Looking for an answer in court.
Looking for an answer in an egg.
Do you want to adopt or abort?
Where are you going to hide?
Or will you hang your honors on a peg?
Are you winning a popular sport or taken for a ride?
A groom but never a bride.
But you are, of course, a teenage girl
on a horse looking for a warm hairy friend
on whom you may depend
maybe spend the night
in dark and cold
while you hold the riding crop
and the reins without stop or stains.
Or do you win the race by the fireplace in soot and flame?
You will not be the same but go up in smoke.
Your only life was a joke.
GRAFFITI
Drawing inside my head
a scruffy cave the prisonwall of life
fine arts for all. The bisons call.
Hanging from a tunnel ceiling.
No chandeliers.
My feeling is some gangs have been here.
Here Brenda, Roy, June, Mr Bush and Alice!
I think it stinks.
Drawing a cunt or phallus
I can connect you with most anything.
Dismembered tots for oil!
Green seaweed in his throat. Fine art, illegal immigrants on any smuggler's boat.
Blood in the pants. Bodies and food will spoil.
No opening or grants. Running like hell from my piece. I didn't do it! I didn't see!
Putting some white on a sponge on a pole like offering Christ his last drink.
Art Interview: Can you describe in detail what you actually do because it would be a little difficult for people reading a magazine to visualize it.
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, we combine visual art with verbal art and acrobatics. We have a group now that basically consists of 3 people; Steve, Mark and I and we have an outer circle of people who also appear with us here in Atlanta. We take my poetry, which I recite, and we illustrate it and enhance it with acrobatics to make a visual still life.
Steve Seaberg: It's like how an illustrator illustrates a poem in a book or how William Blake wrote his own poetry and illustrated it as well. There are all sorts of techniques for doing that. We use 3 dimensional space for our illustration. The poetry, instead of being printed, is actually read by Rönnog so it is a real event and we then perform the illustrations for the poem, which often are acrobatic but not necessarily so. Sometimes we simply pose in positions that seem related to or illustrative of the poem. Her poetry is often divided into verses and each verse we do with different poses. There might be three, four, five, verses to an entire poem. So it's a series of tableaus. Sometimes it might seem like we are imitating art but we're not. We're composing the work ourselves but some of the poses of course are comments on or are taken from or inspired by sculpture going back in the whole history of art. We comment upon things that people do, ways of relating to each other in space. Some are more complicated acrobatically and take quite a bit of training and practice to do. Our goal is to create an image. I guess it is something like talking sculpture. But we have also had people who work with us who do movements. Recently we worked with some dancers.
Rönnog Seaberg: And we also add music quite often with live instruments.
Steve Seaberg: A couple of times we have done this with musicians. They sort of softly improvise while we read the poetry. That is always wonderful, it's lots of fun to do.
Art Interview: Let me drop back and ask you a bit about your educations and your backgrounds. Did any of you study poetry or visual arts at a university?
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, I studied literature. I graduated from the University of Uppsala in Sweden and one of my subjects was literature. I've also read a lot of course and I've taught poetry from kindergarten up to college level.
Steve Seaberg: You've been writing poetry since you were in your teens...
Rönnog Seaberg: No, since I was four.
Steve Seaberg: Ok.
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, we wrote poetry in my family and it was a natural thing. I've always enjoyed it. But I've certainly also written prose books. I have published books in Swedish. I started when I was in high school and published my first story. Now I write mostly poetry but I've done cultural journalism, novels and all sorts of things, mostly in Swedish. But my poetry is mostly in English.
Art Interview: English is your second language?
Rönnog Seaberg: Yes, I grew up in Sweden.
Art Interview: Steve, did you study art?
