ANNETTE BRANDANGER
-dance practitioner of movement and choreography
REFLECTION FROM MY LOGBOOK
For my portfolio I have made a reflection timeline where I have revisited my notes and processed them, making a few summorised chapters that I hope may highlight the essence of my journey so far.
The beginning
My MA journey started during the month of September in 2025, getting connected to the Rambert School and switching on another awareness felt exciting. Early notes from Oct 2025: "I find myself at a threshold, one I have been moving towards for a long time".
The word that spoke to me in the very beginning of this MA was myriad: a constellation of possibilities that feels both expansive and oddly familiar, as if it names something I have always been doing without quite having the language for it. Founding Skisser i bevegelse (SIB), building DansINN, touring schools with A Little Piece of Art, mentoring, performing, being a mum, these do not form a single line. They interweave. The entry into the MA highlighted something very important to me as I was reassured that this apparent sprawl is not a lack of focus but a form in itself.
I came to this MA as someone who has spent over two decades negotiating between body and institution, between the studio and the schools, between my own artistic creativity and the structures that fund or resist movement/ dance. The way I experience it, my learning has never been separate from my life. Thought arrives through movement, knowledge through doing, and reflection often appears through scribbling in the margins of a rehearsal note at the end of a long day.
This process, I am starting to recognise, is the map. Not a map I draw in advance, but one that sketches out as I move. It is what will guide this MA journey and, I hope, the research that follows.
Entering December
Reflecting from December 2025, I find myself deep in the Christmas period with a full mind and not so full body. My notes: Time is pressing, but so be it, I will work through it.
The three lenses, PERSONAL, PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL, are becoming my navigation tools, and the choices I need to make are becoming clearer. Processing the work of others has been very useful: not simply as academic exercise, but as a mirror. What resonates, and what feels distinct from my own practice, has helped me see more precisely what it is I actually do and believe.
One of my initial readings Alive or Dead: Face to Face Becoming Temporary Dance (Claid, 2016) opened several threads at once. It made me question, with new perspectives, why we dance, what dance means to others, what our duty is as dance artists, and what it means that I keep insisting on dancing. What is my dancing, really?
At this point in my reflection, I find myself returning to the idea of start and stop, not as a limitation, but as a tool. I am realising how central it is to my practice, how often I use it instinctively, and how much it shapes the rhythm of my work. I have begun playing with the idea of bringing start and stop into the research itself as a structural and methodological device.
New year
From January onwards, I simultaneously began developing a solo work as a personal research practice, reflecting on my previous professional practice. I practiced this when time allowed, as a way of creating space for my own moving body within the research process. What began as a practical balance between writing and moving also developed to become a habit: a way of moving between the pen and the body, and of capturing knowledge in motion. I did it wherever I was. Through this ongoing movement, action and reflection triggered each other, and I recognised in this a Deleuzian and Guattarian impulse, what I now (June 2026) recognise as rhizome made physical.
During this time I also noticed my restlessness, what was this feeling about? It felt as if unfamiliar territory was shaking me. Not being in the studio much, a feeling of unease appeared in my body. A wanting to move on.
Specific note: Power, resilience, and emotion; three words that are central in my work of SIB Dance Lab. This is a longing and a goal I am looking forward to reaching.
Allowing the fast and the slow to weave together, complementing each other, I seem to realise here that this weaving is part of my personality. This weaving, I am realising, is not a distraction or a weakness, it is a brick in my foundation, part of how I am as an artist.
This connects to my engagement with ecosomatics an acknowledgement that moving is always relational. Space influences me. Surroundings influence me. The feel of an environment shapes how I move before I have made any conscious decision to move at all. This has always been clear in my practice. What the research is helping me do, is name it.
Moving forward
At this point I began reflecting on previous practice, questioning why certain work never grew to its full potential. I found myself asking: did curiosity get in the way of creation? What is the journey from curiosity to materialisation — or is curiosity simply enough for an expression to emerge? And what will an audience take from a curious expression? The word spontaneous keeps following me, and I know there is a reason for that.
I also found myself wanting to say something about the freelance way of being — what it means to sustain a dance practice outside of institutions, on your own terms, over a long time. This felt like it wanted to become part of the research.
In my logbook at this point I had drawn the image you see to the left; overlapping circles, crossing, circular, and written alongside it: "There will be activities that make no sense at all. The gathering."
