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OR/ELLER Anja Arnquist/Madeleine Lindh



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."






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.