Art of Spectra 
Tension

Peter Svenzon has, since he started Art of Spectra in1998, created close to 40 dance performances. His performances are characterised by physical and multifaceted expressions where dance, music, video projections and visual art are linked in an almost filmic flow. Tension is no exception. Art of Spectra does once more submerge into the difficult issues characterising our time. Tension challenges and stretches the laws of physics, and the phenomenal artists include the audience in moments of vibrating fragile closeness and in a vigorously physical presence.

Tension was performed in Falkenberg, Piteå, Luleå, Linköping, Västerås, Göteborg and Vara.

Charlotte Engelkes 
Lohengrin Dream

Charlotte Engelkes continues to explore Richard Wagner’s world of opera– playful, deadly serious and totally bonkers. After the success with Miss Very Wagner and Siegfried – the Very Wagner Hero Hour it’s time for the Lohengrin Dreams– a piece about standing up for your dreams, then giving in to pressure and finally finding yourself asking the one question you have sworn never to ask: “Where do you come from?” With three dancers, two acrobats and one opera singer, Engelkes presents her latest epic performance. The Lohengrin Dreams deals with the struggle between belief and doubt, fairy tale and sink realism, wrapped in wondrous and quaint aesthetic, to new written music and Wagner. Will the swan-borne hero ever show up? And from where? Could popping the question rather connect us than separate us?

Lohengrin Dreams toured during autumn 2019. The piece continued it’s tour to Jönköping, Kalmar, Växjö, Karlshamn and Malmö during spring 2020. 

Siberia/Paloma Muñoz
La Piel Vacía

It is now almost ten years ago that Paloma worked with the Swedish dance company Norrdans and toured the “exotic” Lappland. She has now returned to Sweden with her own performance La Piel Vacia (the empty skin). A performance created for five dancers who, with precision and technical skills, put the somewhat unconventional question – how do we inhabit our skin? The skin can be a happy room but can also be transformed to a prison. Can we get out of our skin? How can we get in touch with the inside? Dressed in skin coloured latex suites they articulate a chorography with great sense of form and dynamics.

La Piel Vacía performed in Vara, Kungsbacka, Uppsala, Halmstad and Jönköping.

Hungry Sharks 
The Sky Above, the Mud Below

The Sky Above, the Mud Below takes the audience on a journey between religious tension and femininity. Grown up in Salzburg with a mother from the catholic part of Kärnten and a father from the Muslim minority of Sri Lanka, Farah Deen lets her personal experiences of a polarized cultural climate be the theme that drains through the performance. The stage floor is covered with Muslim and Christian symbols, which together with the choreography, creates a topology to relate to for both dancer and audience. With her roots in Hip Hop, Freestyle and House, Farah Deen elaborates with her own urban expressions and takes on the movements of the religious rituals in a stage setting created by the artist Golnaz Bashiris’.

The Sky Above, the Mud Below performed in Umeå, Falkenberg and Jönköping. The tour was called off due to the Corona pandemic and the performances in Söderhamn, Västerås and Uppsala was cancelled.

Hagar Malin Hellkvist Sellén 
Better People

Better people takes place in the borderlands where human values are negotiated. The work is a powerful confrontation with our notions of the possible. Over and over again the work keeps asking the serious question of where the boundaries are for what is possible, real and feasible. The choreographer Hagar Malin Hellkvist Sellén/MHS is not interested in stagings but rather making sure, that occurrences happen.

Bättre folk was planned to perform in Växjö, Karlshamn, Stockholm, Umeå, Malmö, Jönköping, Gävle, Ljusdal, Uppsala and Linköping. The tour was cancelled due to the Corona pandemic.

Oona Doherty  
Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus

Just like a documentary dance by Ken Loach, Oona Doherty invites the people we seldom meet on a dance scene. Belfast’s young men, with their violence, vulnerability, burst of fury and their sense of boredom. The dancer Mufasa-Sandrine Lescourant channels in quick sequences aggression, humour, merriment and despair. The social portraits are fragmented and yet meticulously detailed, with sometimes overpowering physics and vocal energy. Gestures, sounds and words are combined in a distinct body language, and twists ideas of masculinity and moral.

Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazaruzwas planned to perform in Malmö, Umeå, Stockholm and Göteborg. The tour was cancelled due to the Corona pandemic.

Furinkaï 
Origami

Satchie Nore is a dancer and choreographer with a background in classical ballet and acrobatics. Silvain Ohl is the designer, the constructor and the poet. They wished to create a performance together. With their mutual fascination for containers and with inspiration from traditional origami technics, their vision was to transform a 12-meter large container from being a freight container to a thing that was a part of creating new relationships. Origami is a performance of dislocation of perspectives, the play of slow modifications between a dancer’s movements and the gigantic freight container.

Origami performed in Skellefteå, Umeå, Vilhelmina, Vara and Jönköping. 

Naïf Productions 
Des Gestes Blancs

Des gestes blancs is a tender, humoristic and thoughtful performance in which Sylvain Bouillet and his 8-year old son Charlie explore their physical and emotional relationship. They experience hinders which can only be mastered by mutual trust. The son follows in his father’s footsteps, and the father imitates the son, a tender improvised play aiming to explore the father’s identity as well as, in poetic terms, reflect the male body’s different ages. This becomes a voyage of discovery for both adults and children.

Des gestes blancs performed in Umeå, Västerås, Karlshamn, Växjö, Göteborg and Gävle. The performance was cancelled in Linköping, Kalmar and Stockholm due to the Corona pandemic. 

Edin Jusuframic 

MEYOUI

Edin Jusuframic has created a performance which deals with the emotional conflict born out of the constant consideration between cooperating or going one’s own way. What does it mean to be selfish or to compromise, and how does this influence the artistic result?

MeYouI is a dance performance with newly composed music by Mario Perez Amigo and two phenomenal dancers sweeping the floor, shaping the inner emotional conflicts which appears when working in a collective.

MeYouI performed in Örebro, Piteå, Linköping, Jönköping, Värnamo and Uppsala. 

Daae/Nordahl 
The Viral Dance

We become more aware of internets rapid spread. An article, dance video, song or an idea can reach millions of people in just a few minutes. This phenomenal is called “being viral” – but how does some things become viral and others do not?

Daae/Nordahl continue to explore with Viral Dance the meaning of being human in a modern society. In this multiplatform project we meet Ludvig and Joanna and their digital subspecies. The Viral Dance is a scenic act, but also an online treat, a collaborative exhibition, a performance installation, or perhaps simply the ultimate viral dance.

The Viral Dance performed in Umeå, Malmö, Vara and Västerås. 

Susanna Leinonen Company 
Nasty

Nasty is a feministic statement roaring out women’s right for independence. Focusing on anticipations, limitations and attacks aimed at our bodies, we will experience an unvarnished depiction of our world. A world where malice hides in the community structures – but also within ourselves.

The performance explores women’s bodies which are constantly looked upon as objects, how they are defined and how the female body is shaped by contradictory demands and expectations. Leinonen’s creations are always identified by exact and precise movements. In Nasty the rigorously trained physical body becomes a machine, stretching, bending and cracking in order to reach its full potentials. But the question remains: who has the right to define this potential?

Nasty performed in Umeå, Göteborg, Västerås, Kungsbacka, Luleå and Vara. The performance was cancelled in Uddevalla due to the Corona pandemic. 

Gunilla Heilborn/Pieter Ampe 
Give it Some Time

As a child Pieter used to dance at family parties. Gunilla as a teenager at the disco Bobbadilla in Stockholm. Pieter felt restless, occupied with the struggle, intimacy and sexual exploration. Gunilla obsessed with reading, walking and everything concerning Russia. Pieter uses his own life, love and struggle as a base for his artistic work. Gunilla has always preferred to use external saurces as inspirations for her projects.

Now Pieter and Gunilla will meet on stage in a performance which starts from themselves, but which most likely will deal with politeness, old paintings, ageing, feelings of failure and the impossible notion of time.

Give it Some Time performed in Stockholm, Malmö, Karlshamn, Umeå, Falkenberg and Växjö.