Any number of sunsets...
We invite you to the last sunset you will ever see.
It is brilliant, psychedelic, hallucinatory, banal, cliché, and polluted. You will bask in its pale plasticity. It is everything and nothing that you expected it to be.
You know why you are coming here but don’t know what it will be like to leave.
It takes 1 hour and 40 minutes.
We invite you to the thrill of your own expectations - the pending near, coming, and distant future. We can’t predict the future, but we will play with it.
By crafting a dystopian situation, where we reflect upon ‘the end of the world as we know it’, I intend to open up for a rethinking of how we spend time with images, objects, and most importantly with our bodies and each other. By placing a finite fictional ending and timeframe on this experience we examine how we would spend our last moments together in a place where sunsets will cease to occur. In a world where images are thrown at us ad-nauseam, how can we use and dismantle an image that is loaded with nostalgic, romantic, and cataclysmic associations to install a new way of experiencing community, our bodies, time, and place? – Rachel Tess choreographer
Any number of sunsets… is proposed not as a dance performance but as the last sunset you will ever see, taking place over approximately two hours with the audience both walking, sitting, and lying on the theater floor. It questions how we would spend time together during the last sunset the world would ever seeas well as how we spend time in theaters. It is proliferated through an acute attention to proximity, vibration, and specific movement qualities juxtaposed against the fictional, semi-dystopian/apocalyptic, and plastic cliché the last sunset ever. In this work four performers create a live sound score the last song ever, and navigate a plethora of objects (building materials, plastic, wrapping paper, kinetic sculptures, garbage) in the last room ever. Any number of sunsets…uses a complete and total, overload of material to nullify any attachment to the invitation and question at hand. It proposes a set of parameters so specific that the question is forgotten, resurfaces, and gives way to a situation in which both the performers and audience are focused on the present.
The dancers are not a group marching to their final destination. They are pockets of vibration ensconced in silence. They are uncanny rhythm at the edge of your consciousness. They stall, interrupt, spill, babble, pass, retract, and drift. You sense the distance between your body and theirs but you can’t name its quality. You dream in texture and velocity. Together we dream the body. Our personal reveries collide and mesh altering our sense of time, place, and purpose.
We craft our object of desire, the sunset, from concrete materials. We use stagecraft and the theater space, with all of its ability to trick, deceive, and lift us from the everyday, to propose a frame for our departure. We use our preconceptions and memories of sunsets past and to come as a vehicle for travel to an unnamed, undetermined future ending.
The contradiction is the ever looming present and our associations (both ours and yours) that leave us caught in a space of reverie, a liminal space that deconstructs the plasticity of the monument we have built. We undermine our object’s importance. We displace value from the constructed to the happening, the immediately tangible to the intangible. We drift and we cannot define. We transform.
Choreography and concept:Rachel Tess
Performers:Nellie Björklund, Kenneth Bruun Carlson, Lisanne Goodhue, Anders Granström, Anna Pehrsson, Dinis Machado, Peter Mills, Isaac Spencer, and Rachel Tess
Lighting design and sound:Ulrich Ruchlinski with Rachel Tess and the performers
Technical:Ulrich Ruchlinski and Tanja Johansson
Artistic Consultant:Anna Pehrsson, Isaac Spencer
It was created with funding from Kulturrådet, Konstnärsnamden, Skåne Region, in co-production with Skillinge Teater and MARC.
Performances and research:
Rehab: (solo performance/research): November 11th 2017 (16.00-22.00)
SkånesDansteatern: (research with entire company and open showing x 1): August 2017
MARC (Knislinge): March, April, May, June (research, open showings x 8, creation)
Skillinge Teater: August (creation, open showings x 3), premiere September 13-16th 2018
Dansens Hus (Stockholm): (performances) February 15-16th 2019
Dansstationen (Malmö): (performances) September 10-11th 2019
Atalante (Goteborg): (performances) November 16-17th 2019
MDT (Stockholm): (performances) November 20-21st 2019
Det är science fiction, den sista solnedgången är gjord av plast och vi befinner oss mitt I en klimatpsykos. ---- Rachel Tess solnedgång får dig att stanna upp, kanske blir du bländad, bedövas visuellt och audiellt. Kanske blir du skrämd,
upprymd eller hänförd, men ingen lämnas oberörd av den sista
solnedgången någonsin. Med den varma sommaren i färskt minne
och det förtorkade jordbrukslandskapet strax utanför dörren är
temat kusligt aktuellt och föreställningen stark och modig.
- Andrea Grapengiesser Ystads Allehanda (Skillinge Teater 2018)
Photo credit Any number of sunsets…
-Any number of sunsets… Dansens Hus 2019, by Thomas Zamolo
