DOCH Master Students of Choreography
MA \\ CHOREOGRAPHY // STOCKHOLM

Wed April 23

17:00 Dinis Machado ”Cosmogony”
17:45, 19:00, 21:30 Caroline Byström ”R e, o r i e n t, a t i o n”
20:00 Dinis Machado ”Out in Space (experience on autonomy)” & ”Tenderness”
17:00-22:00 Pontus Pettersson ”Fragranced stories for my lovers”

Thu April 24

18:00-ongoing ”PETER” by PETER
19:00 Ofelia Jarl Ortega ”Hidden for us”
20:30 Aleksandar Giorgiev ”When you don’t even care to doubt”
18:00-22:00 Pontus Pettersson ”Fragranced stories for my lovers”

Fri April 25

18:00 Lecture by Kajsa Ekis Ekman
19:00 Emma Tolander ”DANCEMIX Improvisations”
20:15 Nefeli Ikonomou ”CFT (Circuit Failure Transition)”
18:00-22:00 Pontus Pettersson ”Fragranced stories for my lovers”
Ongoing ”PETER” by PETER

Sat April 26

13:30 Dinis Machado ”Out in Space (experience on autonomy)” & ”Tenderness”
15:30 Aleksandar Giorgiev ”When you don’t even care to doubt”
17:00 Dinis Machado ”Cosmogony”
18:15 Emma Tolander ”DANCEMIX Improvisations”
19:30 Ofelia Jarl Ortega ”Hidden for us”
21:00 Nefeli Ikonomou ”CFT (Circuit Failure Transition)”
22:15, 23:30 Caroline Byström ”R e, o r i e n t, a t i o n” (Limited seating, please see more info below)
13:30-23:00 Pontus Pettersson ”Fragranced stories for my lovers”
Ongoing-18:00 ”PETER” by PETER

“I wish to make a piece about dance. I want this piece to have the form of dance improvisation because I think if we improvise dance we cannot fake being smarter than we really are, or free from structures. I want that we show the audience how we are trying really hard, because outsmarting structures is important to make things better. Is this possible? I’ve tried it on my own but for DANCEMIX Improvisations I have now invited the intelligent and beautiful Martin Lervik to dance with me, hoping that dancing together and creates more revealing friction than dancing alone.  Let’s make a robust yet vague structure and use a big chunk of being in the moment, super concentration magic and logic. Showing all our skills and coolest tricks of course (yes Martin, you should slide down into a split really slow!) as well as our failures. I wish to make dance that cannot and doesn’t try to hide anything, but leaks ugly and beautiful truths.” – Emma

In her degree project in the Master programme in choreography, Emma is working on dancing together, and around the question of how to work together. In the piece DANCEMIX Improvisations she works and dances together with Martin Lervik.

Emma Tolander (SE) is a dancer and not a romancer. She moves very convincingly because every move she does is true. Her interests in life are survival of the heart, braveness, weakness, compassion, adaptation and love. All of this she keeps in her body.

Emma works with the notorious ÖFA-kollektivet in Stockholm and with her soul mate and colleague Amanda Apetrea in The EDIE&EDIE Project. For years she’s also worked alone or with lovers and friends in Finland, but not any more. She does highly personal dances, based on a feministic analysis of society. At the moment she’s busy with figuring out what the concept of improvisation is and how she can use it and has always been using it in life and dance. Emma draws inspiration from her wise and loving friends, complicated emotions, forests, animals, gymnastics, dance-classes, physical exhaustion, music, blood, sweat and tears.

(Concept: Emma Tolander, Dance: Emma Tolander and Martin Lervik, Playlist: Emma Tolander and Martin Lervik, Sound: Elize Arvefjord, Light: Johan Sundén, Thanks to: Zoe Poluch)

During the course of the MA Pontus has taken interest in poetry and cats, being two singularities, in relation and in consideration to dance, dance, making choreography, human affairs, the bond between choreography and dance, time and spending time together. For the performances at MDT Pontus has chosen to pursuit these interest with the idea of – delivering of text, using poetry as a strategy for words / meaning to escape its linear nature, shifting the perspectives to inflict another another, blurring the edges of what is you and what is me, shape-shifter, the intergalactic queer knight rides through the night, disappearing into dark corners, out of sight, old and new shadows merge and putting up a fight, that that was and will not be, its your eating eyes you will see, come to MDT, the place to be.

