Sketches/ Notebook

Following her momumental and award-winning production Built to Last from 2012, the American  choreographer Meg Stuart wanted to do something very different. In Built to Last with the Münchner Kammerspiele, at the time led by Johan Simons, she used existing classical and contemporary music pieces for the first time. This music formed the soundtrack to an impressive journey undertaken by five dancers through the history and possible future of dance.

The new project was supposed to be small, experimental, and free from explicit targets and well-defined frameworks. Annemie Vanackere, artistic director at Berlin's HAU Hebbel am Ufer, offered to help. Vanackere is one of Stuart's mentors, and has been following her since the beginning of  her European career. She offered Stuart the HAU3 studio as a workspace for her and her dancers and gave her carte blanche. In this loft space at the HAU, the improvisation specialist could work undisturbed for several months. It marked the beginning of a new partnership between the Berlin theatre and Stuart's Brussels-based company Damaged Goods.

Stuart started by teaming up with other artists, inviting costume designer Claudia Hill, musician Brendan Gougherty and video artist Vladimir Miller to work with her on a performance which 'brings together different art forms in a ritual reformulating interdisciplinary forms of cooperation. This became Sketches/Notebook.

The basic idea behind the performance was a notebook with blank pages which are slowly filled with sketches and dingbats. Through the 'collective creativity', in Stuart's words, of four artists and five performers, a series of vignettes emerges. These scenes do not tell a straightforward story, but rather present inner conflict and emotions, in line with Stuart's self-styled hypermodern dance idiom. Her choreographies are characterised by improvisation-based movements, often spooky and raw, yet playful at the same time.

Reviewers have described Sketches/Notebook as 'a feast' and 'a space for play and imagination'. Stuart creates a refuge where imagery, movement, sound, costumes and light converge to build a collage of vibrant scenes, with performers gliding down a slope, turning, rolling, swaying their arms, disappearing into a formless mass of bodies, dancing with a cowbell and changing into new costumes every so many minutes.

Stuart's theme is the act of trying, the search for new forms and new collaborations. She wants to show what she thinks is lacking in the world today, which is 'the freedom to break things open, despite our collective desire for community'. It's no coincidence that the first part of the performance is of such infectious naivety. It shows the pleasure of exploring, which Stuart and her group engaged in up there in the Hau's loft space. The result is this celebrated, intimate – the audience sit on the stage floor, as close to the performers as possible – and heart-warming performance, which has been on an international tour and is now coming to Amsterdam.

In 2014, German dance magazine TANZ voted Meg Stuart Choreographer of the Year, quoting the indelible impression her last three performances have left. These are Built to Last, her first evening-length solo and most personal work to date Hunter, and the captivating experiment of Sketches/Notebook.