Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else
Performance and installation (ca. 4 hours)
Premiere at ARoS Art Museum (DK), October 2023
Upcoming performances at Teater Momentum (DK, Odense) and Dansens Hus (SE/Stockholm) 2024
As you enter the space, you encounter a free-floating, illuminated ring circling mid-air.
Below it, a rotating circle on the floor turns around and around, creating a constant tuning and charging of the space. Audience members are lying on top of it, others sit or wander through the room. Three performers are tirelessly bouncing, pulsing and transforming with their feet firmly planted to the moving object. Moving forwards while moving backwards they generate a sensation of endless repetition as relentless as it is inviting. The perspective changes with each rotation. The musician takes a seat and, in an instant, the meditative pulsing of the dancers transforms, fomenting into the feeling of a rave. The audience joins in with an involuntary nodding of the head, a tapping of the toes, or inescapable full body groove.
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else investigates kinesthetic experience, beginning with a single pulse manifested through three dancing bodies driven by an insistent, layered sound composition. Transformation through repetition guides the choreography. By allowing this pulse to transform over an extended period of time, the artists seek to discover how dancing and choreography attune and guide audiences into experiential and empathetic states. Dance, sound, and kinetic sculpture play equal parts in the total experience, inciting a sensorial ride ranging from the subliminal to the ecstatic.
The durational choreography by Tim Matiakis, Rachel Tess, and musician/composer Ulrich Ruchlsinkis is an extension of, deepening, and departure from the 50-minute group work Us And Everything Else created by Matiakis (with Tess as an outside consultant) in 2020 for the dance company Corpus at the Royal Danish Theatre. Unhinged from the standard evening-length format, Matiakis and Tess filter their skills as performers through the aforementioned interests while insisting on a four-hour format, the exhaustion that it incurs, and the states it can transport them to with the audience.
In this continuation of their collaboration, they focus on repetition, rhythm, transformation, and kinesthetic response rather than narrative, questioning how two bodies can vibrate on a frequency that surpasses normative readings of identity and gender.
Choreography and dance: Tim Matiakis and Rachel Tess.
Photo Credits
All photos Kajsa Rolfsson