Steve Seaberg: Yes. My mother was an artist so one could say I started studying informally ever since I could watch her draw. She was an illustrator actually and I find it interesting that I am now illustrating poetry 3 dimensionally 60 years later. I went to college and majored in art and art history. After that I taught studio art and art history for years but I was mostly a working artist and after a while I stopped teaching and just did my art. I've been doing that for many years. I started with making prints, I've painted, I've made sculptures and I've done performance art. This is sort of a new gestation of my art with Rönnog and I coming together in one thing. I was also a gymnast at college and during my high school years,
Steve Seaberg illustration of a pose Ink on Paper
which never seemed to have much to do with art except that I used to make pictures of myself on the parallel bars. But now I have combined art and acrobatics and I look at it as a visual art form rather than a sport. I still draw these pictures in Rönnog's poetry books to illustrate what the pose should look like. So I am still studying the human figure so to speak. I am constantly concerned with proportion and structure, trying not only to figure out what and how we are going to do our poses but also I try to get the picture right. When you're doing acrobatics you realize that it's the shape of the body and its relation to another bodies that is the important thing. How they look together is paramount. It is not fair making a leg extra long in drawing if it doesn't reach in real life. Picasso can do that, artists can do that - I did that, but that's not going to work when we actually do the pose. So I am constantly working on trying to get it right.
Art Interview: What university did you attend?
Steve Seaberg: Northwestern University, which is in Evanston, Illinois right next to Chicago. But I taught art at Rutgers State University in New Jersey and Clark University in Atlanta.
Steve Seaberg Self Portrait 1974
Acrylic on Canvas
Art Interview: And at one point you stopped teaching and lived from being a fine artist?
Steve Seaberg: Yes.
Art Interview: Were you working as a painter?
Steve Seaberg: No, I was doing everything, actually. I stopped teaching at Clark and I got a job at an experimental multimedia art center. I would teach some classes every day but mostly I was doing my own art.
Art Interview: What year was that?
Steve Seaberg: This was between 1977 and 1979. I was influenced by the fact that it was a multidiscipline art center; we had dancers and musicians practicing and performing all the time. So I would take my drawing tablet and go down and draw pictures of the dancers while they practiced. I was in a way preparing for what I do now. I was working on the human body in action.
Mark Wolfe: I have two degrees in engineering from Georgia Tech and I've lived in Georgia for 27 years. Even though Steve and Rönnog have been here that long I had no idea who they were. After 10 years of engineering I decided I didn't really like it and I started looking for other things to do. First I started supporting artists and then I decided to do some of my own stuff, which was photography. I did black and white photography professionally for 9 years but I was getting tired and I went looking for something new to do to express myself. I ended up at an artist retreat taking photographs when I saw the Seabergs perform their act and immediately fell in love with what they were doing. I thought that I could do what they were doing but I never thought to ask them about it. We tried to get together for some other reasons and as I remember Steve just asked me if I would like to do some acrobatics and the next thing I knew I was participating.
Art Interview: Did you have any experience doing acrobatics before that?
Mark Wolfe: No, not really. I've been an athlete for a long time. I actually did study some exercise science at the master's level in the early 90s, but I'm just very sporty. I played golf, soccer, football and baseball when I was younger. But I was never really big enough. When I was young I was very small, so I never could participate with the kids that were growing rapidly. Actually, now I'm basically in the best shape of my life.
Art Interview: When did this combination of poetry and acrobatics start?
Rönnog Seaberg: It started about the same time as the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996. We felt a frustration that the games are very exclusive and something was wrong with the competitive aspect of the games. The people who were creative thought something was wrong with idolizing exclusivity and competition. We didn't want to compete and we wanted to work with other people. We wanted to mix the sexes, generation, race and nationality without competing. We wanted to develop physical things together rather than see who was the best. There was a poetry event where the Atlanta poets read from the rooftops during the Olympics. We did this partly to illustrate how left out the Atlanta poets were and while we did that Steve and I got a little you know... it was a long time, it was hot on the roof, so we started to do acrobatic movements so the people who couldn't hear us could at least see us. That was sort of the beginning, although I had taken part in performance art for years before that. We are close to the visual artists and we used to have performance parties and do physically difficult things - but loosely, not acrobatic poetry. I find that acrobatic poetry is a way of quickly reading and publishing recent work rather than going to the book publishers, which can take years and things are old when they get out there. I've published numerous books but I really prefer to perform it.
Steve Seaberg & Rönnog Seaberg Death 2002
Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta
DEATH
Play golf while waiting for death
playing possum or bingo dance or sing or
hold your breath for
ever.
Do you think we are playing with death
whatever we do
raising children, selling things
or going to school?
Even when we think
we are challenging
death who doesn't do anything.
Nor do we think it will do more harm
to lose a limb, a kidney, an arm
compared to losing
everything.
Freezing
or burning in hell
when you can't see,
feel, or smell.
