MATTAFORMA

“MOST TYPICAL AND DEFAULT PROCESSES are damaging and quite polluting when you’re working in the built environment,” begins Lindsey Wikstrom, who cofounded Mattaforma with Jean Suh in 2021. They launched their New York practice with the desire to provide more sustainable community-minded outcomes than were currently available in the architecture field, with each of their projects pushing the bounds of material research and design. Wikstrom and Suh’s daily focus is to fi nd partners who share that vision, and to keep up the pace of their technological and environmental research. As such, Mattaforma is not only constantly evolving based on new design and material innovations—it’s also pushing its clients to adopt those priorities.

One example of this ethos in action is Mattaforma’s biofarm and hospitality project located near Sedona, Arizona. Currently in its research and design phase, the work imagines a place where guests immerse themselves in the desert landscape while consuming produce grown on-site. “The client and the consultant team really understood the importance of where the food comes from,” says Wikstrom of the developing concept, “but they hadn’t yet extended that to the built components of the project.” Suh adds that by including the circular principles of biodynamic farming in their designs, Mattaforma formulated an approach in which the structure emerges from the earth “just like the edible landscape.”

At home in New York, the duo is designing The Nursery for Public Records, which is set to open later this year. They have envisioned an addition to the sustainably minded cultural space, which already includes a music venue, bar, listening rooms, and a restaurant in a historic building in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Their brief asked them to build an enclosure to shelter the plants in the open garden space during winter months (and for human use when not occupied by greenery) using three shipping containers already on site. “Our jumping-off point was thinking about how we could use the steel from the shipping containers to absorb and hold heat inside a roof system, thinking about them as we would a Trombe wall,” Wikstrom says, describing a technique to passively absorb and store energy from sunlight.

This elemental approach is typical of Mattaforma: consistently executing complex visions with whatever materials are at hand. Another project currently under construction in Park City, Utah, will embed artist residencies into a mountainside landscape. Their vertical design uses a minimal footprint to reduce concrete volume, according to the design duo, creating a miniature tower in the forest. This environmentally conscious thinking extends into their educational work, like Wikstrom’s discussion series for the newly launched Emilio Ambasz Institute at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a department focused on the intersection of architecture and ecology. Entitled “Material Worlds,” it serves as an outlet to bring Mattaforma’s work to the broader public, and to help bolster the studio’s expansive practice.

As we reckon with the intractable issues of our time, a group of choreographers from across the world—some classically trained, others who cut their teeth in the circus arts—are hard at work inscribing collective feelings of angst, a rmation, outrage, and jubilation onto the body. By translating issues of gender, race, power, and our collective humanity into an arched spine or a utter of the hand, the six choreographers spotlighted here o er a powerful statement on the state of our culture.

By Sophie Lee

Styling by Studio&

Ivan Michael Blackstock

Big names swirl around Ivan Michael Blackstock— he collaborated with Beyoncé on her 2020 visual album Black is King, and with Nike in 2019. But the choreographer’s multi-disciplinary practice is entirely his own. Last spring, Blackstock, 36, put his singular style on display with TRAPLORD —an alchemy of spoken word, dance, and musical performance that explored stereotypes surrounding Black masculinity—at 180 Studios in London. He is also the founder of Crxss Platfxrm, an organization celebrating and supporting the best of the U.K.’s street culture performers and artists.

“Choreography for me is just structured improvisation, a portal to transcendence. Dance is my spirituality—it’s the thing that holds me together. Music has always been the starting point. It’s the thing that makes me vibrate. If we look at cultures from around the world, it’s what dictates the movement. It’s very shamanic. If we listen closely enough, we can hear the music inside of ourselves, from our heartbeat to our breath. Music is all around us, and the more we listen and open our ears, the more we can hear a multitude of sounds and select how to interpret that. The best way to be a communicator of the body is to listen first, then respond.”

Yoann Bourgeois

Yoann Bourgeois trained in the circus arts, and it shows. The artistic director, choreographer, and set designer explores notions of weightlessness, achieving gravity-defying feats that bend the laws of physics. His choreography has been brought to life by the likes of Harry Styles, Coldplay, and Selena Gomez, to name a few.

“Contemporary dance has gradually become so diversified that it would certainly escape even a seasoned panoramic gaze. It is perhaps less of a single landscape and more like multiple worlds. As in many other areas, the advent of digital and social medias has been a phenomenal upheaval. These networks have become real, new scenes that have allowed the recognition of an incredible diversity of styles, individuals, and contexts. Choreography clarifies notions of rhythms, body shapes, and movements. It reminds me of objective rules of space and time; to write a body language. It is a framework for sensation. It is a tool for transmitting information. With choreography, I count time and trace space.”

