A choreographer who insists on using copulating bodies in a work is someone who feels sex is the only way to sell it. Or so one might have thought. But then came Mette Ingvartsen’s “To Come”, an unexpectedly clever and droll reflection on our thoroughly sexualised society. The work involves six dancers in gender-neutralizing blue zentais—the effect is one of adorable play-dough figurines—who arrange their bodies in pornographic configurations with machine-like precision. There are no sounds, no emotions, not a tittle of the erotic. This presentation of sex as seen from the perspective of conceptual dance was the first piece to bring Ingvartsen wider success.
In her teens, the Danish-born Ingvartsen was an admirer of Jérôme Bel, and his influence can be seen in the tongue-in-cheek way she seeks to crack the established codes of theatre. After graduating from P.A.R.T.S in 2004, she gained notice from both teachers and event organisers for her solo work “50/50” and its ironically staged subversion of our patterns of perception. In “Manual Focus”, naked young women dance on stage, each wearing a mask on the back of the head that bears the likeness of an old man. These frightful Janus-faced creatures bend and twist perspectives until they utterly confuse our sense of the bodies we are beholding.
Ingvartsen is an artist who exhibits emotional states without any detectable psychological motivation. Her stunt-like scenes consist of abstract choreography absent of all narrative framing. In her world, there is always more than one yawning fissure. One looks at the fractures for a core and in the process loses the explanatory context. Confronted with Ingvartsen’s work, the well-oiled ratchet mechanism of our cerebral cogs begins to seize and rattle. We should count ourselves lucky.

- Nicole Strecker, ballettanz Jahrbuch 2008