Aabent Rum – Micro festival

The Laughing game er en hyldest til latter – en fejring af dens funktioner & underfundigheder.

The Laughing Game is a choreographic exploration of laughter, which unfolds laughing as social communication, bodily state, stirring sound and sparkling sensation. Exposing the range of emotions present within laughter, its contagious force and foremost its liberating effect. Breaking with the common sense of looking at laughter as only being funny, laughing will be portrayed as a playful but also serious game.

This work oscillates between a dance, an installation and a concert.

In The Laughing Game the audience will enter an existential, not always rational portray of a human condition, that fluctuates between the wild and the absurd, the funny and the serious. The work doesn’t only tell apart laughter and humor, it also separates the form and the sound of laughter from the intention and social context laughter has in everyday life. By different ways of portraying laughter, it becomes alien, something foreign – offering the distance necessary for reflection. Offering new perspectives and enhancing a greater awareness in relation to this common social behaviour.

The Laughing Game is a tribute to laughter – a celebration of its functions & particularities.

Concept, Choreography and Dance: Antoinette Helbing
Sound: Niels Bjerg
Artistic research: Daniel Nordback
Dramaturgy and Outside Eye: Katrine Johansen
Costume: Inbal Lieblich
Lys: Carina Persson Backmann
Residency: Forsøgsstationen (Copenhagen), Vestjyllands Højskole, Teaterøen Copenhagen
Supported by: Statens Kunstfond, Aaben Dans Roskilde, Ubåden Copenhagen
Photo: Jan Vesala

Just OK – premiere

Just ok er den anden forestilling i en trilogi som adresser hvordan dans kan huse et rum for tab. Trilogien behandler tomhed relateret til sorg, og hvordan noget kan være så smertefuldt tilstede og på samme tid så fuldkomment bort. Just ok er formet af zombiemateriale i den tøvende og liminale zone mellem at leve og dø. Just ok arbejder med zombier som miljømæssige og politiske figurer, der hjælper os med at reflektere over, hvordan levende-dødt materiale vedrører de dystre udsigter verden står overfor. Performancen udspiller en form for rædsel som hverken er spektakulær eller øjeblikkelig, men foreslår en stemning af langsom spænding og gradvis rædsel – der skabes en subtilt skræmmende atmosfære; noget ildevarslende, formløst og obskurt.

Just ok is the second performance in a trilogy addressing how dance can hold a space for loss. The trilogy attends to notions of emptiness referring to grief, and how something can be so achingly present and at the same time so utterly gone. Just ok is a performance shaped by zombie material in the hesitant and liminal zone of living and dying. Just ok thinks of zombies as ecological and political figures that may help us to think how such living-dead material relates to the grim prospects of the world. The performance engages in a kind of horror that is neither spectacular nor immediate but suggests a mood of mellow suspense and gradual horror – creating an eerie atmosphere; something ominous, formless and obscure. 

Concept and performaers: Anna Lea Ourø and Amalia Kasakove
Costume design: Agnete Beierholm
Music: Minais B
Light design: Anton Andersson

The Laughing Room – Instllation

The Laughing Room is a video installation that takes the spectator on a meditative journey through the captivating world of laughter. An invitation to dive into a condensed bodily experience of awareness and relief.

On three screens, laughter will be gently dissected – decomposed into its different qualities. Looking at laughter as a nature force, and not as a tool of communication, allows zooming in on the functions of laughter on the laughing body.

Laughter is filled with beauty, ambiguity and power when taking a closer and more detailed look. The installation allows the unseen details to get visible.

Koncept: Antoinette Helbing & Jan Vesala
Koreografi og performance: Antoinette Helbing
Kamera og redigering: Jan Vesala
Lyd: Niels Bjerg

Sorgens Vibrationer/Vibrant Mourning

Online Lecture af
Nina Lykke Dr. Phil. Professor Emerita of Gender Studies

Foredraget kombinerer oplæsning af egne digte og filosofiske refleksioner over død og sorg. Gennem korte oplæg til enkle poetiske skriveøvelser inviteres publikum desuden også til at reflektere over deres eget forhold til sorg og død.

I mine digte, undersøger jeg den sorgproces, som jeg har gået igennem efter min livspartners død. Det er en proces, hvor jeg har lagt vægt på at dvæle i sorgen og gøre modstand mod tidens neoliberale lykke-kultur, som kræver, at  vi hurtigt lægger sorg bag os.  Filosofisk er min tænkning om døden inspireret af immanens filosofi. Fra det udgangspunkt undersøger jeg sorg som en skæv (”queer”) indgang til større økologisk bevidsthed og til at udvikle en alternativ materialistisk funderet spiritualitet. Kan sorgpraksisser åbne anderledes horisonter  i forhold til  mere holdbare og økologisk omsorgsfulde relationer til den materielle verden? Foredraget bygger på min kommende bog Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (publiceres i 2021 på forlaget Bloomsbury, London).

Vibrant mourning by Nina Lykke Dr. Phil. Professor Emerita of Gender Studies
The lecture performance combines  a poetry reading  with philosophical reflections on death, and mourning.  Through short writing prompts, it will also invite the audience to contemplate  their own  relations to mourning. In my poems, I explore  intuitions, emerging out of my processes of mourning my life partner’s death, which have led me to value the importance of dwelling in mourning and  resisting the dynamics of neoliberal cultures of happiness. The focus of my immanence philosophical contemplations is queer ecologies and material spiritualities. I explore mourning practices as a possible entrance to  more sustainable and ecologically caring relations to the material world. The lecture performance is based on my forthcoming book Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (to be published in 2021 by Bloomsbury, London).

Betwixt and Between

I soloværket betwixt and between, undersøger den cypriotiske koreograf og performer Georgia Kapodistria identiteten som et hvidt og koloniseret subjekt. Undersøgelsen sker ved at kigge indad og tilbage på sig selv som en del af en nation, der har været koloniseret helt frem til 1960. Hvordan blev nationen anskuet af kolonimagten? En nation, der ikke var eksotisk nok til at høre under Orienten, men heller ikke sofistikeret nok til at være en del af Vesten.

In the solo work betwixt and between, the choreographer and performer Georgia Kapodistria born in Cyprus looks back and into her identity as a white and colonized subject. Born and raised in a nation that has been colonized and had foreign governing agencies up until 1960. How was the nation looked upon from the colonizer’s perspective? A nation not exotic enough to belong to the orient, but also not sophisticated enough to be considered part of Western Europe.

Performer: Gerogia Kapodistria
Video set design: Jan Vesala
Installation with chosen elements from Georgias research available in the foyer all three days

Workshop
Voice Pulsing/Circle Songs
Alessio Castellacci

These sessions will open a space to re-connect with the pleasure of creating music with our breath, voice, mouth, body. We start with hands-on somatic work to bring our attention to the sensation arising from the mouth cavity, the waves of breath, the impulses to move, and the musical imagination that comes with them.
Once we are aware of these fine levels of the body/voice connection, we tune our listening to the complex rhythms that are present in our speech, breath, movement, and learn how to harness these micropulsations to create improvised percussive vocal music. In the last part of the session I will open few Circle Songs, which are improvised choral songs based on repetition of simple vocal loops and collectiverhythmical entrainment.
Alessio Castellacci is a performer, teacher and sound composer based in Berlin. After studying developmental Psychology and Choreography , he has been drawn to explore the expressive possibilities of the human voice, and has since developed the Synesthetic Voice, a pedagogical approach for voice & movement improvisation. He is the organiser of The World is Sound, intensive program for voice embodiement in Berlin, and of the dance program ROAR Berlin.