“The Studio is a Place for People to Feel Things”: Making Dance with Aufheben’s Isabella Mireles Vik 

Aufheben is a young, project-based assembly of dancers that has been part of Mexican-Norwegian artist  Isabella Mireles Vik’s artistic production since 2023 and has already been professionally endorsed by  Houston art orgs such as Hunter Dance Center, DiverseWorks, and the Texas Biennial 2024. While the artistic bona fides keep rolling in, Vik remains leery of traditional dance company and director titles, as well they might. Aufheben positions itself at the intersection of dance, performance art, and theater,  and espouses such forms as cirque and body performance art. Some of these combinations are well established, their disciplinary silos mostly a matter of tradition. Some are less familiar and less accepted,  which Vik is well aware of. “I work in a kind of fringe area where it’s a mix of my performance art practice and a mix of dance, and that’s not necessarily the most frequently funded thing,” they admit.  “It’s very hard, I think, for people to be convinced of the work I create, or it doesn’t fit within certain parameters of what the NEA wants or what certain institutions want.”  

Vik is wise to be cognizant of funding sources and the comfort level of public audiences. They are an afficionado of the artist Genesis P-Orridge, whose extreme body performance art was rivaled by extreme treatment from art organizations in Britain, where P-Orridge was publicly funded and defunded, supported, shunned, sued, and posthumously acquired by the Tate Collection. Freedom comes at a cost, and Vik has dancers to feed. They are negotiating very practical tensions between creative freedom and administrative responsibility. 

“We had a photo shoot. We’re going to have a campaign. We’re going to raise money for the general operation so dancers can have stipends. That’s the goal. I had to set aside my uncomfortable feelings about a company because, at the end of the day, they still deserve to get paid. They still deserve to have something. So, I’m pushing that discomfort aside to legitimize myself a little bit more, twisting my arm  while I do it, and saying ‘Yes, I’ll do this thing because I care about these people.’”  

The dancers Vik is caring about in the current Aufheben generation – as Vik terms the evolution of the company – are Tuesday Boswell, Lindsay Cortner, Gabrielle De La Rosa, Lillian Glasscock, and Emily  Wang. Vik also dances in her productions.  

From the beginning, Vik’s choices as artistic director are characteristically unconventional. Along with dance auditions, prospective dancers had “these interviews. I took every single person either to my house or out for lunch, and I sat with them for, like, two hours, and I talked to them, and I talked to them, and I talked to them. I asked them about their life, and, naturally, they start talking about themselves, family, everything. That’s where I really falter, I think, because it’s impossible for me to walk a very tight rope of artistic director. I’m the choreographer. I do direct this room. But I also care deeply about the people who are involved. And even if you’re being compensated, and I’m training you, it’s hard for me to have a distant relationship.”

And once dancers were in the company, and the current project was underway, Vik’s leadership remained totally idiosyncratic, and her assembled team is down for it all: “I’m like, ‘Hey, does everyone want to have a body modification crisis and go get piercings on Saturday after the show? And they’re like, ‘Sure. Yeah, let’s all go.’ And I’m like, ‘This is so funny.’ And I took everyone out to the Hill Country.  We were in the studio doing movement and exploring, and I was like, ‘Let’s all go to the Hill Country. I  will just drive us around, and we’ll go find a river, and we can go to a dive bar, a honkytonk.’ I can’t  understand how people can be creative and share so much of themselves and then have so much  professionalism.” 

Vik acknowledges that “the professionalism is there when it’s necessary. When we’re trying to get something done, we’re there. But there’s also a comfortability, because there’s camaraderie there. I  tend to find that mainly in performance artists. I think that in dance it’s a little harder because we’re brought up in this setting where we’re all in competition with each other. I don’t want to be in competition with each other. I want to believe in something bigger than myself, and how do we do that?  We have to be together.” 

While being together in Aufheben has its fun, eccentric times, what Vik expects in the studio is specific and intense. The focus is on making dance that explores a determined structure, but with artistic standards that advance Vik’s proposition that art is emotional sharing, that emotional discovery is perhaps the profoundest way of knowing. And that must be practiced to be performed. “My dancers are not often used to having a space where being emotional is very okay. It’s kind of unprofessional, or it can take away some of our time, but I think that some of the work is just so heavy that I expect [emotional responses]. I also expect them to learn how to cope with it and how to do what they need to do with it, just like they learn to do what they need to do with their bodies. The studio is a space for people to feel things. 

It’s very hard to create when you hyperintellectualize human emotion and consciousness. It becomes really hard to let go of this idea of judgment, these insecurities. But these perceptions of how people are perceiving you will deeply impact the work you can make. When you can let go of that, then I think that’s where you find a really nice place. When you get into a darker place, to an unknown area. 

