Maria Hassabi in conversation with Andrea Rodrigo

Andrea Rodrigo – I read some time ago a description of one of your works that said: “staging the movement between sensation and display.” It stayed with me. How do you work the tension between presence and representation?

Maria Hassabi – I think the tension in my work is connected to a distilled approach to physicality. I insist on precision as a way of understanding the representations I’m putting on display, the relations between the performers, and the use of time and space. As the actions become more specific, tension enters the work. This approach also keeps the performers engaged in the present moment. Sensation is the texture I ask them to incorporate as they work with slowness, so that it doesn’t become deadened or collapse into something inert.

What is the rhythmic foundation of Us? How do gestures unfold? The score the dancers follow implies enormous labor and precision that produces what, from the outside, reads as stillness, suspension, and can evoke a certain vulnerability. How do you think about what is legible to the audience and what remains interior to the technique?

The rhythmic foundation… Well, the performers are counting throughout, even while they appear passive. They are working within a strict script that creates tension rather than release, and can produce a certain vulnerability, especially in performance. I wouldn’t describe it as rhythm per se. Each performer has a solo, and the piece unfolds through their relation to one another and to the audience. It’s more relational than rhythmic.

I keep coming back to the idea of edging—something that is always almost, always at the verge of erupting into something else. When I’ve seen your work, there’s a very vibrant feeling of almost landing into an image, and then it shifts, and that’s what keeps me there, that sensation. Does that resonate?

As much as I attempt to create images in live performance, they are always shifting. Stillness is not possible. We breathe, there is visible effort, and constant micro-
movements that alter what we perceive as an image. What draws me is that instability, in the moment something almost settles and then changes. For Us, I wasn’t interested in arriving at a single statement, but in holding that state of transition, where things don’t fully settle into one form.

Thinking about the relationship with the audience—even though this work hasn’t met one yet and will only do so in the premiere at Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The proscenium and the frontality place the dancers in a kind of hyperexposure, while maintaining a certain refusal of legibility. It can feel counterintuitive that intimacy is what you’re researching through this kind of exposure. What is your relationship to control in that dynamic?

For me, it’s less about control and more about persistence, a persistence toward specificity. Even though the body is not an abstract form, within the medium of dance it can become abstracted. Specificity is my agency toward clarity. Exposure is inherent to the situation. Once you are on stage, it has to be expected. With the proscenium, it’s a bet each time whether intimacy can be sustained within larger venues. Can the work evoke intimacy without shifting its needs toward spectacle?

You mentioned working with abstraction. How does it relate to the canonical language of western abstraction or the common understanding of something abstract as disembodied material?

I don’t approach the performer as abstract. What is there needs to remain legible to me. At the same time, there is no narrative line, and that in itself introduces a form of abstraction. For me, abstraction doesn’t come from removing the human or becoming disembodied. It comes from the structure of the work, the absence of narrative, and from the way time and attention are organised.

How would you describe the specific texture of this work?

The work has not met its audience yet. My works become complete only through that encounter. My overall interest lies in how perception shifts over time while being engaged with a simple task. Us unfolds through duration, where what is seen is continuously adjusting, never quite settling. It doesn’t ask for immediate understanding, yet it creates space for the viewer to enter, drift, and return.

What do you think is at stake in asking an audience to sustain that kind of attention today?

They are invited, and we try to be as generous as possible. I’m not interested in being didactic or in imposing a way of looking. I create a space where we attempt to remain present. The audience can choose how to engage. They can stay, or they can leave. The performers are not given that option.

And the title—Us.

I like the title very much. It has to do with the shifting position between the performers and the audience. At times, the performers can be perceived as “us,” and at other times the audience may recognise themselves in that position. The distinction between “them” and “us” is not fixed. This relation shifts, and moves between these positions, where they begin to overlap and maybe a sense of “us” is shared.

• Interview by Andrea Rodrigo, April 2026

Andrea Rodrigo is a curator and researcher in contemporary dance and choreography. Her practice is articulated in different formats and gestures through curatorial programs, writing, dramaturgy, strategic advising, and the accompaniment of choreographers and artists. Her research uses choreographic and critical theory frameworks to understand how form produces aesthetic and political sensibilities and how somatic knowledge is transmitted and ideologically inscribed.