Afterlife is a messed-up playground. It is a site for speculative futurities and derailed interpretations of a renaissance that never really happened. While diving into hauntologies of Western dance history, questioning whether the Sun King actually ever died, the performance moves through a series of twisted dances from the late Italian Renaissance and early French Baroque. Only to disperse into weird referential landscapes containing subtle traces of Britney’s banger dance from Hit Me Baby One More Time, Andrzej Zulawski’s subway scene from Possession and distorted yoga-gone-wrong inspired materials.
Carried out by three performers, Afterlife tries to unfold muted histories of subaltern bodies. Bodies that, through Western colonial and anti-queer epistemic regimes, were deemed disposable and unfit to partake in any further historical development.
Afterlife is presented in close collaboration with Warehouse9 and the IPAF festival.
The performance is presented in close collaboration with Warehouse9 and is a part of the IPAF festival. Be aware that Warehouse9 / Billetto administrates the ticket sale. Annual pass holders and members of Dansehallerne have received a personal email with a code for booking your free tickets.
Buy tickets here: https://warehouse9.dk/series/afterlife-louis-schou-hansen/
IPAF is a biannual international performance festival produced by the multidisciplinary art organisation Warehouse9. The festival is an extension of the organisation’s focus to support LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural practitioners’ practice. The festival supports development opportunities, and live performance encounters, and creates spaces for dialogue and gatherings.
The Festival unfolds across Copenhagen and presents genre-blurring work that engages with identity politics, sexual expressions and body representations. The Festival is based on the belief that performance can provide different perspectives and ways to understand reality, inspire collective imagining and advocate for better and more just futures.
Warehouse9 (WH9) is a multidisciplinary arts and performance organisation that supports the development and presentation of work and ideas by LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural practitioners. We’re an organisation that cultivates new thinking and community and creates space for queer art year-round. Read more: https://warehouse9.dk/
Buy tickets here: https://warehouse9.dk/series/afterlife-louis-schou-hansen/
About the choreographer:
Louis Schou-Hansen (it/they) is a dancer and choreographer whose work is situated at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Its practice encompasses various formats such as performances, making dances, performing, writing, and sometimes curating. Louis’ work dives into speculative fiction as a tool to investigate, dissect, and denaturalize how bodies have been molded through violent Western fairytales, utilizing queer and trans-feminist epistemologies. Louis has studied dance at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Royal Danish Ballet School, as well as fine arts at The Dutch Art Institute.
In 2023, Louis was shortlisted for the Sandefjord Kunstforenings Art Prize with Harald Beharie, and was in 2020 nominated for the Norwegian Critics Association Prize for the piece Shine Utopians.
In 2016, it started collaborating with Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksdal, working as a performer in several of her works. Louis has also collaborated with and performed in the works of Runa Borch Skolseg, Pedro Gomez Egana, Edhem Jesenkovic, Goro Tronsmo, Andrew Amorim, Janne Camilla Lyster, & Ingun Bjørnsgaard, to name some. Between 2020-2022 it co-founded and curated the discursive, platform Brakkesnakk together with Ines Belli.
Louis has presented works at Copenhagen Contemporary, the Munch Museum Oslo, Untitled Tbilisi, Black Box Teater Oslo, Suprainfinit Bucharest, Dansens Hus Oslo, My Wild Flag Stockholm, The Norwegian National Museum, PUBLICS Helsinki, Palmera Bergen, Godsbanen Aarhus, Entrée Bergen, and RAS Sandnes, among others. Its writings have been published by Situations New York, Understory UK, Scenekunst.no, and Danseinformasjonen. Since 2019 it has been active as a guest teacher at various academies and venues such as CONDTIONS STUDIO PROGRAMME London, Palais De Tokyo Paris, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts London, The Place London, WASP Bucharest, Iwanson School of Contemporary Dance Munich, and BRUT Vienna.