Steve Seaberg: You wrote a poem about the Tsunami shortly after it happened which we have performed a lot since then, including in Sweden where there were a lot of victims. So you're able to write about topical matters and get the work for the public much quicker than you would, as you point out, in a published collection of poetry.
Rönnog Seaberg: Yeah, it is a bit like being a songwriter.
Steve Seaberg: Yeah.
Art Interview: I assume that you're not living off of this art; I can't imagine how you could make career out of doing free performance art. But both of you are in retirement age, correct?
Steve Seaberg: Some people make a lot of money as artists and others show their art and run like hell. Rönnog and I are still running. Mark will have to speak for himself.
Rönnog Seaberg: What you say is certainly true.
Art Interview: Mark, are you still working as an engineer?
Mark Wolfe: No, I actually work as a photographer for the federal government documenting disaster work when there is a major hurricane, flood or tornado. I document the recovery efforts for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of the information given to the public. So that comes and goes based on a disaster happening. I have lots of free time when I'm not working. I basically live a double life - one which is a relaxed life at home, and a very hard work life when I am out there working.
Art Interview: So your work comes in spurts and is very intensive?
Mark Wolfe: Yeah, we work easily 12 hours a day, 7 days a week at the beginning of a disaster, which might last 2 to 4 weeks. It slows down a little bit after that but it's very intensive.
Art Interview: Has your profession had any influence on the poetry or on the performances that you are doing?
Steve Seaberg &
Rönnog Seaberg Tunnel of Transformation I 2005
Mark Wolfe: I don't really think my profession has an influence, no. I mean, I do photograph Steve and Rönnog at times doing things. We did a performance in Freedom Park, which has a lot of sculptures in it this summer and I photographed them performing with the sculpture but I wouldn't say that influences the performances or the poetry.
Rönnog Seaberg: Can I interrupt here; because I think that your ability to see and catch pictures has been extremely important in our work together because you understand what a picture is. You can compose a picture.
Mark Wolfe: Well, I will say that I am a very visual person. I think that's true. That may help Rönnog, Steve and me create the designs. So maybe not my profession as such but who I am has had an influence.
Steve Seaberg: Well, I would like to add that the fact that you are an engineer also helps. The poses that we create have a lot to do with engineering balance and structure. Not only is Mark an engineer, but two other people who are also engineers who graduated from Georgia Tech have been working with us for the last year. So I think that there is a relationship between engineering and what we do.
Art Interview: Do you mainly do performances in art galleries or do you have other spaces where you perform?
Mark Wolfe: We've done them in everything from art galleries to small theater venues to outside in open spaces.
Rönnog Seaberg: Cafés and gyms.
Mark Wolfe: Just about anywhere people meet. We have even done them in bars, which is not recommended. We do them wherever the ground is level enough.
Art Interview: How do you come up with your poses? Is this a joint effort?
Steve Seaberg: It used to be just me, but it has become a joint effort now. Rönnog usually writes the poem first, although her poems have also been influenced by what we do. For example, she used to write rather long verses, where we had to hold in position for quite a while, now she writes shorter verses. She knows that we're going to act this out so that influences what she writes and the way she writes about subjects. Then I think - the way I started was thinking about how could I illustrate her poetry. There are various ways. You can do something that is a literal illustration; you're trying to act out what she says. Or you do something that's the opposite of it. Or you just do something abstract. William Blake often illustrated very upbeat poems with very dark moody illustrations and vice versa. But anyway, that's how I would think. It would be a little like making up a dance, you think how do we move to the next position and whether or not all the poses hang together like a work of art. As more people joined us, like Mark, they input their ideas too. Sometimes we find that we have to improvise to make things work and sometimes we think of things that can't be done so then we have to figure out how to do something else and so forth. So it is becoming more and more a group effort.
Mark Wolfe: One thing that I really like about it is the collaborative process as opposed to photography, where I am all on my own. It is wonderful to work with somebody else and as we do these things sometimes one person has an idea, but they can't get there from where they are starting. Then the other people will chime in and suggest another way of doing something similarly and how to figure it out. That's always been enjoyable: achieving the final pose or whatever in a collaborative way.
Art Interview: Are the poses that you do physically difficult?
Rönnog Seaberg: (Laughs) Excuse me for laughing. Some are.
