Conspiracy Ceremony – HYPERSONIC STATES

SYNOPSIS

The 5 dancers appear one by one on the stage. walking forth and back to their chairs on the first row of the audience seats throughout the performance. Singularly or in a constellation with each other they embody and live out isolated full body states.Ceremonially the states and bodies in the performance are juxtaposed with the audiences and each other. Activating multiple types of analytical thought processes through the compositional proposition, as well as offering simultaneously a full physically fellt experience for the audience.The are dancers stuck in their internal full body states, right in front of your eyes, which violently separates them from you as an audience. Never the less their physicality oozes a certain energetic field that sucks you in and vibrates in your own body.

This ceremonial performance makes visible the interconnectedness of our tissues, the connective tissue dialogs that happen between people in the space between us. And simultaneously the subjective autonomous private emotional and personal experience of each of each one of us. The interlinked singular and joint experience of us together in the space is a mirror of our everyday life. Highlighting questions regarding what is visible from an inner experience and what will never be seen or communicated to the outside from our inner subjective experience field.

In this latest work by Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, intricate states channelling various energies and sentiments without filters, unite in a symphony of pathologies originating in the private psychological and emotional body. Transferring itself into the bodies of the audience as they meet the performers with full intensity, the set up allows the viewer to experience these full body HYPERSTATES together with the dancers. The language of the states carries a force that is marked by an infinite presence that reveals, as well as kick starts an active process within the body of the viewer. Putting these states on display offer us the opportunity to together explore and confront the inner landscape of the de-bordered body, as well as creating a corporeal language that portraits and serves as a doorway into an alternative parallel reality. In Conspiracy Ceremony – HYPERSONIC STATES, Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and her long-term artistic associates continue their in-depth research into a methodology that accesses psychological, physiological and emotional sub-worlds. Since 2010 she has been developing a new genre of performative body language, and an original working method that directly informs her creative outcomes.

CAST & CREDITS

Direction, choreography, concept, stage, costumes
Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir

Choreography/performing
Johanna Chemnitz, Catherine Jodoin, Laura Siegmund, Marie Topp, Suet-Wan Tsang

Music
Peter Rehberg

Lighting
Martin Beeretz

Dramaturgical Consultants
Zeina Hanna, Richard Aslan

Production Management
Elena Krüskemper

Photo
Jeannette Ginslov

Co-production and funding
Funded by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Abteilung Kultur, LÓKAL – Performing Arts Reykjavík, Sophiensaele Berlin.
With support by the Arts Council of Norway and the City of Reykjavík

Distribution
Something Great, www.somethinggreat.de

REVIEW

“The Berlin-based Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir works with extreme consistency, so that it almost becomes a manner…The conspiracy suggested in the title is ambiguous in this symphonic act for an ensemble of black-clad figures whose tentative movements affect the entire space. They develop a physical concentration on the threshold between dreaming and waking that entirely absorbs us.”

Anna Angstrom, Svenska Dagbladet

Internal emergencies

And it is true that something incredible happens in this “conspiratorial ceremony” in which Gudjónsdóttir involves five dancers, most often separately. Little movement, no interaction or claim of communication with the space or the public. The hyper-state is an internal affair. And yet …No one, probably, has ever been so successful in rhyming with a state of choreographic urgency. Many contemporary choreographers have, however, got down to work. Without much result. Feeling what is going on within the body or mind of an interpreter usually requires the viewer to have an acute divining ability.

The Conspiracy Ceremony changes the game. With her research on myofascial release and her personal approach to somatic practices, Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir has opened doors to the invisible and buried body memory. The performers manage, with a minimum of gestures, to create energetic fields that link their bodily presence to very powerful and almost palpable mental ones.

Date: 22/05/2018, Thomas Hahn • dansercanalhistorique.fr