Who we are: Alexis’ expertise is as a dance artist and bodyworker; her current research and interests lie in simultaneous solo dance practice, immersive audience forms, and the role of care in dance dramaturgy. Laressa works with text, somatic research, and dancing to make books, installations, performance, and friendships. Sara’s expertise is a graphic designer, text maker and performer, and her current research and experimentation is in live performance with printed objects. Together, we make texts, dances, performances, and sound.
LARESSA DICKEY is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker living in Stockholm, who researches the dancer’s use of language and the writer’s use to/for dance. She publishes poetry books and collaborative texts; she’s is a member of the collectives WITHING and Misleading Subjects. She makes installations, friendships, books, and performance. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation.
SARA KAAMAN is a Stockholm-based artist & graphic designer. She uses printmaking, performance, writing, publishing and video to make language move. She runs the miniature culture house Munnen (The Mouth) in Bagarmossen, and is part of Girls Like Us magazine. She holds a BA in Graphic Design from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and an MFA in Choreography (New Performative Practices) from Stockholm University of the Arts.
ALEXIS STEEVES is based between New York City and Tallinn, Estonia. She pursues live solo performance praxis and long-term, interdisciplinary collaborations. Most notably, with Dages Juvelier Keates, NYC based collective HAM and choreographer Rosalind Crisp. Concurrently, Steeves has conducted a parallel career as a professional bodyworker since 2003. She has taught dance at the Tallinn University, Estonia since 2008 – current (full time and guest artist). Steeves achieved a MFA in New Performative Practices at the Stockholm University of the Arts (2023) as a scholarship recipient and a BA from Bard College (2001,USA).
Instagram – @misleadingsubjects
Laressa Dickey laressadickey@gmail.com
Sara Kaaman mail@sarakaaman.com
Alexis Steeves sixelaseveets@gmail.com
Tell us about your artistic practice?
– We are a triad of performing artists who study how language meets the body. We think of performance as a form of publication, and vice versa. Exchanging performative practices in the studio we listen for and to translations between dance, language and printed material. We play with relay, cycling material through; reading, writing, dancing, choreography, editing and direction. We maintain a live, asynchronous and remote dialogue between voice and text that accumulates and morphs and writes itself over time.
We ask how subjectivities, human and otherwise, are formed and unformed by the movement of attention through changing materials? We are interested in the slipperiness that ensues, and we attend to scales of sincerity, rigor, and the absurd. We drag time. In response to our contemporary attention crisis we are committed to an emergent ethics of difference that necessitates slow thinking and slow making.
Our first collaborative public showing, ”I want to be a ChatGPT” (2023), spilled out of shared studies at the MA in New Performative Practices at SKH. Our current choreographic practices were developed during residencies in 2024–2026; MDT in Stockholm, Massia and Estonian Dance Agency in Estonia, and Im_Flieger in Vienna.
Is there something specific in your artistic practice that you’re looking forward to devoting particular attention to during a year at SITE?
– Materialize the live performance process into print.
Sustain our artistic practice collectively, individually, together and apart.
Tend to the foundations of an MSG; Mutual Support Group.
Share and exchange with our residency companions.
We are writing a book called The Book of One Hundred Years. So a year is 1/100th of that vision. Looking with a long view and training for the future we seek vibrant *ongoingness in collective creative pursuit.
Currently, the conditions of our collective work are set up by state-enforced rules and regulations. Two of us are based in Sweden, one of us in Estonia. Space is everything and anywhere. SITE offers continuity and context – an artistic home for the time-being.
What are you looking forward to sharing with other artists who are here at SITE?
– Our surliness, wisdom, and love of reading/language as it relates to being together and to one’s artistic practice. We are really good at feedback and we love process, so find us if you feel lost; we don’t know the way but we are good at accompaniment.
More onSITE plant life!
*Jeanine Durning “ongoing” practice
D.W. Winnicott “going-on-being” state