Stina Nyberg:
Splendour

Six bodies moving in semi darkness to loud techno music. Each unto her or himself, yet all driven by the same beat. The choreography dismisses the aesthetics of creativity and individual expression, seeking liberty somewhere else: in to the body taking control over sound.

The soundtrack to the performance is the album Archive One by Dave Clarke: just under an hour of Detroit techno, which after beginning with a gentle booming quickly turns into ever-faster and harder beats, with short interludes of HipHop and House. During the rehearsals, the performers danced to the album on a daily basis, without discussing their individual interpretations. SPLENDOUR is the both the result of this techno practice and the practice itself.

The audience at first only sees an empty room and six performers in the same costume. Dressed in grey tracksuits, they wait for their cue. Someone gesticulates in time to the beats, another advances, jumps and a third waits. A scratch results in a facial twitch. Do the dancers follow the music or is it the music that follows the dancers? The performance works with the affects and involuntary reactions that are created in dancers and audience in the moment in which the sound is absorbed by the body. It tries to create the illusion that it is the bodies that are producing the sounds: “when the wave hits you, each one of you, it rebounds and creates a new sound in this very moment”. Which causality is spoken of here depends on the imagination of the performer and the audience.

With Splendour Stina Nyberg has found a form of choreographic improvisation that radically isolates the individual but does not make this apparent onstage. Expression and personal interpretation recede behind a collective body, which renders the nuances of the sound in a multi-layered image of movement – until exhaustion sets in.

CHOREOGRAPHy Stina Nyberg PERFORMANCE Luís Miguel Félix, Nadja Hjorton, Sidney Leoni, Maryam Nikandish, Stina Nyberg, Zoë Poluch, Rebecka Stillman LIghT-DESIGN Chrisander Brun

A production by MDT Stockholm, supported by Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Stadt Stockholm and [DNA] Departures and Arrivals network, co-financed by Creative Europe program of the European Commission.