GIRLF(R)IEND a performance installation of love and boxes
A month before our wedding, my boyfriend told me he wanted to be a woman… Will you still want me?
Do you fit in a box?
GIRLF(R)IEND is a performance and light sculpture installatiom for children, young people, and adults about feeling different, focusing on gender identity, femininity, norm criticism, love, and acceptance. What happens when the one you love breaks free from the mold?
Choreographed Marie Keiser
Composed by Chris Galea
Dancers: Anne-Sofie Pi Østergaard, Amanda Marin and Emma Östlund
Installation art by Thea Asmussen
Supported by Kulturpuljen Odense and Kunstbygningen Filosoffen
LEAR – LET YOUR DAUGHTERS RULE!
King Lear turns 417 and has decided to retire from the Company. Goneril, Regan and Cordelia plan Daddy’s birthday, but who deserves the biggest piece of the cake, and when is it time to leave the patriarchy behind?
Based on Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear and in a choreographic hybrid of contemporary dance, physical theatre and new circus, we follow the three clowns Goneril, Regan and Cordelia in a story of what happens when our superficial fight for applause and power makes us miss the real human connection, and how hard breaking away from your parents can be.
LEAR – Let Your Daughters Rule!
Premiere September 16th 2023 at Teater Momentum
Performers:
Anna Emilie Lauge Pedersen
Anne-Sofie Pi Østergaard
Cecilie Schyth Kjær
Director: Marie Keiser Asmussen
Composer: Christian Galea
Dramaturgic consultant: Kitter Krebs
Produced by MeerKat Dance Theatre
LEAR is supported by:
Malta Arts Fund, Odense Kulturpulje, Ingeniør N.M. Knudsens Fond, Dansk Skuespillerforbund & William Demant Fonden
LOSER – FAILING TWICE IS TWICE AS NICE
Dramaturg, choreographer and Lecoq based clown teacher Marie Keiser-Nielsen
Dancers: Linn Fletcher, Anne-Sofie Pi Østergaard, Lucas Kruse, Cecilie Schyth Kjær and Maria Pearl Weise
LOSER is a research project mixing contemporary dance and physical theatre. The project is about developing a practice where failure can be an asset rather than a liability; a practice which holds great potential for performers across the fields of dance and theatre.
The merger of Physical Theatre and Contemporary Dance is an attempt at a new approach combining Lecoq’s neutral mask and simple clown with contemporary dance practice. Rather than a new aesthetic, we are looking for a new process to bring about an honest physicality on stage. We do not intend to make dancing clowns or clowning dancers, but using clown techniques as a tool for contemporary dance training in order to strengthen presence, audience contact and playfulness in choreography and finding a new language for physical, post-dramatic expressions.
Work presented in collaboration with HamletScenen, Queer Arts Studios and Åbne Scene 2023
Supported by William Demant Fonden, Den Jyske Kunstfond, Initiativpuljen Aarhus and Augustinus Fonden
Lecoq-based training tools for contemporary dancers.
The LOSER project is about losing the battle, and about losing control. It is about moving in a space of uncertainty, of unpreparedness and vulnerability.
BRIGHTON BOYS
Summer 1900. On the sunny Brighton Beach at the Japanese East Coast, the water is warm, and the work is grey. Simon gets pregnant, but the mermaid is nowhere to be found. Can he be a mother without her? And will Paul From Work still want to dance with him at the annual Tropicana Party?
After the war comes the party. During the pandemic comes the escapism. Under the glossy exterior, the fear waits and shifts in its cage. Brighton Boys is an attempt to discover what lurks under the water’s surface while humanity drinks a piña colada and tries to forget. It is a work about the human in crisis and how we cope with the aftermath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_3GiBst4c
MISOGYNIST MEERKAT/AUNT WHO?
Ladies and Gentlemen! This is a play. A traditional, old-school play about a family; a mother, a father, and their two children.
Everything goes its normal way for the Johnson’s, until Aunt Vince moves in… A tragic tale of meerkats and blowjobs.
This piece is a painful reminder of what happens when we give up the fight. What happens when we try to make people something that they’re not. When we try to make ourselves fit in a role that is not ours.
AUNT WHO is also a spoof on ‘A Doll’s House’, it is a choreographic narrative which incorporates clown technique, animal study and contemporary dance. It is an exploration of the space between physical theatre and dance, the space between laughter and repulsion.
