- Residency
“Men on the Moon” Helga Guren & Martin Lervik in residence
Although not a prolific genre by Hollywood standards, pre-perestroika Russian sci-fi offers a fascinating body of films – a fantastic voyage from early constructivist epics to post-apocalyptic dystopias, taking in prophetic moon explorations, space-race propaganda, atomic war allegories and existential art cinema. An ideologically charged genre, Soviet sci-fi can be read as charting the rise and fall of communism behind the iron curtain, with the wide-eyed optimism of space fantasies made in the early years giving way to damning post-Chernobyl nuclear nightmares as the Soviet bloc crumbled from within.
With “Men on the Moon” Guren & Lervik tries to make sci-fi propaganda-choreography, where Russian science-fiction connects with Norwegian embodiment. This is not communist-propaganda, it is dance-propaganda. We would like to find out how a science-fiction body can be expressed. How modified/mutated bodies move in a distant future, on another planet. How do they functions, how do they travel, how do they detach themself from spaces and from particular forms of belonging?
Imagine a group of “science fictional” characters wondering around unsettled, crossing boarders, spaces, environments and situations in order to find out what their bodies can become in terms of movements, sensations, speeds, intensities, qualities, rhythms and pulsations.
We want to dance Russian science fiction.
We want to embody science fiction.