When: 2024, premiere in December at Dansens Hus in Oslo

What: Lena was part of the project team, and was responsible for the graphic design

Links: Presentation from Dansens Hus, Oslo, and from Fossekleiva Kulturhus in Drammen.

DEED, the dance artist duo comprising Suzie Davies and Mattias Ekholm, probes the existential upheavals that ensue when body and mind undergo a transformation, a metamorphosis, rendering them foreign – alien. What transpires when the physical form refuses obedience? When the labyrinthine mind constricts our agency, are external forces then the agents of our confinement, or have we ourselves become lost within the soul’s desolate wilderness?

In This Alien Body, the dancers struggle their way through the shackles of stagnation and the confines of limitation. Accepted truths must be redefined. Thoughts must yield to nascent thoughts. Boundaries must be redrawn. That which we once deemed immutable is no more. A new foundation must be erected.

To shape this performance, Davies and Ekholm enlisted composer and director Øyvind Osmo Eriksen in an artistic companionship. Together, they have hewn a musical and subtly comic stage language in the liminal space between dance and theatre. A theatrical, yet richly associative expression, wherein the dancers’ self-perception as performers is challenged, on both the personal and the artistic plane. In this production, the dancers are propelled from their familiar environs into uncharted and alien spheres.

With over thirty years of experience as dancers each, Suzie Davies and Mattias Ekholm have, in the last decade, created and produced a multitude of performances that engage with diverse physical thematics, most recently disability and identity. They pursue a tireless exploration of the conditions of the body and of art.