I believe that artists have to get incredibly uncomfortable and not pick the easy things. Pick the hard things. From that, when you’re finally trying to create this piece or this work, and you’re sitting in that uncomfortability, you learn what it means. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about the people who are involved. And I think that’s really special.”

Vik describes the process of making dance as one of overlapping projects where the searching and researching portion of one arrives during the production process of another. This avoids the sad feeling of finality at the end of a project, but so does the lack of tidy finish to Vik’s work. Rather than the ending of a story or the proof of a thesis, Vik prefers to think of artworks as resonating with possibilities and implications even as they resolve on stage. 

For Vik, at the inception of a work, “something happens, and it’s in my everyday life, and I start to notice it, and I have to follow this trail. I don’t make any sense of it. None of it makes sense in the beginning,  ever, and then eventually everything starts to piece together, and simultaneously it starts to happen. It’s not something I can really control. If I stop doing it, I’ll be in a really bad place. Sounds like a curse. Kind of is like a curse, actually, because I have to do these performances, I have to create these visions because it’s too haunting to not. I have to do it. And I won’t get the answer to what’s bothering me or what’s happening internally, or what‘s happening in the work if I don’t keep going. It’s like finding a thread and pulling and pulling to find out, where does this end? That’s what it feels like to create work.  It’s this necessity to understand more about myself and understand more about this concept. Most of  the concepts are abstract, and painful, and difficult.” 

In the current work, the initial thread was an accidentally challenging interaction that Vik happened to overhear. “My stepmom got a call, and she was having a bad connection with her mom on the phone,  and started calling for her mother. I’d never heard a woman in her 50s call out for their mother like a child before, or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before, but I was listening to my stepmom call for her mom, and she was saying, ‘Ma! Ma!’ And she couldn’t tell if she could hear her or not. To think that at any age you can call out for your mother, and it’s the same voice as a child. Why did it affect me so much to hear that? Why did that make me so emotional, almost existential, in a way? Why did that happen? So  it started with that.” 

Where it went is into a contemporary folk tale that Vik wrote, inspired by ideas of origin, birth and rebirth. It is heavily influenced by a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian katabasis – the story of heavenly goddess of Inanna’s descent to the underworld to confront its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal. Vik’s folk tale involves six sisters, all born simultaneously from a single egg. When one sister dies, the others bury her and then await her transformation, her resurrection, as she experiences a descent that parallels Innana’s, shedding all assets and protections before arriving naked before Death. Gifted, or regifted, life,  or re-life, the sister re-encounters each travail she overcame on her descent, reevaluating the value of her sacrifices in her transformed state. Vik has staging ideas for each of the three sections of the dance leading up to the sisters’ reunification. They believe that a descent story is common to women, and that the sisterhood – however those gendered terms are applied – welcomes the transformed one with relief that the death has been conquered, but without surprise that the journey was necessary or was successfully undertaken. It is a harsh interpretation of coming-of-age, but Vik’s preferred journey is the difficult one, after all.  

What is certain is that the womb and the tomb are both dark places of emergence, that reflection requires a kind of reproduction, and that the origin cycle and whatever need it responds to remains unbroken. Aufheben is still working through their resolved response to Vik’s proposal. The descent portion of the dance has already been performed by Glasscock under the title Oculus when Vik was invited by Jessie Ferguson to share choreography at the Break-In Dance Fest held at MATCH this year. And now, an early section will be performed at Mind The Gap 38 on December 2 at MATCH. Birth focuses on the six sisters’ original birth, before the transformational rebirth that comes in later sections of the work. This birth is nonetheless a mythical and miraculous thing. Vik wants audiences to connect to their own ideas of Mother while viewing the piece. I also suggest that you consider an important element of Vik’s creative process, that of mirrors, and how it is that through reflection and reproduction the original comes to be revealed.  

There is much to anticipate for fans of Aufheben. We will all be in our seats for Mind The Gap, and we will await details of the full, evening-length work in fall 2026. Meanwhile, Vik and their dancers will continue to develop content in their own rich and unique way, resulting in a rich and unique piece for us to devour. 

Vik is optimistic about the position she and the company are in, and with the results, their creative work and her directorship will continue to produce. “I’m always so hungry for so many things. But it’s where I  think I’m at with the project. With Aufheben and everyone involved, I’m super happy. I’m such a sap,  because I’m just like, ‘Is everybody happy?’ I don’t ask that in the studio, obviously, but I always hope everyone’s as happy as I am. And when there’s good days, it’s nice. It’s really nice.” 

Learn more about Aufheben and Isabella Mireles Vik here. 

Get tickets to Mind The Gap 38 here.