5 Questions for Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir

Margrét will visit The Green Room on the weekend of October 16-18 to conduct a FULL DROP workshop.

TGR: Margret, you developed the sensation and state-oriented practice Full Drop over the course of 10 years. What drew you to develop this practice?

MG: As a child gymnast and later professional dancer, my body had become a distant tool to me. So by the age of 30 I felt the need to start  de-conditioning my professional dancer’s body. From then on I focused entirely on choreography and stepped off the stage. Through that journey of de-conditioning, I  developed my artistic vision, fueled by a deep desire to make space on the dance stage for the vulnerability of the anti-hero, a paradigmatic type of our performance-oriented society, a representation of a state that is increasingly becoming a taboo in our neoliberal society.  The body of this anti-hero stands for all that remains of it after exploitation, exhaustion, psychological implosion and overstimulation. Exploring this choreographically enabled unique bodies to be presented on stage, from which the consequences of increasing alienation, victimization and commodification within society could be pondered on.

TGR: What kind of somatic and psychological precedents did you draw on to do this? 

MG: The practice is based on meditation, visualizations, bone work, and the development of intensive deep inner listening and surrendering to inner body systems and rhythms. Through the action of letting go of control by entering into an active-passive state of inner listening, we surrender to non-action and thus create a space to witness whatever arises. Without manipulation or judgement in that way, we become able to enter into formerly unknown full body states. Opening up our experience to the subconscious and inviting the unconscious to manifest. The possibility is there to  come into contact and symbiosis with the forces latent in the deep tissues of the body. Creating the circumstances to be undone. The focus is on recognizing and  releasing in order to go beyond our omnipresent body memory and the cognitive wiring we have developed that is directly associated with it. Through that, expansion of your perception takes place and new territories of experience open up. 

TGR: Are there elements in your practice that are independent from these precedents? 

MG: No, but my choreographic method and artistic creations have many additional elements which are not a part of the practice.

TGR: How has the practice FULL DROP influenced your work as a dancer and choreographer?

MG: My artistic work is grounded in a practice that brings together the physiological and psychological states of the body with a focus on working and exploring pathologies of the social-political body within our own bodies. Displaying the politics of intimacy is a core theme within my choreographic work. My working methods directly inform the themes of the artistic works I have presented. The aim is to create an environment where both performer and onlooker are able to question their inner and outer realities through it. Over the course of the last 10 years, I have been focussing my professional research into the physical doorways into the physiological and emotional sub-worlds associated with deep tissue release. I have been able to identify and research numerous reproducible physical processes defined by accessing presence and inner system movements and a dialog with the subconcious. Through this research  began the process of mapping out a new category of performative body language, ways of developing it, and transferring the knowledge of it, both practically and theoretically to the wider international dance scene and dance academia. In 2017, I was invited into a collaboration on Somatic Archiving with Professor Susan Kozel (Department of Philosophy, Malmö University), in relation to her Living Archives project. Our aim from then on has been to continue to deepen our joint phenomenological research into somatic materialism by exploring the translation of embodied states into writing and back again.

TGR: I imagine you usually work with dancers with this practice. How do you think non-dancers (musicians, actors) will respond to your way of teaching, an how could the workshop influence a musician or actors way of approaching their work?

MG: Throughout the years many people from different professions have taken my workshops. Since the practice is not artistic but focused on enhancing larger capacity to be present and in reciprocity with yourself,  it is useful to everyone.