Performance pieces
I explore performance and performative expressions through dance, through body, movement and being. Through connecting a room of people in a moment. It is the body that takes the space, bears the context and shares expression. Only time is witness. Below is a selection of performances that managed to be captured by skilled photographers. These will have to act as examples, as the performances I've given that did not manage to get captured are many more.
In the spring of 2020 I was offered the opportunity to participate in Anna-Kajsa Wikströms project Spring Water, a project that, through the making of craft, explores the relationship between humans and water. My role was to carry a yoke of ice by a spring in Nacka, and thereby embody some of the thoughts of the artist.
The images were captured during a cold and sunny day in April by photographer James Dmitre Johansson. The yoke was melting slowly on my shoulders, dripping down on my back, running down my arms. The feet went numb, the neck and back too. The yoke chilled the blood through my skin and I could feel the cold inside the skull, in the hands. I took deep breaths. The birds sang.
The whole body was shaped by the cold, witnessed the tool with which we've carried our water for millenia. I was shaped, stiffened, bent – I was directed. A soft human shape, more than half made up of water; my survival. I follow, breathe, and carry.
I live.
In other times I fall into the dark and the beast, into the cave before dawn. The bones rattle against my chest, the body is still but tense. It is the gaze that speaks, opens a presence. Who will you be, when we meet?
I claim the room through movement and dance, I talk to the floor, walls, surfaces and people. I myself become a surface, ready to tumble. I take with me pieces of others and return pieces of me.
Whenever I use tools in my performances, it is usually ropes. During the opening of the photo exhibition RAWmotions I performed a piece where I was ”born” from the ropes.
On me was a projection of a butterfly pupa slowly maturing in its cocoon. I woke up in the ropes, hanging from a bamboo beam and to the sound and rise of the music I was more and more released, more and more free and alive until – I reached the floor. Just as the life of a butterfly is short, so too this. I fell back; into sleep, stillness, and the end.
Performing with ropes as a medium for expression is also not something that I always do alone.
In October of 2019 me, Johanna Hajnos and Saara Rei were invited to perform at an opening for the photo exhibition Lost in (m)orbital thoughts in Kummelholmen, Stockholm. Inside of big, grey ”bodybags” we found movement, the ropes and each other, in our enlightened island inside the otherwise dark space.