Art Interview: Two of you are in advanced age. How old are you guys?
Rönnog Seaberg: I'm 72 and a half.
Steve Seaberg: 74.
Mark Wolfe: I'm 44.
Steve Seaberg: A kid. (Laughs) Most of the other people that we work with are in their 20s, so we have a broad range of ages.
Art Interview: Most people wouldn't think of people in their 70s doing acrobatics, especially not some of the poses which I've seen you doing; it's quite remarkable.
Mark Wolfe: You should give these guys hug and feel the muscles rippling through their backs and chests.
Steve Seaberg, Rönnog Seaberg & Mark Wolfe
Steve Seaberg: Well, we get like that because of doing these things. People say, oh, do you do yoga and we say, no we do this. This is how we get strong: picking each other up. Of course, we have to practice every day doing it. It is rather rigorous. But of course we like to do it.
Rönnog Seaberg: I also do back exercises just about every day because I have to have a healthy back. But I didn't start with acrobatics until I was 64 or something. That was the beginning of a new life for me.
Mark Wolfe: I personally do a lot of biking and I do a lot of pull-ups and push-ups. But part of the thing is that it is hard and we are making harder and harder poses all the time. It's a kind of challenge for us both physically and artistically.
Steve Seaberg: Yes, we know other acrobats in Sweden, for instance, and when we were there we worked out with them several times and we were in their show. We learned from them and they even learned from us. That is what we are trying to do, it's sort of what the world acrobats are trying to do, they are all working together; they're all working in the same scene. So, we do learn from other people how to do what we weren't able to do by ourselves. We have quite a network of people that we keep in contact with on the techniques.
Art Interview: Do you find that technique is very important as opposed to just using brute strength?
Steve Seaberg: Oh, absolutely, none of us are THAT strong! It's all in balance of course. For example, when you are picking somebody up above your head if they push at the same time you do, it makes it twice as easy and suddenly they are in position. This has a lot to do with trust. A person who doesn't trust you is going to weigh or seem to you to weigh twice as much as they really do. But once you begin - and this goes back to the subject of co-operation, which is really important - we really have to trust each other. If I worry about Mark's feet slipping on my back, I would never be able to pick Rönnog up above my head at the same time. I just have to say to myself: He's going to do it. To do a handstand or a head and shoulders stand on somebody else, you just say to yourself they are going to hold it and I'm going to do my part. But of course, to build up this trust takes a while. It takes months to be able to be sure the other person is really capable of doing their part. So when we get new people we immediately start doing things with them that just have to do with building up that trust.
Mark Wolfe: Another thing, on the trust issue: They trust me to hold them up. For my part, I trust Rönnog completely. I know what she's going to write is going to reflect not my view but that I'm going to agree with it. I've never been worried about what she was writing because I know that I will agree with almost everything she says.
Steve Seaberg: That is a good point. I mean, what if she were to suddenly praise president Bush while we were holding each other up?
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, that's not me...
Steve Seaberg: That would really shake our whole structure.
Art Interview: I'm sure that all of you would fall down if she did that.
Rönnog Seaberg: We also have to teach new people about understanding.
Steve Seaberg: Yes, and we teach them to understand what they're doing, that's right. This collaboration and trust is really one of the basic ingredients of what we do. When I was a gymnast we were a team; but we never did anything together. We just got up one at a time and did our tricks and got our scores. Now it's so much fun to get up and do something with a bunch of other people. It's much more fun than doing it alone and it's so different from a lot of other contact sports where people are knocking each other down and tackling each other, or knocking each other in the face like in boxing. And even the martial arts, which are very popular, now are still basically about mayhem, even though they focus on self-defense. When we come into contact with each other it's a touch of trust. I mean, we hold on to the other person because we trust them and want to do something positive.
Mark Wolfe: When I was younger I had an intuitive sense that co-operation would go a lot further than competition. But especially here in the United States, the notion of cooperation is precluded in our lives, in our popular culture and general stereotypic notions. So when I ran into Steve and Rönnog it was obvious to me that these were people who have the same type of thoughts that I do.
Steve Seaberg: Yes, and nobody is really the star in this. Somebody is on the top very often, which is often Rönnog because she is lighter but without the rest of us that could never occur. There is never or hardly ever a place where it doesn't take all of us to do what we're doing and that's very exciting.
