The dance- and performance artists Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile met in Baltimore, where they were part of the same feminist dance group and lived in the same squat. A tarot card took them to New York, where they started their ongoing project FlucT. Outside their studio in Brooklyn, the last of the summer heat presses on the asphalt, but with a hint of autumn. The room vibrates in blue light. They have just been rehearsing and are sitting on the floor to talk about violent dance, rape culture, the emptiness created by capitalism and dance that is not pretty.

How would you describe FlucT?

Sigrid – Monica and I are running FlucT together and we are doing sound art, performance, dance and installation.

Monica – We mainly started within dance, even though neither of us is a trained dancer. Sigrid was studying communication sciences and I was taking sculpture at college. We met in a dance group that did feminist narrative dance. But we weren’t such close friends then.

S – We’re from the same place in Baltimore and we were interested in the same things.

S – But we didn’t know that at first.

M – But we were the dominant people in the dance collective. We wanted similar things, so we took the lead.

S – Then we lived in the same collective, and there we found each other, one beautiful night.

M – By talking about suffering.

S – After that, we started to have a dialogue about our perspectives on the world. It progressed, and in the end it was just the two of us performing together.

M – But we felt we needed to get away from Baltimore. So we went to California and worked trimming grass (marijuana, not lawns) to get away for a while and think about where to go next. It was between L.A. and New York. So we asked, “Shall we move to L.A.?” and drew a tarot card. The card was the Devil, which symbolises over-abundance and materialism, among other things, and that wasn’t something we wanted.

S – So we assumed that meant we should go to New York. And in December we’ll have been here for three years.

You seem to be very close and have similar views – what does your work process look like?

S – When we work it normally starts with a concept. We recently did a project based on the story of the scorpion and the frog, for example. So we started by talking about it and what it makes us think about. Then we go into our motions and talk about what motions we want to see and use. After that, we make the pieces that form the work. Some parts are direct choreography and some parts are more theatrical. Monica might be a dog on the floor, and I put a leash on her in a sequence followed by us rolling around on the floor feverishly. We’ve developed our own language for our movements so that we can communicate more easily when we create our sequences.

M – We’ve worked out our own technique, a vocabulary within which we can improvise.Most of it is choreographed, but the parts that aren’t have a narrative. Like a saga or monomyth, the hero’s journey. A clear structure for what should happen and in what order.

S – We call our signature movement “the freak out”, and it’s completely improvised.

M – We lose it completely. We throw ourselves on the floor and quiver. We don’t even have control over ourselves or our bodies.

S – It takes a lot of time and different methods to create a ten-minute performance. There’s a lot of cutting and pasting.

M – But we always choose the narrative and the music together so that we convey the feeling we want to get at. The music is often by musicians we know, but Sigrid mixes it. The dance is a way for us to deal with topics that interest and affect us. Control and loss of control, as a woman for example. You could describe it as an aggressive dance battle. The work process is generated through our everyday life, how we communicate as friends, and living in the culture we live in. It’s impulsive and fluctuating. It’s very intense, but I guess that’s how it is with things that are passionate and come from what you live in. Our latest work is called A Gape, which refers to the feeling of an inner gape, an emptiness, that we often feel but don’t know how to fill. And by talking about it, we arrived at the concept of the chicken and the egg. Which came first?

S – Do you feel empty because of capitalism or has the hole always been there?

M – Is it learned or eternal? And it resulted in a ten-minute-long piece with many different pieces consisting of theatre and dance.

It sounds like you have a very organic way of working.

S – When we work together it’s like we’re married, get divorced and then married again and give birth to a child that we look after for several years. But in a short space of time. It’s very distressing. We want different things, then we agree and are able to move on from a particular detail and keep working.

M – And it requires intuition. Since it’s an abstract language. We can’t require anyone else to see what we see and we rarely have a clear end goal. We add things and take things away, add and take away.

S – Since we both live in a media and TV-dominated world, we’re affected by it when we create our performances. It’s like watching TV and changing channels.

M – People have described watching our performance as being like channel surfing. We jump from sequence to sequence.

S – Even though the different sections are interconnected. But for us it’s completely natural.

Do you see it as a conversation between the two of you when you interact physically?

M – People often perceive a story about relationships because we’re two people interacting. We’re quite different in our capacities for movement. Sigrid is very strong, so she’s often the base, and I’m more flexible so she’s often the one lifting me. But the relationship is constantly fluctuating. The control shifts all the time. If she’s the base, then she’s often the one with control and I’m the one who’s being physically handled. But then it suddenly shifts and I’m handling her and I have control.

