I have been part of the Shaking the Habitual team since May 2012, working as a choreographer with developing the show, its concept and dance, and since 2013 as a performer in the Shaking the Habitual Show on its 2013 European tour, the 2014 USA-Canada tour and the final European tour in 2014.
Shaking the Habitual, the album, lays the groundwork for this show. Based on the artistic and political ideas therein, we play with the expectations and question habits of the concert, the dance performance, the club and the music festival. Working within a highly commercial, professionalised and male-dominated music industry, we strive to twist and strangle hierarchies to find other ways of organizing work and its conditions. Disrespecting borders between digital and analogue, fake and real, professional and dilettante, star and cast, experimental acts and glamorous shows, nature and culture, audience and artist, blood family and chosen family, dance and action, a Buchla and bongo and the sound of a hit and a kiss.
We use the full potential of the electronic concert. In addition to bodies playing electronic music, we suggest different bodily engagements. We suggest dancing together as a mobilization, a collective moment for everyone in the room – on and off stage – to take part in.
We, The Knife, are a group of people with diverse approaches to dance, moves and music. Some of us are musicians, some of us are vocalists, some of us are choreographers, some of us are experienced performers and some of us are not.
We learn from each other.
We share responsibility.
This is a suggestion. For all of us.
/The Knife