Steve Seaberg, Rönnog Seaberg, Mark Wolfe and 2 unknown. Studiefrämjandet, Ekeby bruk
Uppsala, Sweden 2005
Mark Wolfe: In general, acrobatics is just a great metaphor for supporting one another and working together.
Art Interview: Is this metaphor reflected in the poetry as well? Does the poetry follow a theme?
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, I'll answer that question. As a poet I usually start with some idea; it could be political or religious or just about life or death. I guess we have certain ideas that we share and believe in and I show those in the poetry but when I write poetry I'm also concerned with words sounding good next to each other and what they mean and their double meanings and I think about rhymes and things like that. I really like poetry a lot because there is so much word play and double understandings that happens rather unconsciously while I write. It wouldn't be good poetry if it didn't have that but I have a lot of experience and I've read a lot and I rely upon that when write.
Steve Seaberg: We can't use any equipment when we perform. We're really low tech. We can't use microphones, even though people keep people keep trying to stick them on Rönnog. Everything would get tangled up no matter how small they were. Our clothes have to be really tight because a thumb could get caught in somebody's waistband. There are some of the damndest things that can happen
Rönnog Seaberg: And when we are naked...
Steve Seaberg, Rönnog Seaberg, & Mark Wolfe Performance at Gallery Twenty-four, Berlin, Germany 2005
Photo by Ina Lenzner
Steve Seaberg: Yes, if you are naked where do you put electronics? So, we often appear on stages that are completely filled with the electronic junk of the modern musical age and Rönnog will say to everybody: You have to move close because I am not going to use microphones. And then people do; they listen and they hear it all. It's just amazing that we are able to do this even outside. The idea of using any sort of enhancements would be contrary to our beliefs. Certainly we need lights to be seen, but we are a little bit of a movement in the opposite direction to the electronic art scene.
Art Interview: How often do you write poetry, Rönnog? Is it a daily process?
Rönnog Seaberg: No, I write maybe 2 or 3 poems a month and sometimes I write other things than poetry. In the past I have written book reviews and articles for publications here and there and I'll do a reading here and there. But a poem takes a long time to develop from the moment I first write it down to when we have gathered the group and have practiced it well enough that it makes sense. It takes weeks, although we have done it quicker in certain cases. It takes a little while. I write poetry down when ever it comes to me.
Mark Wolfe: And I know from experience that sometimes it doesn't take long at all. There was one time I was out of town working and I felt that the people there were mistreating me. I wrote an e-mail to Rönnog asking why people don't have integrity and two hours later came back this poem called "integrity". She said I inspired her somehow to write that.
Rönnog Seaberg: Well, of course after a long life of writing I do have things ready to go when they have to go. I have experience by now; when I was young I sometimes wondered what to write about - things like that. That comes with practice.
Art Interview: You're practicing the physical aspects of your performance on a daily basis, is that correct?
Rönnog Seaberg: Yeah, pretty much. Sometimes, when we are traveling, we don't have a place to practice. You have to have a place that is big enough and safe enough to do it in, but here at home we practice every day. At least Steve and I do.
Art Interview: How long do you practice a day?
Rönnog Seaberg: We often cut it into two or three practices. If we have other people from the group coming over that would mean more practice. Steve and I usually do something alone every morning.
Steve Seaberg: With a group practice it can last up to an hour or more depending on how many people are there.
Art Interview: Sometimes you perform in the nude. How did that start?
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Rönnog Seaberg, mother, poet, author and performance artist died at home on
Wednesday, October 17, 2007.
With her husband of 50 years, Ms. Seaberg created a new art form: acrobatic poetry. It was the physical expression of a life that embraced the world, relied on strong family support and always broke conventions.
Born in Sweden, Ms. Seaberg earned degrees in literature and religion from the University of Uppsala. She met her Chicago-born husband while he was visiting relatives in her native country. The couple moved to Spain, wed in Morocco and vowed to live life as artists in America. They moved to Atlanta, Georgia, USA in 1970.
This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Steve seaber, Rönnog Seaberg and Mark Wolfe on July, 29 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and Atlanta, Georgia, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
hat do you get when you take a 70 year-old couple and combined them with poetry, acrobatics and nudity? You get the Seaberg Acrobatic Poetry group.