Pontus Pettersson is a Swedish dancer and choreographer trained at Statens Scenkunst Skole in Copenhagen between 2003-2007.  His choreographic work ranges from fortune telling to choreographies/dances on the main stage, from a necklace to sweet whispers in you ear. It is a love for dancing with a particular interest in objects that bridge to a choreography that is as much daring, useless, beautiful and something else. Pontus has presented his work in Sweden and abroad with the latest work being MOPA – I disappear in darkness and Debut, a collaboration together with Adriano Wilfert Jensen (DK) and Sandra Lolax (FI) as well as taken part of international projects for young makers like Choreoroam, ENPARTS and DanceWEB. As a dancer Pontus has worked for choreographers, like Deborah Hay, EKKO, Mårten Spångberg, Ohad Naharin and Stina Nyberg. In 2013-2014 Pontus is also a project student at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

A special thank you goes to my fellow students at the MA, Sandra Lolax, Adriano Wilfret Jensen, Anna Koch, Tova Gerge, Ingrid Cogne, Emma Kim Hagdahl, Franziska Aigner and Theodore Trottner.

Hidden for us is many non-stories and the story about many stories. Four walls, the floor, the ceiling and these hits: hit her hitchkock, mossy 1-3, la rödötte, if you fall, 7333, 7 spring, killing x file, quantizized frozen,1-3 vienna, trying a river, Jacky, just what we want, elderly, bells, practice, flippy, up go, stajstaj, twinkan inkan, late night session and more.

Ofelia Jarl Ortega is currently a musician, among other things. Ofelia is interested in the notion of necessity and is lately exploring different strategies for survival through punky and gritty aesthetics, as indeed aesthetics is redundant.

”On a train that’ll take me to Malmö I read ”the politics of vulnerability” by Ulrika Dahl, about vulnerability as a feministic strategy, and I cry. It’s because of the text and it touches me. It resonates in my body and thoughts, in my private life and as an artist. Then I take part in a demonstration that takes the night back and I cry. At the age of 23 – after years of trying to be strong and able to endure criticism or remaining unaffected – I realize what I’ve been lacking, or what I sometimes have chosen to reject. It’s not about being able to cry, since crying is not necessarily about vulnerability, but the empowerment of vulnerability itself.” – Ofelia

(Concept, music and hits: Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Project supervisor: Emily Roysdon, Sound and light advice: Elize Arvefjord, Johan Sundén, Collaborators: Andrius Mulokas and Karina Sarkissova, Special thanks to: R&R, planningtorock and Patti Smith)

This is a happening of choreographic work.

We have bouncing bodies, organic, at work, in ellipse.

It’s contingency that moves us, and its intuition, as a non-rational consequential logic, that drives us.

Together.

Is it vibration and resonance that we are measuring in the space, or are they measuring us?

You are invited to build with us an intuitive architecture, in intuitive timing, in empathy.

Aleksandar Georgiev. I have grown up in period of transitions (economic, political, cultural and of identity) in the Balkan region. Adaptation is something that the circumstances were activating in me. Then I caught myself in a constant looking for transitions. I was born in Skopje, in the year 1985. Through these years this mode of “in transition” mostly revealed for me practices of mastering, pulling and pushing, measuring, choreographing conditions and thresholds of various intensities.

My name is Ace. There are many things that move me. That’s why “around” is the term that I use to describe my on-going engagement in working with choreography. Lately, I have been focused on working with subtlety and with a practically implied constant measuring of intensities. I have been triggered by non-rational, consequential logics, figuring out how they take place in diverse structures.

I am concerned with what choreography can activate and from where it acts.

(Performers: Nefeli Oikonomou, Viktorija Ilijoska, Kliment Poposki, Linn Ragnarsson, Elias Girod and Ace, Mentor: Dalija Acin Thelander, Light: In dialogue with Johan Sundén, Sound: In dialogue with Elize Arvefjord)

Dinis Machado will present three works developed during the MA. “Out in Space (Experiences on Autonomy)”, “Tenderness” and the one-to-one 10 minutes performance “Cosmogony” distributed in the folowing schedule:

April 23

17:00 till 19:00 Cosmogony – 10m one to one performance on Stage – reservations: HERE
20.00 “Out in Space (Experiences on Autonomy)” and “Tenderness” on Stage.

