Nadja Hjorton
Residency presentation

Nadja Hjorton is working on a group piece that will premiere in March 2014. In this residency presentation she invites her collaborators for the first time and present the project for them and for anyone who is interested. In the presentation, Nadja will try to map out the landscape in which she and her collaborators will spend some time the coming months.

The production, with the working title ”Talk about it”, is a continuation of the work Nadja Hjorton initiated with her solo “Radio dance” in 2012 and will premiere in March 2014. Together with the dancers/choreographers Halla Ólafsdóttir, Zoë Poluch and Jessyka Watson-Galbraith, light designer Chrisander Brun, sound designer Elize Arvefjord and dramaturg Caroline Åberg, Nadja Hjorton will explore ideas, practices and approaches she found interesting in the making of the solo. “Talk about it” is dealing with radio as a format and explores the activity of listening together in a theatre context. Just like the solo this work also attempts to talk about perspective – which artists and practitioners must relate to their history and which ones can ignore theirs?

About ”Radio dance”: ”I run across the floor. Jump, roll and spin. Some classical music is playing – probably ”In the hall of the mountain king”. I futter with my invisible butterfy wings and reach towards the ceiling. I spin and spin and spin. Eventually I fall down in a heap on the foor and I lie there, catching my breath and let the spinning wash over my body. As waves. I have just turned 5 years old, the year is 1986 and the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, has just been murdered.”

Radio Dance is a solo dance performance that deals with dance and history filtered through a personal life story. Nadja Hjorton uses the radio format, and her performance moves through a subjective dance history that makes visible, and questions, a general dance history. In the performance, Nadja is broadcasting her radio program live, a program that covers her own life from childhood to adulthood with Sweden and the world’s political climate as a back drop. It is a program about dance and dancing. The autobiographical take in Radio dance is also an attempt to talk about perspective – which artists and practitioners must relate to their history and which ones can ignore theirs? With a nostalgic touch and some sentimental fragments, Radio dance moves from the intimate to the large, from the personal to the common, from the past to the now, and from Nadja Hjorton to Isadora Duncan. Through listening, dancing and storytelling, Nadja attempts to create an event that invites and allows its spectators to be both attentive and unwary.

Radio Dance premiered at MDT Stockholm in December 2012 and the solo was Nadja´s graduation piece from the Master Program of Choreography at The University of Dance in Stockholm.

About artist’s residency.

(Concept and choreography: Nadja Hjorton. Collaborators and performers: Halla Ólafsdóttir, Zoë Poluch and Jessyka Watson-Galbraith. Light design: Chrisander Brun. Sound design: Elize Arvefjord. Dramaturgy: Caroline Åberg. Supported by Kulturrådet – Swedish arts council. Co-production MDT)

Free entry, studio 2

Before the residency presentation of Nadja Hjorton there is an open lecture with Christian Duarte on stage. The residency presentation will start directly after the lecture so the audience can participate in both.