title of the investigation at the residency | Endurance |
| Description of investigations and findings | During the two-week residency, I explored how endurance can be practiced physically and relationally by balancing resilience and vulnerability. Esther Wrobel and Lucía Jaén joined for periods.The physical work focused on four movement states: posing, chaotic movement, slowness, and jumping. These were tested site-specifically in BIRCA’s forest and shaped by its terrain, then brought into the studio for refinement. Relational exploration unfolded on three levels: within the body, between dancers, and with elements in the landscape. Uneven ground, trees, and stones required constant adaptation, grounding the practice in negotiation with place. The studio served as a reflective space, while vertical dance added layers of gravitational tension and release, allowing vulnerability to emerge as agency. Across all sites, the body became a sensor for navigating uncertainty, embodying strategies inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s The Ethics of Joy. |
| What are you most curious about or invested in in your own practice? | I'm most curious about how the body navigates uncertainty through movement—and how resilience and vulnerability are manifested through bodily movement. I'm invested in how environments, gravity, and relationality shape this process. Site-specific and vertical dance practices reveal how connection—with self, others, and place—can become a resource for sustaining endurance and creating movement strategies for uncertain times. |
| What questions did you bring to investigate and what questions are you leaving with? | I arrived asking how endurance can be practiced physically and relationally—how movement helps us navigate uncertainty by balancing resilience and vulnerability. I leave wondering how relationality and an affirmative ethics can support shared endurance: How do we build strength across bodies, environments, and gravitational forces? And how can vulnerability become a collective strategy for navigating change? |
| Transformative, creative moments at the residency | As we were practicing vertical dance on the climbing wall in Ringebakkebruddet, I made the realisation that the closer I was to the ground, meaning being in more contact with other actants, the more vulnerable I felt. As I came further up on the wall - higher up in the air - I felt more free and safe, but from the outside it looks more vulnerable. It made me reflect on the exchange and difference between the own experience and that of an observer, and how everything is in flux. |
| Keywords for the work done at the residency | Aerial dance, Embodied Landscapes, Resilience |
| Research locations | BIRCA grounds, Black Space (BIRCA), Ringebakkebruddene, White Space (BIRCA), Wood at BIRCA |
| Further documentation | notesBIRCA |
| Photos documenting the research |
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| Videos of work in progess or reflections | |
| Webside links | -- |
Tanya Montan Rydell