April 26

13:30 Dinis will show “Out in Space (Experiences on Autonomy)” on Stage
17:00 till 18:00 Cosmogony – 10m one to one performance in Studio 1 – reservations: HERE

“In my previous works, performers constructed and maintained spaces, that were scenic mechanisms, through a deep (civic) engagement with the ecosystems that every performance proposed. This duty of maintenance allowed them to project their utopias there.

One year ago I left Portugal by reasons not difficult to guess for any newspaper reader.

During this two-year research program I created two performances. My work adapted to a new context of production that was also dramaturgical – a need to not depend on the context. Basically, space effectually disappeared from my works.” – Dinis

In “Out in Space (Experiences on Autonomy)”, Dinis put things together, like homeless children convert an old coca-cola can into a car, an ashtray, or a bird. They react as proto-alchemical figures – like fetuses or galaxies – silently, very alive and floating in the space that hosts them. And most of all: infinitely potential.

In “Tenderness” he develops and overlays two practices in the attempt to reconstruct a community. A physical practice where performers continuously maintain and transform each other indirectly in an exercise of anonymous care. And a practice of projecting and describing other realities in such a detail that allows as to foresee their materiality, as an exercise to share utopias and amplify our perspectives of futures.

Dinis Machado. In 2013 Dinis received the Life-Long-Burning co-production support from Cullberg Ballet for his project Black Cats Can See In The Dark But Are Not Seen. He has finished the Independent Studies Program at Maumaus – Visual Arts School (Lisbon). Has holds a BA in Theatre by the ESTC (Lisbon) and studied Ballet and Contemporary dance in Balleteatro (Porto). His works have been presented since 2007 in Uruguay, France, Sweden, Germany, England and Portugal. Dinis created the set and lighting design of all his own performances as well as that of Melodrama by Rui Catalão, and OP 49 by Miguel Pereira. He frequently runs workshops around his practice. He is a board member of Interim Kultur (SE) and NEC (PT) and associated artist from ZDB in Lisbon.

“Wisely, Dinis Machado, author and performer,(…) tells us about the construction of fictions, that we recognize as such because we relate them with the real, and tells us also about the reality of the theatrical construction we are witnessing.”

-João Carneiro in Expresso

(Concept/Choreography: Dinis Machado, Made in collaboration with: Ellen Söderhult, Anne Lise Le Gac, Alex Nagy and Mandi Tiukkanen, Artistic advice: by Jens Strandberg and Dalija Acin Thelander)

Studio 2 will open at 18:00 on Thursday the 24^th of April and close at 18:00 on the 26^th of April. PETER welcomes you to come and go as you so wish, with no entrance fee. MDT is open through out the night and day so you can visit PETER whenever.

PETER is an author, a space, a choreographer, a duration, an activity and a art object. Visit PETER as it expands not only choreography but also theatre, art and life itself. Blurring the lines between things, making new traces through and around our lives, you get to experience complete absence and total overload – all at the same time. PETER is the moment of meeting the impossibility, the implausible. This is EPIC, this is the LAST DANCE MOVEMENT and this is PETER. Some call it anarchy some call it the future.

Peter Mills (1987) was born in Liverpool, grew up in the Midlands and lived mainly in London but also Glasgow. Peter started ballet when he was 4 and half years old, and soon was interested in performing and many different types of dance, doing musical at the local theatre. Leaving school Peter studied at a musical theatre school in London where he fell in love with contemporary dance. Peter started studies at Rambert, a Ballet and Contemporary dance school where he started to choreograph. During his third year Peter joined the physical theatre company Fabulous Beast, leading him to work as a freelance dancer, performer and choreographer. After a year Peter toured in live artist Simon Vincenzi’s company around Europe, and in the meantime he created a work called no choice don’t watch this, which was shown in Scotland, England and Germany. Within the MA in Choreography at DOCH Peter has been furthering his investigation into experimental choreography and dance. This has been a fulfilling experience and Peter hopes to make sure it continues for a life-time.

(Gratitude to: Elize Arvefjord for sound, Johan Sundén for lights, Lisa Schåman for dance, Ida Sidenvall for choreography, Robin Dingemans for supervision, Camilla Damkjaer for supervision.)

The performance take place in Studio 1. Seats are limited. Tickets holders can either make reservations HERE or be admitted on a first-come, first-served.

In a para-amorphous universe Reorientation evolves around the movement of noisy bodies and objects in a realm of sonic utterance. A hybrid between intension and extension, between sound and semantics, between control and uncontrolled, between body and immateriality.

