It is not what you see, but how you see and when you can't see. The gaps filled with imagination, the sensations storming and informing you, the imprints you hold on to, the drifting of your attention.
A loose thread, a missing link, a connection detached and rewired. Warped, then messed up, to get lost in yet another fabrication. Something moves there, suspended in a near distance.
warp is a sensorial choreographic experience in the dark. Four performers move with reflex weaves that respond to touch with sound (embroidered with conductive threads, connected to a a touch sensor, connected to a Raspberry Pi, a speaker and a power bank), 30 meters of reflex fabric and a soundscape panning between eight speakers. What unfolds is a game with vision and non-vision through how the light is reflected off the materials. This disorienting and multi-sensory journey drifts between organic rhythms, nocturnal metamorphoses, and technological imaginaries.
warp explores the hegemony of vision and the visible which has shaped the arts and the production of reality since the Enlightenment. Through a choreography with darkness, the theatre is no longer an apparatus for directing attention or making visible. Instead, the work asks for a dance that can take place more in the body and imagination of the audience than on stage in front of them. Exploding theatre about appearances, warp orbits around a question of disappearance: how do disappearances appear? When darkness bears metaphorical ties to invisibility and exclusion, warp explores the potent and queer poetics of "being in the dark."
concept by Gry Tingskog
trailer/documentation performed by Rodrigo Andreolli, Am Ertl, Amina Szecsödy, Gry Tingskog
made in collaboration with/original cast Rodrigo Andreolli, Chloe Chignell, Amina Szecsödy, Gry Tingskog
weaves woven by Rodrigo Andreolli, Chloe Chignell, Amina Szecsödy, Gry Tingskog
weaves programmed by Gry Tingskog
sound Amina Szecsödy and Gry Tingskog
light Gry Tingskog and Laura Salerno
camera Quiet City Berlin
editing Gry Tingskog
documentation/trailer produced at LAKE Studios Berlin
warp is co-produced by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and Hessian Theatre Academy (HTA). With support from Kulturamt Gießen
warp premiered October 2021 at Frankfurt LAB as part of Tanzfestival Rhein-Main.
For bookings contact grytingskog@hotmail.com
(darkness falls inside you, around you, through you)
it begins by coming back: falling into a state in-between sleep and wakefulness, we no longer sort time. a loop of delays, blurring our sense of temporality. our body unfolds an architecture of absence, bridging tenses. we move to remain intimate with the absence. and so, we disappeared into the darkness for a while. you remember that one time (darkness falling) moving slowly inside each other. the trace you left would make a heap of wet matter. we close in, as the darkness moves closer. it doesn’t scare us to think about an end (falling) not knowing if the absence of scare is a distance we’re willing to take. (again) the vague reverberates – the echo remembers (and again)
echoes of you(s) is a collective drift, a temporary dislocation of the subject. it moves inside multi-layered temporalities and durations. patterns erode away, leaving tenuous traces; they make tunnels across time (i think i’m adrift inside them).
How does our perception shift in the dark? How do we perceive (in) darkness?
echoes of you(s) takes place in a fully darkened room, where the visual deprivation enhances the audience’s senses. The darkness is occasionally interrupted by blinding flashes, creating an inverted echo of an image on the retina in the eye. echoes of you(s) puts the audience’s perception and interpretation at stake, exploring the part memory and imagination plays in making sense of the world around us.
In echoes of you(s) Amina and Gry move together with sculptures embroidered with pulsing fiber optic lights. The obscure objects morph through various shapes and forms, suggesting a plentitude of images and imaginations. An associative soundscape pans between 8 speakers in the room. The continuous dislocation of the origin of the sound disorients the space, and you inside it. This multidisciplinary work explores what happens to our bodies, perception and selves in the dark.
echoes of you(s) is as much an installation as a choreographed state of mind, a slow research of bodies in constant transformation. echoes of you(s) is a collective drift, ambiguously journeying between the depth of the ocean and outer space, visiting creatures, landscapes, images and fictions of many worlds. This non-frontal and sensorial experience has been presented both in theatres and museums.
With and by Gry Tingskog and Amina Szecsödy
Concept, choreography and sculptures Gry Tingskog
Sound Gry Tingskog and Amina Szecsödy
Sound design consultant Miguel Caldas
Trailer and photos Nemo Hinders
With support from the City of Stockholm and the Hessian Theatre Academy
echoes of you(s) premiered in 2019 at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm as part of Rough Proposals Festival.
For bookings contact grytingskog@hotmail.com
They let words meet their body. The flesh of language moulds its porous form from inside. Words shape their substance into a specific body; a fictitious reality of change. This body; time poured; and then that body. They shift, and the space shifts too; together they leak into a new situation, another fiction: realities redrawn as they move through them.
cheating discipline and other artistic affairs is a joint journey through weak fictions. Slowly, different temporalities and proximities develop – subtle realities embedded in layers of darkness. Moving through social, imaginary, linguistic and sensorial bodies without faithful continuation, the piece creates manifold affairs. Adulterous contracts, seductive leakings and intimate ways of spending time together come to exists within, but in deception of, disciplinary order. Cheating Discipline and Other Artistic Affairs is in one way a porous body in itself, continuously leaking from its given form and changing, again and again.
In cheating discipline and other artistic affairs four dancers oscillate in-between presences and absences, proposing a space somewhere in-between. The piece unfolds into darkness. Initially, blackouts frame the performance in images. The drawings on the floor are made with glow-in-the-dark chalk, and the costume pour dyed with glow-in-the-dark paint. Over the course of the performance, the blackouts grow longer, slowly swallowing the light. In the darkness, a parallel narrative unfold, materialising another reality. Glowing creatures move in a glowing space. The tonality of which fiction is more real shifts, as the order of light over darkness is inverted. The work unfolds an intimate imaginary world, as it accompanies the audience on a journey destined for the dark.
With and by Maia Means, Amina Szecsödy, Oda Brekke and Gry Tingskog
Concept and choreography Gry Tingskog
Sculpture, costume, light and sound Gry Tingskog
Trailer Fredrik Wåhlstedt and Gry Tingskog
Photos Fredrik Wåhlstedt
Co-produced by Weld. With support from Stiftelsen Längmanska kulturfonden.
cheating discipline and other artistic affairs premiered in 2017, was reworked and premiered 2019 at Weld.
I Object! is an interdisciplinary performance integrating dance, sculpture and installation into a choreographed rest. The performance aims to disrupt the subject-object dualism by siding with the object. As a verb, ’object’ connotes a positioning, a resistance and a protest. This work indulges in the art object as an act of resistance, an active positioning and agent. I Object! departs from the exhausted body as an objection to today’s hyper-capitalist society and the conditions, bodies and subjects it entails. It sides with the object for empowerment and rest, reclaiming a body that is burnt out, exhausted, worn out and consumed. These exhausted bodies are a possible feminist revolution, loudly objecting to a society that sacrifices bodies for economic profit.
They revolt.
Welcome to the resting revolution.
I Object! includes five dancers and three life sized, human-shaped textile sculptures slowly morphing between different notions of object and subject. This piece weaves together threads of installation and performance into a choreographed rest, inviting the audience into horizontality.
With and by Oda Brekke, Maia Means, Tuuli Vahtola, Emma Strandsäter and Gry Tingskog
Choreography Gry Tingskog
Sculpture, costume, sound and light Gry Tingskog
Trailer Elin Magnusson
Photos Elin Magnusson and Gry Tingskog
With support from Inter Arts Centre, INSISTER SPACE and Weld.
I Object! premiered in 2018 at Inter Arts Centre.