A thin layer of moss covers everything; green fur covers everything.
The landscape is moving. She is moving.
Here, where we are, everyone is alive.
Here, everything is alive. That mountain looks like a jellyfish. That plant is smoking.
She makes it rain - just for a moment. Nature, she sings. Nature adjacent. The humming chord between a person and a thing. An ear, an eye, an anything, a nothing, not above or outside, a fancy, a chimera.
Everything is breathing in this world.
Image: Stanislav Dobak
“Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphism (superstition, devinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is stuck between person and a thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman environment”. -Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Traces is an immersive installation performance in which a magical, dynamic and ever-changing landscape evolves all around you. A place where people become objects and objects come alive, grow and multiply.
Traces is a multi-sensory experience that blurs the boundaries between us and our environment and questions our place within a living world. A dreamscape remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water and sound.
Credits :
Choreography: Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Performed by and created with: Katie Vickers, Inga Huld Hákonardóttir, Tiran Willemse and Kinga Jaczewska
Later performed by: Jeanne Colin, Inga Huld Hákonardóttir, Rósa Ómarsdóttir and Siet Raeyemaekers.
Scenography: Ragna Ragnarsdóttir
Costumes: Ragna Ragnarsdóttir and Wim Muyllaert
Music and sound: Sveinbjörn Thorarensen
Light design: Elke Verachtert
Production Manager: Sinta Wibowo
Artistic Advice: Dries Doubi
Production: Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek
Co-Production: Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek, Kunstencentrum Buda, Theaterhuset Avant Garden, MTD Stockholm.
Co-Funded: Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Nordisk Kulturfond, Nordisk Kulture Kontact and Reykjavík Culture Fund.
Support Stuk, Beursschouwburg and WpZimmer.
Thanks To: Jeanne Colin, Sandy Williams, Dianne Weller, Hákon Pálsson and Elke Lotens
Performances:
November 24 2017@ Beursschouwburg, Brussels
November 25 2017 @ Beursschouwburg, Brussels
April 19 2018 @ Pop Arts Festival, Brakke Grond, Amsterdam
May 2 2018 @ MDT Stockholm
May 3 2018 @ MDT Stockholm
June 14th 2018 @ Kunstencentrum Buda
September 11 2018 @ Bastard Festival, Avant Garden, Trondheim
September 12 2018 @ Bastard Festival, Avant Garden, Trondheim
November 30 2018 @ MIR Festival, Athens
April 4 2019 @ Vorblót Tjarnarbíó and Reykjavík Dance Festival, Reykjavík
“It makes Traces an hour and a half long live Pipilotti Rist clip, in which everything feels fluffy, has strange colors and is in an innocent way kinky erogenous, with a creepy sweet music. As if some LSD accidentally ended up in the cupcakes on a teenage spring party.”
“An enchanted room where even the synthetic fur gets life”
“Traces is a sensory relief, a post-psychedelic Polar circle version of Plato’s cave”
Image: Stanislav Dobak
“It is a beautiful world that breathes, resonates and lives -where man is only part of something bigger. You can see “Traces” as a romantic, slightly spacy, or eye-opening commentary on the present, where we have forgotten to listen to the ambiguity of things.”
Image: Stanislav Dobak
“The nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin introduced the concept of ‘pathetic fallacy’: the attribution of feelings, thoughts, intentions and the like to things. This is commonplace in the object theater, but you can do that well and less well, and Rósa Ómarsdóttir is doing very well.”
Image: Stanislav Dobak
Reviews and Interviews
Interview DV
Interview Morgunblaðið
Review Theaterkrant
Review Svenska Dagbladet
Image: Stanislav Dobak
