The Danish director Jonas Corell Petersen and Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksdal have teamed up
with a dance performance which also borrows elements from the concert-format. The music is composed by Lasse Marhaug and the danish designer Henrik Vibskov is in charge of the costumes.
Petersen is currently working as a house director at the National theater and as a house dramatist at Dramatikkens Hus. He has received several awards and won the Hedda award for the performance /Ik/Ich/I. Petersen last visited Black Box teater with the performance ZOO.
Fiksdal has gained an international reputation as a choreographer. She has been a part the Black Box teater programe several time. The performance Night Tripper received Natt & Dags Oslo Award and HOODS got awarded with the Dance Critics Award from the Norwegian Critics’ Associaton. Cosmic Body was nominated for The Hedda Award for best scenography and costume design.
The title of STATE is probably what linguists would recognize as a ”true homonym”. The term denote a word that is written and pronounced in exactly the same way, but has a variety of meanings. What were your intentions with this ambiguous title? ”The starting point of this project was the relation between rituals and the state. We think of state as something ambiguous; the national state is after all a relatively new idea, and in english state could mean to be in a state and to state something. We are interested in figuring out how the rituals take part in the creation of the state (broadly speaking) and how states manifest themselves through rituals.”
This performance might function as an anthropological study of ritual dances worldwide, but clearly also has its very own expression. How was the process? ”During our work we watched lots of ritual dances from all over the world. We started investigating the function of the dances in their local communities. Historically speaking, within the theater world, this could not be said to be a new strategy, as Grotowski and Odin Teatret became quite famous doing just that. Also, looking at the history of dance, we can easily recognize how choreographers like Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham and Mary Wigman operates dance material inspired by ritualistic dance traditions. Using what we have learned from the process, we wanted to figure out if we were able to make contemporary ritual dances, and if these dances would be able to manifest different states of being and states (in a broad context).”
