Choreographer and cellist to bring renowned artist's exhibit to life at American Swedish Institute

As she was in the process of creating a dance piece about German-born, Sweden-based artist Ann Wolff, choreographer Laurie Van Wieren sat with her notebook and pondered the way she and six dancers and two musicians were pressing against time and space.

"We are conducting," she wrote. "We are sliding and flying near where you walk and where you see."

Van Wieren has been working to bring Wolff's images of becoming — whether that be becoming a bird, a house or being a state of leaving or remembering — to life with the same fluid play between abstraction and narrative that exists in Wolff's artwork.

Van Wieren has teamed up with cellist Michelle Kinney for the project. They've been collaborating together since the 1980s, when Kinney approached Van Wieren after a show at the Walker Art Center and handed her a cassette tape of her music.

"She liked the music a lot, and just really hit it off," Kinney recalled. "There's been a mutual trust in the way our processes connect."

Now they're working on a performance for the American Swedish Institute's Turnblad Mansion, set amid an exhibition featuring Wolff's art, called "Ann Wolff: The Art of Living." They'll perform it during "First Look," the opening night event on Saturday.

Wolff works in glass as well as metals and other media, and is known for her expressive sculptural gestures. With a mastery of negative space and texture, the artist moves between architectural shapes, animal and human — particularly feminine — forms, and a sense of movement. At one point in her career, Wolff spent time observing rehearsals of the renowned choreographer Pina Bausch, creating work that mined Bausch's raw immediacy.

Now, Wolff's work is proving to be inspiration for Van Wieren's choreography.

"I just really took a liking to her work," Van Wieren said. "It's metaphorical, but it's kind of simple. She has a sense of humor."

Van Wieren notes that often Wolff creates work about the body and self, as well as masks, which she feels drawn to.

Van Wieren's choreography is built from walking and everyday gestures playing out in the bodies of seven dancers of different ages and backgrounds. Kinney and bass player Nick Gaudette, meanwhile, play music going back to medieval times. They're doing mostly Swedish music, but also including a work by Egyptian composer Hamza el Din, who is known to have reinvented the musical culture of ancient Nubia.

Kinney says in her work with Van Wieren, they didn't want to overpower Wolff's visual art.

"We aren't stealing the show," Kinney said. "It's kind of a beautiful landscape where each element has its place. The sculpture, if anything, is standing out among the dance and the music."

ASI has a number of Wolff's works in its permanent collection, and featured the artist in a group exhibition in 2023 called "Fluidity: Identity in Swedish Glass." Around the same time, the Waldemarsudde, an art museum in Stockholm, did a rather large exhibition of Wolff's work. That show featured pieces that the 88-year-old Wolff created later in her life.

"So this is really her coming free of all of the constraints you could say, from working as an artist for a big-time glass house like she did for many years," said Erin Stromgren, ASI's director of exhibitions. "And her own exploration with identity and aging."

Wolff worked for many years for Kosta Boda, a well established glass house in Sweden. There she designed "Snowballs," a popular candleholder design that would later spur a lawsuit, with Wolff saying she hadn't seen a dime of her bestseller since the mid-1980s.

ASI's exhibition, made in collaboration with the artist and the Ann Wolff Foundation, features works that were shown in Waldemarsudde as well as art lent to the museum by Cafesjian Art Trust in Shoreview. Like ASI, Waldemarsudde is built in a mansion, and Stromgren said the installed works are "almost like they're floating in front of the windows of the mansion. It's really kind of ethereal."

Stromgren said ASI had been wanting to host a movement-based installation in dance for a while, and decided Wolff's work created an apt opportunity to do so.

"Ann's work often references the body and our connection to our body, and movement of our body," Stromgren said.

In addition, because of Wolff's themes around aging, the museum wanted to work with a dance artist who has had an extensive career. "Laurie has been on the scene in Minneapolis for some time, and is so pivotal," she said.

Often, when ASI features international artists, they pair the work with local artists in Minnesota. Besides Van Wieren and her collaborators, the ASI exhibition also features "In the Bardo," a series created by local artist Nancy Randall when she was 95, as well as Randall's "Footprints of the Voyage," a series of nine lithographs.

The "First Look" event is the first part of a longer residency Van Wieren will be conducting in the museum. Twice a month, Van Wieren and her collaborators also host "activations" in the space. For those, the museum is setting up tables with paper for visitors to draw outlines of themselves.

"One of the things that I've been working with is drawing yourself — your body — behind you," Van Wieren said. "Kind of blindly, and making this body drawing, and then creating work out of that." Van Wieren's team has plans to create masks that the audience will be able to take part in, and there will be video installations through the museum.

In one, video screens will show just the dancers' heads." We're moving quietly, softly," Van Wieren said. "We are thinking of being seen."

Van Wieren will present her final dance work, along with Kinney's band the Stylites, on May 24.

But first up is the mansion takeover, as the dancers move through the different rooms of ASI. Watching rehearsals while she's reading music, Kinney said, the dance reminds her of watching birds in a feeder, and suspects the audience may have a similar experience because the performance moves through different locations. You won't be able to have a direct view of all of the moments in the work.

"There will be times where it'll settle for people to be able to watch three minutes' worth of an arc," Kinney said. "But there's a lot of stuff going on all over the place, and it's dreamlike."

Van Wieren approaches the same metaphor when talking about the work. "What I'm after is to let [the audience] just look and see, the way you would when you're out in the woods and you just look at a bird or you look at a movement. I want people to see it that way and not to worry about getting it. Just be in the room with movement."

'Ann Wolff: The Art of Living'

When: 7-10 p.m. Sat. American Swedish Institute, 2600 Park Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $30. 612-871-4907, asimn.org/event/ann-wolff-first-look.