Get to know BamBam Frost

Welcome to Black Box teater BamBam! Can you introduce yourself to those of us who don't know you from before?
Hello! Thank you very much, I'm really looking forward to playing at Black Box teater! As mentioned, my name is BamBam and I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. I am the daughter of a skateboarding mother and a hip-hop dancing, music producer father and would like to say that street culture is in my DNA. Since I was a child, I have been very mindful about what is funky and what is not, and I notice that I carry that with me into my creations.

I graduated in contemporary dance at Stockholm University of the Arts in Stockholm in 2013 and in 2018 I debuted as a choreographer with SORRY. YES is my second work and premiered for a closed audience (during the pandemic) in the fall of 2020. I usually say that I work artistically with choreography as my main craft.

What are some of the main ideas and themes your work revolves around? My interests are constantly evolving, but I see that certain themes return and how these in turn divide into two worlds. One is a world of recognizable material from television, pop culture and art. I have a strong interest in the history of entertainment from the last hundred years and how it goes hand in hand with our post-colonial history.

The other part of my work consists of a world of what we may not see, but what we have the potential to feel. I am interested in investigating transcendence, body memory, pleasure, tactility, empathy, care and vulnerability.

We have read that you work from an intersectional feminist perspective.
Would you like to elaborate on this a bit?
You know, I used to write like that at the beginning of my choreographic journey but the more I delved into intersectional feminist theory I became humbled by the fact that it is an eternal learning process and rather than claiming that I am "working from it" I now say that I am in the constant process of learning to practice intersectional feminism.

Currently, this means that I constantly return to black feminist theory for guidance, it means long discussions about class, privilege, sexuality, feminism with friends and colleagues, and above all with my closest colleague and co-creator Lydia Ö. Diakité. We share thoughts, feelings, dream about alternatives, constantly create new strategies where we test ourselves in our working groups in the search for a sustainable intersectional feminist way of working. It becomes a mess of both glory and lots of mistakes and I let all of this permeate my artistic creation.

A solo work is often the result of a collaboration with several others. Can you tell us a bit about how you work with your artistic collaborators?
I work very closely and intuitively with my collaborators, I have great confidence in everyone's artistry and the clearer I am about where I want to be with the process, the easier it is for everyone involved to click into that journey. I have a long and close collaboration with the composer Yared Cederlund, and music often plays a large dramaturgical role in my works.

I always work with outside eyes and artistic advisors, my brain is far too fragmented to find specificity myself. Alexandra Tveit has been an artistic advisor in almost all of my productions and now together with Lydia Ö. Diakité also in YES. It is very rewarding for me to have the privilege of playing with, testing before, being challenged by these two. It's also nice to work with two who can honestly shout "nooooooooo that's a disaster!!" when something is really bad :)

YES will be performed on August 25–26 and marks the beginning of the fall season 2023.