MOVEMENT ONLY EXISTS FOR A MOMENT: IN CONVERSATION WITH MAX COOKWARD
Max Cookward’s practice develops through accumulation and drift, moving between choreography, filmmaking, and performance without hierarchy, treating each form as a temporary vessel. Extremes remain central: staged collaborations with musicians and fashion houses on one side, solitary experiments in landscape on the other. Movement is allowed to exist only briefly, collapsing as it appears, while film holds onto fragments. What emerges is a body of work that holds performance at its threshold, always slipping between presence and aftermath. In this conversation, we talk about extremes, impermanence, collaboration, and the rituals that keep his practice alive.
You move between forms. Choreography, filmmaking, live performance. What anchors your practice across disciplines? Do you think of yourself as more of a mover who films, or a filmmaker who moves?
I’ve always felt a healthy disconnect from identifying with any particular medium. I’ve never really identified as a ‘dancer’. Rather I just use dance as a medium to express something more important to me. I think my purpose on this earth is to explore embodiment, creation, freedom and connection and I enjoy drifting between different mediums to express these pillars of my purpose. I thrive when working without structure and routine, and I find that having multiple avenues to express myself helps me stay alive and engaged with what is ultimately most important to me: being in process.
From Jean Paul Gaultier’s theatrical excess to site-specific solos in volcanic landscapes, your work flows between high fashion and elemental space. What draws you to that range? Is there a different kind of truth that emerges when movement happens outside traditional stages?
I enjoy extremes. The city, the desert. Maximalism, minimalism. People, solitude. I guess I’m just attracted to what lives on the edges of normalcy. I am repelled by creative suburbs, where taste and ideas are watered down, where people and ideas conform and where practicality wins. I want to either be running around in LES, NYC, with my VHS camcorder, capturing chaos and life, or in complete solitude by a volcano, naked. By living and experiencing my living body only in these extremes, I can find my kind of balance. A balance where I can engage with the breadth of humanity and also the power of nature and let it alchemise in my physical being.
"Movement only exists for a moment. Like breath, it is alive but it never arrives into something solid."
Your performances often touch on themes of transformation, impermanence, wildness. What is it about those states of flux that captivates you? And how do you choreograph for something that’s meant to shift, dissolve, or disappear?
Movement only exists for a moment. Like breath, it is alive but it never arrives into something solid. In its nature, it asks you to accept the impermanence of itself. My performances are there to live and die. And I enjoy how powerless that leaves me as a creative. At the same time, I think my filmmaking practice serves as a way to archive and document these fleeting moments. I enjoy the combination of movement and film as it allows me to archive brief moments of magic.
Whether you’re dancing onstage for FKA Twigs or directing in solitude, there’s always a sense of longing, intimacy, and rupture in your work. What emotional terrain are you most drawn to? What questions keep showing up in your body?
I’m drawn to radical honesty. I want my work to be an image of truth to inspire people to live more authentically and with more love and liberation. I want my work to give people permission to go and live out their truth. To be alive and feel the emotional extremes of life. To continue to play and be children.
Many of your projects seem to be about world-making: temporary, physical, cinematic worlds that bend time and place. What’s your process for building those spaces? Do they emerge from research, from improvisation, from instinct?
My process is always collaborative. Whether it’s collaborating with people, with music, with space, with sound or anything. I always think I’m in conversation with something and I must listen sensitively to whatever those other elements are.
A lot of my process is also built on intuition. Part of my core must be aligned with why I’m doing something; otherwise, it feels futile, and I struggle to find motivation. I spent a lot of my years as a child and teenager in very rigorous training to be a dancer. During those years, I often wasn’t motivated from a pure place, and it takes a toll over time. It’s essential now that anything I do has to fit some sort of alignment with my higher purpose so that I can stay authentically motivated.
You’ve developed and led Movement Meditation workshops across continents. How has teaching shaped your own relationship to embodiment? And what does a meditative rave mean to you?
Teaching allows me to develop the rituals that are important to me. Every time I teach, I am asked to share what is important to me in that moment of my life. It forces me to organise my thoughts and practices into a concise deliverable workshop that encompasses my embodiment ideals. It helps me channel my inner world outward to others.
Meditative raving to me is that feeling when you’re in the club, or studio or wherever, and you are stuck in a repetitive movement that is continually changing and developing and you're observing the beautifully delicious sensory journey of that repetition. You’re able to step out of the driving seat of your body and observe yourself falling into the rhythm of the music and let it hold you in a meditative state where you can find moments of transcendence.
"I want my work to give people permission to live out their truth. To be alive and feel the emotional extremes of life. To continue to play and be children."
In your collaborations with fashion brands, musicians, and choreographers you seem to act as a translator between vision and motion. What makes a collaboration feel deep or generative for you?
Successful collaboration happens when you suspend expectations and allow yourself to fall into a deep trust with that person. Magic is often created in moments of serendipity and surrender. To find this magic, it is essential that I truly listen to my collaborators and abandon my agenda.
I also think successful collaboration often mirrors the stages of a romantic relationship. The initial curiosity and desire, the uncovering of each other's creative world, the mystery, the intimacy, and then the deep trust and connection and support that follow. My collaborators are my lovers in a kind of platonic way and I find the process of creativity with people very intimate and moving.
Queerness, and resilience seem to run through your work both visually and in terms of feeling. How do you think about queerness as a movement language?
I think what links Queerness and movement to each other is that they are both about the liberated body. In order to move you have to liberate yourself, and the same is true for queerness.
Your body is often your own instrument, archive, and tool. How do you care for it, physically, emotionally, ritually in the face of so much output and travel?
I’m still trying to understand how to take care of myself. Touring is exhausting. Back to earlier when I mentioned extremes, my work is very extreme. I’m often on stage in front of thousands of people multiple times a week, so it’s essential to spend time in complete solitude and nature. My self-care looks like meditation, sleep, and walking. But after a few days of solitude, I’m always ready again to face the crowds again and document the chaos and joy of tour life.
"Magic is often created in moments of serendipity and surrender."
Finally, what’s calling to you next? Is there a project, a place, or a form you haven’t yet touched but feel magnetically pulled toward?
I’ve been manifesting a lot of beautiful things these past months and I have some very exciting projects I’m working on. The universe is showering me with some precious gifts right now that I’m soaking up with gratitude and love. Beyond this year, I want to continue my film-making journey more, maybe spend some time in South America. Keep being human, not working too hard, and staying in flow.
