Kurssi on jouduttu perumaan vähäisen osallistujamäärän vuoksi / The course has been cancelled due to a low number of enrolments.
During the workshop we will explore the practices that were created in the making of the performances Romeo und Juliet and The Juliet Duet. The workshop includes an online exploration and a zoom friendly ballet exorcism, screaming, writing dance and reading to each other, snaking around, some online headbanging and then some gossiping and deep discussions.
Erna & Halla are now in a residency working on the piece The Juliet Duet, which will have a livestreamed demo on Friday 4th June (more info coming soon). Read more about the piece below.
The Juliet Duet
Choreographed and performed by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Halla Ólafsdóttir
Set design by Chrisander Brun
Sound design and video Valdimar Jóhann
Music by Stephen O’Malley and Sergei Prokofiev
The Juliet Duet – is a dance performance inspired by Prokofievs Romeo & Juliet. The idea for The Juliet Duet came out of our collaboration with the piece Romeo und Juliet that premiered at Gärtnerplatztheater in 2018.
We both have a love/hate relationship with classical ballet and we feel that it needs healing from centuries of oppressive ideas about perfection, hierarchies, gender roles and inequality. In Munich, we developed a practice we like to call „Ballet exorcism“. Ballet exorcism uses the language of classical ballet, it‘s technique, composition and pantomime, but merges it with aerobics, jazz ballet screaming practices and headbanging with a cathartic effect.
The voice also plays a big role in our collaboration, the voice as an invisible body in the room, sound and music as an extension of the body. Where choreography and music merges and where you in the end cannot detach it from one or the other. We combine witchcraft with elements of housekeeping, prosthetic body parts, hair, confetti, fake blood, sweat and tears. It‘s turning out to be an emotional, sad, terrifying, hopeful, weird and a humorous piece.
We have been in residency at Schauspiel Leipzig, BIT in Bergen, The Reykjavik Dance Festival and now Zodiak– though actually working in Reykjavík (for obvious reasons) at The Dance Atelier / Dansverkstæðið. During the residency we have been using an audio version of Shakespeare's play as a starting point and a backdrop, experimenting with dancing as a way of generating writing. Remixing and reinventing the original text through dance and see where it brings us. We see it as sort of fan fiction (becoming dance fiction) using an already existing story in order to create many new different stories, themes and narratives.