Part ghostly repository of unconsumed sensuality, an installative kinetic fadeout, part somatic (strip)tease, This resting, patience addresses attraction, voluntary objectification, proximity and the aesthetics of bareness. Employing an experimental format, it upsets the passivity of installation and the time-delineation and dramaturgical resolution of performance and steps away from the tradition of viewing dance as an alienated spectacle to instead emphasize its immanent sociability. In its devotion to the body, This resting, patience proposes sensuousness and dancing as timeless and democratically available technologies of undoing the world and projecting the continuous present into a future that lasts; forever suspended and unfolding, quintessentially tender, infatuated, attentive.
CREDITS: By: Ewa Dziarnowska With: Leah Marojević Sound: Krzysztof Bagiński Light: Jacqueline Sobiszewski Costume / styling: Nico Navarro Rueda, Franziska Acksel Dramaturgical support: Jette Büchsenschütz Artistic dialogue: Suvi Kemppainen Photos: Spyros Rennt Video documentation: Margarita Maximova With thanks to: Maciej Sado
Ewa Dziarnowska
Ewa Dziarnowska (PL) is a dancer and choreographer based in Berlin and working internationally. Her latest projects, “This resting, patience”, and “Untitled.Solo”, engage with the ideologies of improvisatory processes and embodied knowledge in countering the prevailing need for rationality, linearity and sense-making. She is interested in a poetic dimension of dance, its inherent sensuality as well as the pleasure and pain it brings along. Feral, rough and raw, but not devoid of precision and expertise in relation to movement technique(s), her practice challenges ways in which dance circulates within the context of bourgeois theatrical conventions and product-oriented entertainment industry. Ewa is a graduate of SEAD, Salzburg and HZT Berlin and a 2015 DanceWEB scholarship recipient. As a performer, most recently she has worked with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Michele Rizzo, Enad Marouf, Isabelle Schad and Sheena McGrandles.
Vaginal Davis’s cinerama movie experience is coming to MDT! Please join Ms. Davis for an annotated screening of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Miloš Forman’s Hair. Indeed, the year is 1979—it feels like yesterday! The cinematic extravaganza is co-hosted by MDT and Moderna Museet, in collaboration with My Wild Flag.
The exhibition “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” is initiated by Moderna Museet and extends across several locations in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). Each institution highlights a different aspect of Vaginal Davis’s expansive practice.
Vaginal Davis
Award-winning artist, acclaimed author and international blacktress Vaginal Davis is coming to Stockholm. In her pioneering and incredibly diverse oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets racial justice and resistance meets joy.“Magnificent Product” is her first major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet. In this “magnificent product”, which unfolds at Moderna Museet and other art institutions in Stockholm, you are invited to see Ms. Davis’s expansive practice from all angles." – Hendrik Folkerts, Curator
To read more about Vaginal Davis exhibition at Moderna Museet, please follow the link below
In Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) the South-African born, Europe based choreographer Tiran Willemse
invokes his own multiple histories of dance through a kaleidoscope of the 19th century ballet classic
Giselle, the Kuduro from Angola, and the Nigerian genre Alanta. The ghost story of Giselle becomes
the primary vehicle through which Willemse gives his past selves space to be as they are - ghosts, not
dead, who have not left fully, though they may have been asked to. Both an exercise and an
exorcism, Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) is an evocation of Black experience within European contexts,
and a thinly veiled masquerade of its absurdities. As differently gendered bodies claim space for
expression, their haunting simultaneously haunts cisnormativity.
What bubbles to the surface may be headless but it's not shy. The emerging dance is simultaneously
a solo by Willemse and an ensemble performed with the unresolved tensions that move him. In
limbo between presence and absence, these bodies -rendered invisible, suppressed, (as certain
histories often are) invited, or not- have nevertheless come back to reclaim Willemse’s body. These
multiple consciousnesses are given the room to rehearse both as and with Willemse, a repétition
(rehearsal) with a difference.
