OR/ELLER

OR/ELLER is a we-formation, consisting of two voices, operating within a constructed subject. The name OR/ELLER is a reminder of the inherent ambiguity of dance and a hint towards their artistry pointing in several different directions concurrently. Since 2018, Anja Arnquist and Madeleine Lindh are running OR/ELLER, consistently insisting on keeping one foot in the room for performing arts for children and young people, and one foot in the room for performing arts for an adult audience. 


OR/ELLER works with a signature of optimism, femininity and an unceasing interest in the craft of dancing. Through their long term movement-research, they allow a specific and multi-articulated physicality to fuel their linguistics and their aesthetic approach. In the exploration of what movement is able to convey, they construct their concepts, where choreography and scenography often emerge as interwoven traces. In their interactive performance WEB, they let the dance move into a motorized colossal scenography in which children and adults climbed around in a giant net together with Anja and Madeleine. In V, the audience could experience, on a distance, how the duo let bodies transform that very same spatiality into a projection surface for a futuristic dance epic. In NET, three dancers display an elastic rubber band net's ability to bring the audience together as a democratic body of society, that during two years, have met several hundreds of children in gymnasiums across Sweden and Denmark. In Terrarium, for the dance company Norrdans, a stage in the shape of a stylized terrarium was put on display like a theater inside of the theater, for the dancers to, in a simulated fauna, be able to both be each other's environment and become each other's landscapes. 


Central to their artistic work is the power of transformation, and how dance in its smallest component, for example via a shifting of weight, can change our entire reading of body and constitution.


So far, the duo has collaborated with and presented their work at stages such as Dansens Hus in Stockholm, Dansinitiativet, Stadsteatern Skärholmen, on tour with Norrdans, Cinars in Montreal, Dalateatern, Saga Kulturhus, NorrlandsOperan, Dansehallerne/KORA (DK) and now MDT with the performance Dolly.