Re,or i(e) n(t) ,ation talks about migrating clefs, a pig’s nose, a brown bear from Peru, keys to an old boat house, an airport choir, practice mats, remnants of beaver-chewed trees, human scale echo, the last syllable of a word. And about that, when having left the body, it doesn’t belong to (one)self.

Re, Or, In, Nation is a para-acoustic piece parallely oriented around the origin of the word audiere. An auditor’s dance where the invitation goes to eye, anus, body, ear, vagina, skin and shoe. A close up of ventriloquism and an around-ing displacement of words as matter. A constructed metabolic space displays fictional coherence. An acoustical overhearing, a sloppy listening. Space for a dance.

In addition: The choreographic sound piece takes place between black-out and darkness.

Caroline Pyo Soon Byström’s workings take on their expression in indeterminable certainties as art objects. In this stage performance that originally sought to be a headphone piece, she’s been working on an around-ness and reorientation. She’s a lover of sound, works with delay and displacement, and investigates stagers of atmospheres. In its technical sense, Caroline is an immigrant. Maybe born in Teagu, South Korea, probably in the month of August.

Caroline studied in SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) and in 2012 was a danceWEB scholar. Before landing in Sweden to enter into the MA in Choreography at DOCH she conducted a year of studies at The Institute of Applied Theatre Studies Gießen under Visiting Professor Petra Sabisch. She’s also a part of the collaboration Universal Performance together with colleagues she met in Vienna during danceWEB.

(Concept & Choreography, Performance-word excerpts: Caroline Byström, With: Lisa Stenberg, Elise Brewer, Lisen Ellard and Ellen Söderhult, Light: Johan Sundén. Audio technical and acoustical advisor: Lisa Stenberg. Mentor: Nasim Aghili, Interviews with: Tobias Hübinette, Patrik Lundberg, Nasim Aghili. Thanks to Elize Arvefjord.)

CFT is a work staging sensations, imagery and concepts generated from an old folk myth traveling through centuries via mouth to mouth singing. The myth acts as a trigger of an atmosphere that then becomes the work via spreading it in different ways in the theater space (tonality, societal affect, visual impact etc.).

The outcome is a performance around constantly un-building your buildings, discourses and formats, dealing with physically covering and revealing space(s) and intensifying this process of transmutation within versatile layers. Spreading material that acts as sticking glue for a community without a “we”. The choreography is executed by humans, potato-flour and other materials present in the space.

“A song that is melting in and through our voices…
a story travelling as a soft long-term gesture through centuries…
contaminating and choreographing sets of actions…
thinking about failing and falling out
…again and again…
about the stories that are dripping out of the main canvas and that are silenced
gazing collapse as potent battlefield for transformations…
burying the self all over again…
the river, the circle, the promise, the trust is where we start from….
but also where we want to break from..”

Nefeli Ikonomou. Throughout her previous choreographic works Nefeli has been interested in how different manifestations of presence or environments (political, societal, artistic, etc.) are gazed upon, referred to, thought of or connected to each other and also how they appear and are brought forth in a performative situation. Her main approach is triggering emergence of body(ies) in different planes and vectors, the diving into affects that it generates into versatile combinations, and the challenging of working methods. Lately she has been fascinated on the observation of long-term gestures or movements, using it as a generator of analysis for propositions for the representation of the present. She has a BA in Design, a BA in Dance and she is currently finishing the Master in Choreography at DOCH.

(Performers: Aleksandar Georgiev, Josefine Larson Olin, Moa Westerlund, Noah Hellwig and Nefeli Ikonomou, Mentor: Paz Rojo, Music: Sebastian Printz and Nefeli Ikonomou, Voice: Nefeli Ikonomou, Sound consultation: Elize Arvefjord, Light consultation: Johan Sundén, Thanks to: colleagues and collaborators, teachers and supervisors, Theodora Iliopoulou, Paz Rojo, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Sebastian Printz, Doch, potato-flour)
Note: The performance will be in dialogue with a lecture on crisis that will be held by Kajsa Ekis Ekman on the 25th of April in Studio 1, starting 18:00:

“Greece today, a society that has been hit by the tidal wave of crisis, a crisis that is becoming permanent. 30% unemployment, 60% youth unemployment and the health situation is becoming dire. At the same time the country is still paying back the huge interests on loans to international banks. But resistance is forming in all sectors of society. A lecture about the causes, consequences and possible solutions to the crisis. A situation that, after all, is not that different from what Sweden is living…”