Credits:
Concept, Artistic Direction & Performance: Tiran Willemse
Dramaturgy: Andros Zins-Browne
Music: Tobias Koch
Sound operator: Thibault Villard
Choreographic Advice: Laurent Chétouane
Light design: Fudetani Ryoya
Production: Paelden Tamnyen, Rabea Grand
Co-production: Gessnerallee Zürich, Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center, Lausanne
Supported by: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Pro Helvetia, Schweizerische
Interpretenstiftung SIS, Migros-Kulturprozent
Tiran Willemse
Tiran Willemse is a dancer, choreographer and researcher from South-Africa based in Zurich and Berlin. His performance based practice is rooted in a careful attention to space, imagination, gesture and sound, focusing on how they relate to the ways in which construction of race and gender are performed, communicated and challenged. He worked and collaborated with Trajal Harrell, Meg Stuart, Jerome Bel, Ligia Lewis, Eszter Salamon, Susanne Linke, Andros Zins-Browne and with Cullberg Ballet under Deborah Hay and Jeftha Van Dither. His work has been shown in Arsenic Lausanne, Impulstanz Vienna, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee Zurich, Sophiensaele Berlin, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Santarcanagelo festival and MCBA in Lausanne and continues touring internationally.
The word “lounge” is both a verb, meaning to sit or lie in a relaxed way, and a noun, meaning a public room where people may relax. Lounging is both an action and a place, a space that you shape and inhabit and savour. This dual nature of rest, of waiting, of moving and
being moved. is at the heart of this piece. Lounge is a duet for two female-identifying bodies.
Together they move through states of active and passive rest, shifting from reclining and
positioning themselves, to finding pleasure in the duration of repetitive motions. The lounge as a public as opposed to solitary space is also important here. The performers use each other’s presence to go deeper into themselves and into the vibe. Permeating the piece is the notion of the Invisible Lapdance, consisting of small, nearly imperceptible dances that use the gaze to blur the borders between the giver and receiver. This choreographic strategy highlights and interrogates the relationship between dancer and audience, public and private, seeing and being seen. Sensuality is integral to this piece, and
consequently so too is atmosphere.
CREDIT:
Choreography, performance and concept: Marga Alfeirão
Development and performance: Mariana Benenge, Myriam Lucas
Music and live mixing: Shaka Lion
Set design: Yoav Admoni
Lighting design: Thais Nepomuceno Veiga
Support on distribution: neon lobster / Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
A production by Marga Alfeirão in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE (Berlin)
Thanks to: Francisca Spuzi
Marga Alfeirão
Marga Alfeirão(Lisbon,1994) uses media to carve safe-spaces for the exploration of intimacy and sexuality through dance and performance. Heavily inuenced by dance-genres and sound textures from the african diaspora disseminated through Lisbon’s social tissue, she attempts an active claim of womanhood, making room for lesbian sensualities.
In 2023 she premiered LOUNGE at TanzTage, a lesbian lap dance duet. Last year together with Camila Malenchini, she premiered Wet Eyez, a work on emotional bodies and fantasy. She has worked with choreographers Tamara Alegre, Antonja Livingstone, architect Afaina de Jong, among others. She is active in the portuguese Ballroom scene as a founding member of the Casa das Musas. Graduated from HZT’s BA in dance and choreography in Berlin (2017-21). Together with her collaborator Camila Malenchini, they are developing a new work on horror, paralysis, womanhood and myth to premier in 2024.
a guttering investigates encounters around the dinner table in order to nurture queer community and our interdependence. The title is a word play on ‘gathering’, ‘gut’ and ‘gutter’. The work is exploring and exploding the format of a dinner and its making. In this gathering, community meets fermentation meets queer meets somatic meets access needs meets food sovereignty meets working condition meets social choreographies meets decolonial practices meets storytelling. a guttering is founded in participatory practices and during My Wild Flag it will manifest as a collective food preparation and a shared dinner. The group works to uplift visibility of labour behind food production and the resources need it, by subverting traditional methods and values of the dinner table, in order to seed awareness
MWF Talks
My Wild Flag (Karina Sarkissova and Pontus Pettersson) have invited Runa Borsch Skolsteg from the new dance festIval in Oslo Mind Eater and Julia Celejewska from the queer feminist collective Kem in Warsaw to Stockholm. In conjunction with a guttering, we will continue to talk and share ideas, experiences, needs, and dreams. in a continuously shrinking cultural climate we ask ourselves, as well as the local queer and cultural community:
-How do we organize?
-How have we organized, and how do we want to continue organizing in the future when our conditions for making art are continuously shrinking?
-What are the possibilities for art and artist-run spaces?
-Is art needed? How?
-Can we think about alternative ways to produce art when there's no cultural money left for queer spaces and fringe proposals?