Making use of meerkats choreographically allows us to examine deep human emotion in a raw and undramatic way: it gives the opportunity to show our basic desires through the animal within.
”Apart from serving as a break out of the mould of tradition, this subversion was able to demonstrate the fragility of the family construct as commonly understood in contemporary society and that, much like other animals, human beings can never truly be divorced from their instincts” – Sunday, June 10, 2018, 09:07 by Anna Marie Galea – Times of Malta
THE FARMOR PROJECT
My grandmother is dancing. I see her face on the screen. She looked happy then.
‘Farmor’ is a dance theatre piece about being sick of home and homesick; about roots and wings.
I feel homesick a lot of the time. I live in two countries, belonging to both but not quite at home in either. My life as a traveller has broadened my experience and given me many friends, but they are far apart; I can never have all my loved ones in the same place. Little pieces of my heart are missing wherever I go. Always homesick.
In Malta, I miss the birch trees and the buses that arrive on time. I feel like the character in H.C. Andersen’s The Shadow; a Dane stuck in the sweltering heat of the south, drying up. In Denmark, I miss being free to be who I am, a foreigner free of expectations.
Dance and theatre make a home where community is not based on heritage or even language; it is a safe haven where the soul and love of movement is what ties us together. Working creatively creates a little family of arty freaks, which can feel more like home than the place we happened to be born. In Denmark, my family and friends have known me always, it is hard to break that mould and defy the preconceptions in order to grow; I feel homesickness then, sick of being home and stuck in a box. These feelings are at the core of my next exploration. I want to combine the notions of homesickness with notions of home as a box.
The piece is about distances: How we can be close to people who are far away and feel estranged from the person next to us. In these very politically correct times, compassion for the minorities, for the environment, for the animals is on the rise, and as much as I love that development, I sometimes struggle to see the same compassion towards our neighbours, the lonely old woman next door or the estranged family member. I think these questions of impact and love are essential to explore, especially with a young generation who, in my country, communicate more through screens than through smiles. We are far from each other, sitting in the same room.
Where we are from can be a safe haven – or something which haunts us as a shadow and drags us into the mud. How can we let go of the roots we are born with and build new ones? Can we be rooted into different places at the same time?
The story is a simple tale of a beautiful woman I knew. Who danced with a bottle of wine in 1956. And who died with a bottle of whiskey in 2014. When a loved-one leaves us, where do they go? And how do we handle the loss when we lose a grandparent, a lover, a part of ourselves or our heritage? Do we become less ‘us’ when we leave home, or more, do we grow wings or lose touch?
An old film reel. My grandmother is dancing. She looks happy. At least I know that she was happy once, and her steps are the beginning of mine.
COCK AND A FEATHER
“Five hens,” it now ran, “have plucked out all their feathers to show which of them had grown leanest for love of the cock, and then they all pecked at each other till the blood ran down and they fell down dead, to the derision and shame of their family, and to the great loss of their owner.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Cock and a Feather” is a dark fairy tale told through contemporary dance and physical theatre. It is an exploration of themes of gossip, feminism and how stories travel and change through time and space; an exploration of relationships in general, and female relations in particular. It is a piece about women and the issues they face in terms of empowerment, feminism and commodification. The project recognizes the constant struggle of the female body within patriarchal society and the ways in which feminism seek to reclaim this body and the sexuality it possesses. It is also a story about chickens.
https://www.facebook.com/Valletta2018/videos/1719552098130374/
PLAY/GROUND
The year is 2118. The evil and greedy dictator Natas Adler implements a scheme to monopolize natural resources and starts draining the land of Acirema. Adler’s government begin PROJECT SQUARE; an attempt to collect and control the four elements of nature; Earth, Fire, Air and Water. If Adler succeeds, he will have total power and monopoly of the natural resources.
CANUCK/DADDY’S LITTLE MATCH GIRL
Canuck leaves home and learns to fly a bit too high. Malta 2018
Canuck was conceived after reading about a crow in Canada which attacked people and stole murder weapons from crime scenes. I adore crows and my first attempts at animal study were utilized for this piece about a little girl whose scientist crow-parents go to far in trying to control her and making her what they want her to be.
https://www.facebook.com/um.dancestudies/videos/1618129668273875/
DEN MAGISKE VANDDRÅBE (DK 2017)
Cirque du Suitcase’s show ‘The Magical Droplet’ performed by Katrine Peytz and Marie Keiser
Directed and choregraphed by Marie Keiser