S – It often results in feminine and masculine essences, which I think is cool; some people work beyond man and woman but, since both of us are women, we can evoke those essences while also changing them for a while.

M – I think our first performance that we did seriously was where we were the same person fighting with themselves. And we played with androgyny. Both of us had blonde hair, the same clothes and the dominance oscillated back and forth between us.

S – I think it’s still like that. It’s always like that.

M – It pervades everything we do now.

S – The display of the internal.

M – A constant internal battle.

Women are often connected to their art. Do you think it’s possible to separate yourself from your art?

S – I’ve tried to do that this past year. It used to be like I shut down after a performance; I couldn’t meet anyone or talk to anyone. There were too many powerful feelings and too much of myself in the content. But the content isn’t a part of me. During the performance itself, I have begun to allow myself to be a little more detached. We have a ritual before we perform – a little formula – and when it’s started to work then it’s “off with my head”.

M – I feel like FlucT is separate from us. There’s a seed there that’s personal, but it’s developing into something much more far-reaching. We talk a lot about rape culture, because we live in it and we can talk about it based on what we’ve seen. It’s not necessarily from personal experience, but there are things that affect us and there’s an empathy there.

S – It’s not that this is our personal history. We just go back to what is present in our reality.

M – It’s more like critical analysis.

S – Through movement and gestures.

M – It’s the abstract language. Instead of writing a paper, we create a performance.

S – But speaking of the personal element, I had problems with it at first. Dance was very technical and very sexual for me for a long time, and I felt very vulnerable before I was actually able to feel that this was me in my body and that my body could be a tool for communication.

M – For me, there’s an element of communication when I perform, where I don’t feel like it’s me any more. I guess it’s the adrenaline or some other chemical thing, but it feels like I’m being controlled by some other force. Like I’m being taken over by something else. And afterwards it feels like coming down from a drug. It’s a very spiritual experience.

I’ve heard that from other performance artists, about coming back or coming down. I think of rituals when I hear that – do you see what you do as ritualistic?

M – I do. It comes from wanting to create something that you want to happen. We’re creating a vision of the future.

S – We have little rituals during the creative process. But otherwise I don’t know if ritual is the right word – homage, or a community maybe.

M – I recently watched a documentary called Rise that was about krumping, which is a dance style that is big among black people in the Bay Area. It’s an expression of growing up under oppression in a fucked-up society. A society that creates a need for aggressive expressions. They create their own community and their own movement. “You krump so you don’t fight.” That struck a chord in me. But for me it’s about being a woman, and expressing what needs to be expressed. FlucT makes that possible for me.

S – Sometimes I feel like we should write a manifesto for our works. But part of understanding the works is not fully understanding. We don’t want to say outright what they’re about, because what good would that do with language as it is?

With dance, I often feel that I don’t want to have it served up too clearly. It’s a different kind of communication from verbal communication, and it’s important that there’s space to communicate things other than the rational and concrete. It speaks to me on different levels.

M – It’s abstract for a reason.

S – And maybe it lets us reach more people?

We don’t describe ourselves as activists; we describe ourselves as artists, because the artist might need more of a reason to be seen, but part of the activism we still do is to fuck things up. To fuck with a system that is learned. And part of that is, as a woman, not to take responsibility for the audience’s reactions.

Do you see your work as political activism? And how do you see responsibility in relation to art?

M – We don’t describe ourselves as activists; we describe ourselves as artists, because the artist might need more of a reason to be seen, but part of the activism we still do is to fuck things up. To fuck with a system that is learned. And part of that is, as a woman, not to take responsibility for the audience’s reactions. Since we’re female physical artists, we will always be put in boxes, and as dancers we will always be sexualised because we work with our bodies. So if we’re going to be put in boxes, why not fuck them up a bit? In our latest work, there’s a section where it looks like Sigrid is sucking from my nipple and I’m holding her neck and looking at the audience like it’s porn. She turns around and it looks like I’m fucking her. It’s a very clear porn reference. Something everyone has seen and recognises. It’s very direct, and you can see that we’re talking about something very specific.

S – What we stage is already out there. And by disrupting and unsettling the system that’s already there, we can let people get close to it in new ways. But I don’t feel responsible. Except to my mother. She really hates what we do. She’s very proud, but at the same time she thinks it’s a pain.

M – It’s not beautiful.

S – Watching me shove my fist into Monica’s throat isn’t pretty. It’s not like I’ve made a beautiful mug with little flowers on it.

M – “Hey Mum, I’ve made a broken ashtray.”

S – “With a bit of blood in it.” But it’s all we know how to do.

See the performance of FlucT here and here.