- How to inspire each other to continue self-organizing?
Sal Reis Trouxa
Sal Reis Trouxa is a plant-based chef working with sustainability, zero-waste and fermentation. They are especially interested in the politics and social aspects around food and culture. Growing up in a self-sustaining community made by their grandparents in rural Portugal, Sal’s roots continuously inspire them to work with food both as a necessity and as a point of connection and togetherness. In the recent years they have worked as an assistant cook for artist Mirna Bamieh in her project Palestine Hosting Society and choreographer Samah Hijawi. Whilst working professionally as a chef, they have also done catering for multiple artist projects and festivals. Meanwhile they are developing their own ferments from grains sustainably produced in Scandinavia.
Sarasvati Shrestha
Sarasvati Shrestha is an artist and horticulturist working at the intersection between art, design and horticulture. Through intermedial works, gardens and farm work, sculptures, installations, education, social and performative practices, the work is often driven by issues around value systems, food, circularity, access to land and health. Through cultivation and primary production of vegetables, she has expanded her work to collaborate with social movements, artists, activists, farmers, friends and family, by raising questions around working conditions, ownership, geopolitical conflicts and accountability. Guided by queer ecologies and strategies that resist colonial and binary logics, her work centers around tracing routes to nurture a societal transition towards food sovereignty, agroecology and solidarity.
Ar Utke Ács
Ar Utke Ács is working as an artist within contemporary dance and an expanded understanding of choreography. They work with the poetics and politics of the body in the seams of performance, dramaturgy, text, installation, the social and the imaginary. Ar Utke Ács working with discourse in proximity with their artistic production, in particular, they are busy with counter- hegemonic strategies from queer and crip writing and lived experience. Collaborative and collective processes builds the core of their body of work and Ar Utke Ács often works across different fields and mediums of art and research. Throughout the past years, they have created a series of works focusing on affect landscapes and subversive poetics of positioning oneself non-verbally, including their first major performance production echoes. They are currently working on Thrash Mob, a commission for ESC Youth Company, which deals with social choreographies and alternative Dance History. Furthermore they are currently working on the first piece of their unapparent trilogy which will premiere in 2025 co-produced by MDT (SE) and Dansehallerne (DK).
Ar Utke Ács is a part of the queer art club collective fake daughter, which has organized queer art gatherings since 2019, as well as the studio cooperatives Dance Cooperative in Copenhagen and höjden studios in Stockholm.
Julia Celejewska
As a member of Kem Collective, I have been co-creating Kem School for the past four years. I focus on well-being aspects, providing tools that support long-term, sustainable action. I also work as a trainer and facilitator focusing on wellbeing and burnout prevention in social movements.
Kem
Kem is a Warsaw-based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.
Our projects are characterised by hybridity and fluidity, blurring the boundaries between art, curating, education, activism, clubbing and community-making practices. It is a community created in the process of collaboration and engagement with the politics of embodiment, feeling and subjectivity in relation to collectivity. Kem experiments with formats and strengthens queer, feminist and anti-racist artistic practices and discourses.
Runa Borch Skolseg
Runa Borch Skolseg is a playwright, writer,curator and critic. She has a master's degree from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and runs Dionysian Corporation, a global concern consisting of a fashion and publishing house with costume designer Fredrik Floen.
MIND EATER
MIND EATER is an Oslo-based, artist-run, non-institutionalized festival that is interested in new artists and performative practices organized by Runa Borch Skolseg and Louis Schou-Hansen.
Welcome to celebrate the last day of the festival with a killer dancefloor, come get sweaty!
Håll Käften Och Dansa
Håll Käften och Dansa (HKOCHD) was founded in 2010 as a female DJ collective, but today consists of the founder Gabriella Ekman. With a strong love for hip hop, influences from the tropics, rhythms from dancehall and bass from the clubs ancestors - HKOCHD has also worked as a nightclub manager and arranged clubs at Sweden´s most famous nightclubs. Besides creating an energetic, positive and dance friendly atmosphere at every event, HKOCHD is one of the mothers of legendary Thotland, has also held DJ workshops, played behind multiple artists, worked in theaters and at both local and international festivals among many other things.
Her music is a en eclectic mix of house edits, dancehall, rnb, afrobeats, amapiano and other surprising edits and genre breaking mixes you’re going to love.
