In 2022 the Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg presented a short novel as part of the Ob/Scene Festival commission, a dance performance for three dancers and two singers titled ‹I’m Hiding One of These›. The ambition was to write a novel through the specific conditions of dance. Not a novel about dance or inhabited by dancers like Hollywood movies such as ‹Billy Elliot› or ‹Saturday Night Fever›, but using the perspective of a choreographer. Let’s say a choreographer, who learned from Merce Cunningham, Judson Church, non-dance of the 90s and so on. Dance that has no story, no characters, that happens on stage not in a set like ‹The Cherry Orchard› and that doesn’t concern itself with development but still is a novel. Maybe not so exciting, thrilling or action-packed but more like a dance, a place to forget oneself where thoughts and impressions make the reader’s stories come alive.

The novel was presented, one episode each day fourteen days before the performance that so to say became the fifteens episode, not as a resolution of the mystery but as a different unfolding of a landscape crisscrossed by movement, temporalities, rhythms and touches.

Perhaps, a political intention was to offer the readers a moment without the flood of stories that contemporary society, day and night, rubs in our faces. After all, stories tell us what to experience and think, what to focus on and at the end of the day shop and consume.

This year, Mårten Spångberg has written a sequel ‹Stories That Tell No Nothing II›, which will accompany the festival daily. There will be no performance in the end but perhaps the book is the missing dance, the movements that disappeared, that can be experienced on your phone while spending time on public transport, while waiting for your girlfriend or read out aloud to your mother.

• ‹Stories That Tell No Nothing II› Link

Supported by Fond Darstellende Künste Berlin, Längmanska Kulturfonden.
With special support from Filipa Ramos and Galeria Municipal do Porto.
Thanks to Laura Pante, Silvia Bottiroli, Kim Benjamin and Alejandra Pombo Su.
Translated by Kim Shinu.

Mårten Spångberg is a choreographer from Sweden living and working in Berlin. Next to creating dances he has taken an interest in choreography as expanded practice, realizing for example films, architecture, books and social choreographies. He has published several books, fiction as well as theory and is currently finishing a book about dance and mourning.
Ob/Scene has commissioned four of his recent projects and he has lectured frequently in the context of the festival. From 2024 Mårten Spångberg functions as the artistic director of Ob/Scene festival.