PERVASIVE MAGNETIC STIMULI

Synopsis & reviews

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. – C G Jung

In this performance work for 3 dancers, Guðjónsdóttir opens up a new and unexplored realm of her choreographic methodology and deepens her distinctive and innovative performance aesthetic even further.

PERVASIVE MAGNETIC STIMULI serves as a doorway into the sub- and unconscious. Populated by instincts and archetypes, C G Jung saw the Collective Unconscious as an unconscious field that transcends the personal psyche and having a physical home localised anatomically in the subcortical centres, the cerebellum and the spinal cord. The onstage spectacle and its supporting methodologies represent a realm where appearances and consciously motivated action are not the lived reality of our lives. Forces equally ancient as current and far greater than all of us are explored through a language which is marked by an infinite presence that reveals and pervades its environment in the same moment. Turning the performance into a vessel of vibrating energetic communication as well as possibly an intensive meditation experience.

Concept- choreography- direction: Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir/performers/choreogrpahy: Johanna Chemnitz, Laura Siegmund, Suet-Wan Tsang/music: Peter Rehberg/costumes & set design: Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir/light design: Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and Martin Beeretz/production management: Elena Krüskemper/Lokal/ Photos: Zeina Hanna, Ev Schmidhuber/International/Distribution: Something Great/Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin. Coproduction: Inkonst Malmö, WP Zimmer Antwerpen, SOPHIENSAELE.

Reviews

As I searched for images meanings and content to hang on to, I was left adrift, slowly streaming away from my query, my desire and expectation to find something beneath the surface. This piece becomes a canvas, not a white canvas, but a canvas of fields and energies which set the conditions for a journey to unfold…But this is not just any canvas. As it shapeshifts, Pervasive Magnetic Stimuli allows itself to be what it says it will be: pervasive. Not invasive, but pervasive. My humble advice: Let it do what it has to do. And if you can’t, it most probably will do what it has to do anyway. How or when? That’s for no one to know and each to find out. The collective unconscious has been conjured, but have no fear, we are all here: witnessing, calling, dreaming.

Chris Gylee, International Notice 1rst. november 2018, http://internationalnotice.org

I wonder: Whose unconscious is being shown to me as I melt into my chair and pour over the stage of Pervasive Magnetic Stimuli? The choreographer’s? The dancers’? The person’s sitting next to me? My own? What projections am I throwing into this cave?…I am addressed, but I cannot access the faces that I see: they are elsewhere, intoxicated by an energy I cannot touch, an energy I merely savour through the glossy, trance induced look in their eyes…And then I realize: I am being taken. We are being taken. Taken under. We are being taken under as Pervasive Magnetic Stimuli break the mirror, and for a split second allow us to have a glimpse at what lies beneath the surface of our expectations.

Mariana Nobre Viera, International Notice 1rst. november 2018, http:// internationalnotice.org