NEW WORK, premiere November 2024 at MDT Moderna Dansteatern, Stockholm.

All people have one thing in common. We've all been there, inside someone's body! Even though we all have different experiences of becoming, coming into being, or giving life to new people, we are still connected in this;
Life's first chamber play.

Based on experiences from the time between the first heartbeat and the first breath, OR/ELLER has allowed three guiding stars to cross-fertilize different inputs into the work's theme of coming to life and becoming. Dolly the sheep - the first clone, the artist Dolly Parton - who continued her creation outside the womb and the Doll - who comes to life through play and imagination.

Dolly can be described as a dancing laboratory, which draws inspiration from puppet theatre, chamber play and anatomical theatre. With a playful but serious concentration, the body and its movements are put on display. Dancers and audience are on the same island, in a simulated very first room, gathered around a scenographic body.

Around the idea of the poetics of cell division, the blurred boundaries of subjectivity and a constructed becoming in our contemporary world, Dolly revolves around the ability that movement has to awaken that which puts us in contact with what it means to come to life, to live and to become. In close contact with the audience, the moods in the room change, the roles dissolve. Objects become living puppets and the dancers become abstract dancing elements at high speed. These do not stand in contrast to each other, but constitute the relationship that the performance wants to go deeper into. Here the focus shifts between the very specific investigation of how a body part can take shape, grow and duplicate, to how we are linked together, see and relate to each other.

In this project OR/ELLER turn their ideas around the “within”, insideout. In Dolly, life's first place, the womb, becomes a friction surface and horizon for all of us to share and start from, as a common source of highly individual bodily experiences and phenomenological musings about becoming. It becomes the stage for a dance performance, where the working body in symbiosis with the intimate stage space wants to point to the first relational activity of man, the movement that leads to the realization of a you and an I. It is both a banal and highly existential thought to devote time to.




Credits
Concept, choreography: OR/ELLER – Anja Arnquist, Madeleine Lindh
Dance: Anja Arnquist, Madeleine Lindh, Sam Huczkowski
Dramaturgy: Kristina Hagström Ståhl
Scenography: Johannes Fäst
Costume design: Naemi Gustavsson
Music design: William Rickman
Art direction & graphics: Sepidar Hosseini
Photography: Chrisander Brun
Production: OR/ELLER & Nordberg Movement
Co-production: MDT and Dansinitiativet
With support from: The Swedish Arts Council, The City of Stockholm and Stockholm Region, Kalix kommun, Luleå kommun, Danskonsulent Norrbotten and Region Norrbotten