An example of the scribbles that appear, not planned, they arrive. And looking at it now I understand it as an acceptance, that the research process includes things that resist logic, and that gathering those things together is itself a form of work.
This was also a moment of frustration, and I needed to be honest about that. I recognised a familiar pattern: the tendency to try to save the world through dance, to take on too much, to spread energy in too many directions. Locating where to put my energy is an important part of my process, and it requires care and a certain decisiveness. Not everything can be carried forward.
I wrote this at the time: "Words are good, but written down they become rigid." It named something I had been feeling throughout, that the aliveness of practice resists the fixed understanding of language, and that this tension is not a problem to solve but a condition to work within.
Touring
"Mum, I managed to improvise a whole song without losing the rhythm — super cool."
I sit down to watch my daughter dance, witnessing her enjoyment, moving freely. This moment stays with me as I head out on tour.
In January I was touring with Et lite stykke kunst (A Little Piece of Art), a project I have been performing since 2015 and one that forms the foundation of my interdisciplinary practice. Though the work has a set frame, there is plenty of space to explore within it and I believe this is part of why it keeps touring.
During this time I drafted these keywords into my logbook: war, culture, the culture house, freezing as a creative tool, lifting dance to the importance of defence, togetherness, resilience. I was also practicing S-shapes, working on precision in how I communicate with the body, asking myself: what am I actually moving?
I was a little uncertain during the tour about how to make this work fully relevant to my practice research. But one thing that was consistently present was the meeting point between audience and dance — and that meeting point is interaction.
Contextualising
Something begins to shift. A slow process, which I began noticing during the Christmas holiday. Perhaps it emerged from trying to articulate my practice to family members who have little familiarity with or understanding of this field. My process of contextualising starts to appear more clearly through the log; aims, interests, objectives. There is more planning, more structure emerging. Et lite stykke kunst and SIB Dance Lab appear again as anchoring reference points.
In a reflective note I write: "What becomes of the movement once it leaves the body?" This question, also shared on the SIB Dance Lab Instagram, sits at the heart of what I am investigating.
It is about the life of movement beyond the moment of its making, what it leaves behind, what it passes on, what the audience carries with them after the encounter.
The photo is from FRAMED: 2024 (Collaboration with SIB Dance Lab, Move Dansefestival and Kunstbanken)
I have chosen this image deliberately. Dance in a gallery space sits at the intersection of several of my interests, movement, visual art, and the question of where performance belongs. It is an image that reflects the interdisciplinary threads that are revealing themselves through my contextualisation process.
Spring 2026: Digging into the Mountain
It is now spring 2026 and together with my mentor I am digging into what feels like a large mountain of practice. The words I have noted at this stage are: sketching, impulsive, spontaneous, fear free.
In my notes and scribbles prior to my presentation I find myself asking: who am I? And then, giant leaps. Part of my work lives in the detail: feet to fingertips, placement, near and far, tipping, filling, exploring the surface. And then allowing the giant leap, a physical sensation that creates freedom. When practicing this with others, these moments generate physical conversations.
I later reflect on Giant Leaps as a concept. Two questions emerge: what do I mean by this, and what makes them happen, or what allows them to happen? The words I reach for are multiplicity, phenomenology, Descartes, and thinking.
In February 2026 I do some free writing on the why. I entered this MA because I recognise ambitions within my practice that I have never dedicated time to fully understand. These ambitions are closely linked to how I move, why I move, and to whom I move.
I also reflect on the current situation of dance in Norway and name a paradox: even though many things have shifted in order to support dance, the dancer still does not experience these changes as empowering. The structures improve, but the feeling inside them does not always follow.
After my presentation I move through an emotional journey; excitement, questioning, measuring and comparing, trusting, and then a recognised need to secure grounding, to find breath. As we say in the studio: turn your fucking head. Come back to the body. Come back to now.
This is where I will pause the timeline.
This is a recent image from the POP-up Performance SKETCH: kroppens stemmer (SKETCH: Voices of the Body). Pictured is Bernt Ola Volungholen carrying me, a spontaneous act in front of an audience, my body held in a straight line. The performance took place in a gallery space. Image credit: Kirsten Flagstad Festivalen and SIB Dance Lab, 2026.