Vidya Patel

For Birmingham-based Vidya Patel, movement is about death and rebirth. As the founder of South Asian Dance Artists U.K. and a Young Associate Choreographer of the acclaimed dance organization Sadler’s Wells, she has studied Indian classical dance since childhood, and was a finalist in the South Asian category of the BBC Young Dancer competition in 2015. Patel, 27, has spent the years since interrogating the historical in fl uences that shaped her Indian classical training—re fi ning and expanding her practice beyond the genre, but never forgetting her roots.

“The landscape of dance is always evolving, always shifting. It’s like cycles: the new becomes old, the old becomes new, things die and then they’re born. Everything is constantly copying and imitating, with the desire of being original. I still do believe colonialism is present. It’s embedded within systems that many are now working towards understanding. It’s not about dismantling tradition, but getting rid of ideologies that were built on colonial structures. Even in Indian classical dance, there’s a huge effect from the British. My very being in the U.K. is through colonization and displacements and the migration of my family. I choreograph to make something in my mind tangible—to understand it further, to explore the possibilities of my imagination, and to ask how human emotion can be translated. I create and move to help understand myself and how I belong in the world.”

JOHN-WILLIAM WATSON

John-William Watson, 24, is no stranger to the surreal. The self-described “dance theater maker” merges existential themes with the granular intimacy of human connection. They are also a Young Associate Choreographer at Sadler’s Wells, a Northern Connection Artist of 2021/22, and the co-founder of Another Collective, a Belgium-based dance theater group.

“Choreography means world-building for me. It means storytelling. It means creating a universe, establishing its rules and boundaries, and then messing with the parameters. My practice is rooted heavily in surrealism and the absurd. We’re constantly met with things that don’t make sense, decisions that people make, events that occur around us, déjà vu, and creepy coincidences. Ultimately, I think there’s something truly silly but also very profound in mundane situations and everyday encounters. My work sits on the borderline of the most bland, ordinary scenarios and the big ole questions that keep us up at night, like trying to imagine what’s beyond the universe’s current point of expansion, whilst waiting for your dog to nip one off in the park. My work attempts to bring elements of the human condition and consciousness to light—things we all share.”

Eleanor Perry

Eleanor Perry, 35, is the co-founder of Thick & Tight alongside Daniel Hay-Gordon, and has collaborated with creatives including Gary Clarke, Lea Anderson, and Julie Cunningham. She’s worked as a movement director, lighting designer, and costume designer. As a dancer, she has performed everywhere from the Centre Pompidou to the Hollywood Bowl, and has taught at companies, including Trinity Laban, Gary Clarke Company, and Impermanence Dance Theatre.

“A friend once asked me what my choreographic method is, and I half-jokingly replied ‘precision and angst.’ It can take so much concentration and thought, but at the same time there’s a lightness about it. After all, you are just making up a dance. I love that it can feel trifling, frivolous, dif ficult, and a matter of life and death all at the same time—total inconsequence and total drama! I always feel a pull between things that seem to be in opposition but aren’t really, like seriousness and fl ippancy, control and freedom, constancy and change, individual and universal, clarity and ambiguity. I want to reframe what artistic ‘excellence’ means and celebrate differences, highlight that they don’t need to separate us. They can reveal—in a much lovelier way—what is shared more than a stage full of people who are all supposed to look the same and be perfect in the same way.”

DANIEL HAY-GORDON

Filmmaker and choreographer Daniel Hay-Gordon, 34, has performed across Europe and the United States. In 2012, he and Eleanor Perry established the U.K. dance theater company Thick & Tight. He’s worked with heavyweight institutions including The Royal Ballet—which tapped Thick & Tight to curate programming for its Family Sunday and Late events—Staatsoper Berlin, and The Royal Opera House.

“Finding invention, storytelling, musicality, humor, rapture, and expression through the form of movement is thrilling to me. Some days I can be on a roll, and movement streams fl uently. On other days it can be really challenging; I can create a passage for a few hours, then look back at it and feel a bit nauseated! Dance doesn’t happen by chance or because of some kind of unearthly genius; you have to work really hard at it. Historically, it has been an industry where abuse is permissible; most dancers are young and have been trained within a suppressive culture. However, a new generation is seeking to rebalance the hierarchy, to speak out when they have grievances, and to work towards an environment of collective responsibility. Earlier in my career I was often told that the way I moved was too feminine. My queerness was something undesirable. Thankfully, times have changed, and authentic ways of moving are desired and celebrated.”

Makeup by ANNA PAYN

Hair by ELIOT McQUEEN

Nails by CHRISTIE HUSEYIN

Set Design by SAM PIDGEN

Produced by THE CURATED

DOP MAX MONTGOMERY

Digi Op NINA CLOSE Lighting

Direction by ROSS ZILLWOOD

Fashion Assistance by TOM GRIMSDELL and TAMSIN MICHAEL

Makeup Assistance by

TAMSIN BILINGALL

Set Assistance by KAUSH ODEDRA and HALEIMAH DARWISH

Location DROP STUDIOS