OR/ELLER — oreller

ABOUT OR/ELLER

The dance and choreography duo OR/ELLER was founded in 2018 by Madeleine Lindh and Anja Arnquist. OR/ELLER often develop their choreographical and spatial concepts simultaneously. Their dance art is characterized by highly visually dramatic pieces, using dance as an expressive driving force.

As a result of their interest in working with choreography through a parallax of scenography and dance, their recurring concepts revolve around the notion of "within" and "inside", reflected in OR/ELLER's works taking place as large formats on larger stages, as well as more intimate, meeting their audience between two books in a library. They play with the idea of their pieces as surfaces of contact, where they invite dancers and audiences alike, as well as children and adults, to dwell in fiction, playing with both a complex and straightforward tonality, where both seriousness and humor are allowed to take place.

With their distinctive style, OR/ELLER's dance art is driven by the idea of curating their audiences rather than just creating performances for already-initiated audiences. Therefore, the idea of cultivating the scene of dance performances for children and young people is of great importance to OR/ELLER.

"Choreography is particularly exciting to work with where the dance and room meet. In the room as such, and especially within a stage context, where skewed power perspectives lurk, but also, for this very reason, a bubbling potential to challenge and break down boundaries. We are inspired by children's way of being in the world and making it accessible to themselves. They dare to look a little too long, quickly switch their interests, give life and voice to objects, and ask the great existential questions."

In addition to the "Within" concept, OR/ELLER has another guiding principle in our work, which we call "The Clinch". We simply like the experience of something "clinching", that is, when it feels like something doesn't quite fit in, but despite or because of this, still makes you feel good or giggle! In more detail, OR/ELLER interprets a "clinch" as a sensorial experience where either sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell, separately or together, experience something that is suddenly a bit off or not familiar to previously known patterns. We find this particularly interesting in the context of the performing arts, where the "clinch" usually occurs when the aesthetic is perceived as incoherent. OR/ELLER finds this place thrilling and exciting. What might that feeling and experience mean in relation to artistic production and aesthetics? In what way does this reveal taste?

Children's ability to make the world accessible to themselves is an excellent source of inspiration. They are experts at making new sense through never before seen combinations, and therefore they should have the patent to the concept norm creativity. By reading their surroundings through the necessity of imagination and curiosity, children build temporary systems that are not yet arranged in terms of time and cognition. OR/ELLER thinks of this as the place where both a young and an adult audience can discover, for example, what an encounter is, how something sublime appears, or what it feels like when something deeply moves you.

Through the previously noted "clinch" and curious gaze of the child, OR/ELLER explore taste and aesthetics through their works. If taste and aesthetics are generated from the friction that emerges from the inevitable interweaving of social, cultural, and historical mechanisms into our minds, then OR/ELLER thinks that the performing arts are the most compelling format to marinate these phenomena through. In this, OR/ELLER works closely with the artistic collaborators (performers, set designer, composer, costume designer, lighting designer, illustrator, and graphic designer). Together and with each partner's expertise, the works' themes are transcribed and translated into various forms of media. In this way, each project is transmedial by nature. OR/ELLER views their works as surfaces of contact. There are many ways to talk about encounters. Right now, in the world as it is today, it seems important to make contact through the medium of art. Whether OR/ELLER is creating an interactive work, a site-specific work, or a large-scale performance piece, we invite you to an experience that allows for a sensorial encounter with dance.

"We use the performance room as a surface for projecting alternative states and places, which can change the perception of our world and of what the body can be, and which, with its fictional quality, can say something about humankind and the present."

Together they have developed a shared experience of encountering a diverse audience with various abilities and ages, having danced in, and choreographed, works with different types of interactivities at the core.

HOW DID OR/ELLER BECOME —> OR/ELLER

Dance brought us together.

Imagine a body that is shifting its weight as to take a step.
This motion can be either quite ordinary or incredibly beautiful. Why?
What is it that makes a dance, dance, its dance?
What makes a dancer dance that particular dance?
Who should watch the dance?
Where should it be danced?
These ungraspable but nonetheless intriguing questions eventually led to the launch of OR/ELLER in 2018.

We started working together as dancers in 2008. Since then, we have worked on many different projects, such as dance performances, films, books, publications, plays, and various interactive performance formats.

We both have a strong legacy from Forsythe improvisation. We have spent many years developing this method further into other improvisational structures. We also share a heritage of postmodern dance from over a decade of collaboration with Cristina Caprioli and ccap. During our years of working together, we have been in constant conversation about dance and our dancing, both together and separately.

Our work is imbued with optimism, femininity, and a never-ending interest in the art of dancing. We share a fascination for material that "flickers", with a complex yet accessible composition, where dance and gesture, musicality, social behaviors, signs and symbols, an awareness and interest in presence production, and a physicality that is busy shifting in weight and tonality, turn into language and fiction. By "flickering", we mean the dancer's ability to pursue several directions and layers simultaneously or switch between the previously mentioned qualities through the material and the dance. This can also translate into longer transformational arcs or the changing of mediums. To shift, jump, break and switch, while several longer transformational curves are in motion, is a type of linguistics that holds the hand of nineteen seventies' "Écriture féminine"* and links up with the "Solar Punk"* of the twenty tens'.

* Link, Wikipedia om Écriture féminine
* Link, about Solar Punk

OR/ELLER about ANJA and MADDE

Anja and Madde live south of Stockholm in the neighboring suburbs of Fruängen and Västertorp. They live with their respective partners and have two children each, born in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2018. In the summers, they head north rather than south. This same pattern holds true at Christmas. They each have a Volkswagen and spend time with both cats and dogs.