Italian Swedish choreographer Cristina Caprioli courageously works in the liminal space where creativity is constantly in flux. Born in Italy, she has made Sweden her artistic home and has been honoured in both countries for the profound influence she has had over generations of choreographers. A researcher into the soul of the dancing body, she operates outside established institutions as a free spirit, knowing creativity is in the process rather than the finished product.

ICONS: Your production platform in Stockholm is CCAP: ‘Cristina Caprioli Artificial Project’ but you have changed it to ‘Crash Choreography Alliterated Periphery’. How did this creative base evolve?

Cristina Caprioli: For a long time, I worked within the system, according to the market, within the establishment, and eventually I realised that this was not my calling. I needed to step back and follow what the work means rather than how it could be consumed. I established this space in a large empty gym hall in 1991.

We started with the office, then a creative space, and later we decided to have our own performance space where we could perform for longer periods and for different audiences. We were building a discourse with people creating works that are interactive and more an event than a performance. You don’t only come to see dance. You also come for a social interaction, plus a lecture and some food.

It has been an unbelievable privilege to be able, over time, to engage in the questions of: What is dancing for? Is it for the performance, which people come to see, then leave after seeing it only once? What is the divide between learning and performing and experiencing? I wanted the sharing and the working to run in parallel and, most importantly, to establish a different kind of an exchange economy.

Here, with our establishment, everything is for free! We perform over 200 events a year, for regular audiences and with children, with disabled and with seniors. We run daytime events and three to five productions at the same time. It's been lovely, but unfortunately, due to funding cuts, soon it will be all over.

ICONS: This is a very idealistic concept and difficult to sustain economically.

CC: The main problem is that CCAP is a research-based, artist-run enterprise, and that does not fit the Swedish mainstream “culture.” My point is, contemporary art is a project ahead of its own time that proposes something that is not normative or conventional. So, it’s absolutely logical that research work is the fabric and must develop whatever social or exchange you propose. Our take on the project and our concept from the very beginning is that if art is truly art, if dancing really is dancing, you will need no explanation. It will engage the viewer.

ICONS: What was your first encounter with dance?

CC: I was probably about nine or ten years old when my parents put me in a dance class. It was ballet and I fell in love with the rigour, with the architectural mapping both of the body and the space. I never really wanted to be a dancer. I enjoy going to performances, but I don’t need to perform myself. I am fascinated by the physiological complexities of the human body beyond the frames of given ‘techniques.” I’m interested in the specificity to be found in the systems and conditions that allow for ‘this’ particular movement to be manifested in ‘this’ particular way.

ICONS: Did you study choreography while training as a dancer? Should this be taught to all dancers?

CC: I am actually a professor of choreography. And I see no divide between dancing and choreography. Thus, the question is, how do you teach what cannot be ‘divided? However, one can expose students to different choreographers’ work, and that is what I did.

ICONS: What inspires you to create dance?

CC: I wait and I listen. I take in. I absorb. I’m like a sponge. I make myself available and things hook into me. When I sense something build up its own urgency, that’s where I go. I start with reading. I read a lot in the fields of theory, philosophy, and politics and then, because I'm an old-fashioned girl, I dance. Parallel to the dancing I leave the door open for objects and eventual deviations. It’s really a question of remaining quiet and alert, bouncing between critical dancing and critical thinking, making the two overlap and thrive.

ICONS: When do you start to bring in other dancers?

CC: I haven’t had auditions forever! People interested in my work find me and so we start. I feel it is my responsibility to invite people, potential collaborators, to the table. I tell them my thoughts and then we move on. Most of the time I expect them to memorise material as an actor would learn a script—not to ‘repeat’ my dance—as a way to enter the syntax and the language of this particular project from which you may contribute with your own improvisation or something else.

We might work four or five months to get into this particular language for this particular project, and after that it's like opening the window and all this other stuff comes out and the work proliferates on its own. We go through a tunnel together to reach the point where we can pose the basic questions: How do I approach the dancers’ bodies? What do the dancers think of themselves on stage? What are they doing on stage? These are the questions that must be continuously dealt with, and we do that by dancing.

ICONS: You have also made films. How did 2soon come about?

CC: First came a piece named 2late where I looked at Rococo style, a short-lived, revolutionary fashion.  It’s asymmetrical, blurring the inside and the outside. It is all curves and all pleasure, lightness and transparency. We performed the piece only for a few weeks but it left some spillage. I collected the spillage and tweaked it into 2soon, which is a film. I was watching the incredible symmetry of Busby Berkeley’s choreography. It’s symmetric but when it’s filmed from above you get the Rococo spirals.

So 2soon was the backside of 2late, and of the Rococo. You finish a work and right away you have both a reverb and a reverse for you to move on with. So actually, I never need to start anything, and I am trying all the time not to finish anything. It’s a discourse that keeps elaborating its arguments from different perspectives. Choreography is a continuum.

ICONS: Tell us about one of your many multidisciplinary works, BODY interrupted, of 2001?

CC: It was one of my first cinematic montage experiments. I was invited to be part of a conference on Gilles Deleuze, and I focused on his concept of the interstice, the gap between things, at Tate Modern in London in 2001. Deleuze writes about film to articulate his own philosophy, and I read his philosophy to articulate my dancing. I read his words on process, change, and the relationship between image, space, and thought.

This encouraged me to take a leap of faith and experiment with his concept of ‘crystal image,’ which maintains the closest link to the virtual. I collaborated with Mateusz Herczka, a video and computer expert, and we worked with algorithms and structures, and then allowed the computer to develop the choreography. The results from the algorithms were so liberating; it meant avoiding my arbitrary criteria – this is good, or this is bad. Of course, this was also what Merce Cunningham and John Cage did.

ICONS: Was Cunningham a major choreographic influence in your work?

CC: I went to New York in the late 70s. In Europe there was mainly dance theatre and expressionism and I never hooked into that. Meeting Merce was a revelation. My mind flipped from modernism to post-modernism and I absolutely loved it. But it’s not in my body to be that linear and it didn’t fit my spirit.

There was also the minimalist work of Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs. Of course, they were unbelievable, and I paid attention to them all. And Twyla – I love Twyla Tharp. I love swag! Push Comes to Shove – how good is that? I never tried to dance in these companies. I was more interested in what kind of choreography they were doing. I came back to Europe because things were changing in the US. There was no more this moment of exuberance where everything was possible and there were things to deconstruct. Now things were already hijacked by the market.

ICONS: Thinking back to your teenage self, what might you have done differently?

CC: I was fifteen when Woodstock and Flower Power came in and that was a turning point. Not that I fully understood the ideas, but their politics struck a chord in me. I wish I could have been more radical and maybe I should have been. But no, I’m fine. It was an optimistic time. It was possible to make a revolution, and it was possible to believe in art. I don’t see what other choices I would have made. Still, ever since I have not been able to fit in institutions.

ICONS: You love change, but what remains a constant aim in your work?

CC: The number one is the idea of the body; tangible and real but also poetic and philosophical. A body incredibly grounded that can move freely and is able to counter the modern White Western trope of a body with a centre from which everything expands, with frontality that dominates the space. It’s also a metaphor for the kind of political standing, grounded in the basic condition of existence that is to be found in your body physically, mind included.

Most important is that this dancing body is ‘controlled,’ and at the same time, ‘unconscious.’ That is, front lobe and spinal cord at once. As such also operating as ‘connective tissue’ between all the aspects of human condition, and in turn between humans, places, and histories. This is the dancing I love: the very aesthetic experience due to induce and proliferate reciprocal exchanges, in the collective, by and through the singular.

ICONS: You have recently received two major awards. One, the Swedish Illis Quorum, is an honour seldom awarded to a dancer. You also received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Biennale Danza 2024. This puts you in the same category as Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham. How does this make you feel?

CC: I was surprised and very, very happy. And it was wonderful also to be back in Italy. It touched me deeply because it was unexpected. Nobody knows who I am. I’m here in a corner doing stuff with a few people. The lovely thing about the Biennale is that it is not a competition: It is a gift!

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BIOGRAPHY: https://ccap.se/en/about/

VIDEO TRAILER OF RECENT WORK --   DEADLOCK (2023), choreography by Cristina Caprioli 

PHOTOS: Headshots of Cristina Caprioli (2022), photo © Jens Wazel; DEADLOCK (2021 – 2024), dancer Louise Dahl, photo ©Thomas Zamolo; FLAT HAZE (2019 – 2024) performer Louise Dahl, photo © Thomas Zamolo; PETROLIO2 (2014, 2022), CCAP ensemble, photo © Håkan Larsson; TREES (2010 – ongoing), CCAP ensemble, photo © Håkan Larsson; CLOTH (2011 – 2022), performers Emelie Johansson Cilla Olsen, photo © Håkan Larsson

INTERVIEW'S CREATIVE TEAM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Interviewer: Maggie Foyer

Executive Content Editor: Camilla Acquista

Executive Assistant: Charles Scheland

Founding and Executive Director: Vladimir Angelov

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