thecarrierbag festival is the third edition of a festival for dance and choreography that focuses on how we gather around works.

It is an ongoing artistic research between Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore, materialised in spacial and atmospheric scenes – it’s a piece in itself. With a beginning and an end. An intervention, a scenography, a dramaturgs speech, a performance, another performance, and a stage staged in the middle of a big, bright and breezy space.

All these bits of the piece called thecarrierbag festival have been chosen through the bodies of the two curators. The works were curated because they triggered affective responses. It started with a tickle, crept through their bodies and ended in quite a mood.

thecarrierbag festival is a two day festival at Fabrikken for Kunst og Design with four choreographic works, three interventions, two dinners, one DJ-set, and all the in-betweens.

PROGRAM JUNE 23rd

18:00 / Grand drape pull / Intervention by Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore

Grand drape pull is a metaphorical drawing back of the curtains to reveal the piece called thecarrierbag festival. In this performative intervention, Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore will open the festival with a welcome speech. The curtain will fly, the lights will come on, and the festival will begin!

Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore are the artistic leaders and curators of thecarrierbag festival, and have worked together as a curatorial duo since 2015. They are interested in giving attention to the around and in between, with the festival format as a departure point. Their duo practice exists as a way to be carried next to their individual dance and choreographic practices. They are both part of the collectively driven venue and group Danseatelier in Copenhagen.

The interventions are small performative actions, moments or events that exist in the space in between the performances. The interventions are made by: Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore, Danseatelier / Olivia Riviere and Nanna Stigsdatter, Storm Møller Madsen and Barbora Vilkaitytė

19:00 / Dirgy Dancing / Performance by Lisen Ellard

Dirge – /dɜːrdʒ/ – a lament expressing mourning or grief.
Dirgy Dancing is a collection of lament dances by and with local dancers from different places. Dances that are dedicated to people, memories, times and places, like a way to perceive the unmentionable of what’s lost.
Collectively, we look back at what has been in order to be able to face what comes after, and that there will be an after. The lament dances create space to be in the presence and in care of what has passed and no longer is.

Lisen Ellard works with three local dancers for Dirgy Dancing and at thecarrierbag festival it is lament dances by and with: Johanne Chemnitz, Julienne Doko, Khamlane Halsackda.

Lisen Ellard and director Mattias Lech have collaborated for several years around themes of death and its rituals, which resulted in the performances Funeral and DEATH. With the dance anthology Dirgy Dancing, Lisen Ellard continues this investigation of loss and the relationship between grief, memory and movement. lisenellard.com

21:00 / the incense of assembly / Intervention by Olivia Riviere and Nanna Stigsdatter / Danseatelier
Light my fire through the longest night
Tread into your step, feel the heat of the moment
Picture this **
Inhale the scent of the assembly

21:30 / It Doesn’t Look Like Anything To Me / Performance by Jules Fischer & Josefine Opsahl

“It Doesn’t Look Like Anything To Me” is a collaborate piece created by composer Josefine Opsahl and visual artist Jules Fischer. The title refers to the sci-fi series Westworld, where the hosts (robots) use the phrase:” it doesn’t look like anything to me” as a fail-save response in encounters which make them question their own reality. Choreographically the piece is the beginning of a bigger investigation of masculinity and patriarchy. The movement material is searching for vulnerability, softness, and collectivity in found material from sports, movies, and folk dance. The music is an elegant negotiation between a live cello and electronic loops constructing a filmic and epic soundscape.
The composition lets us feel the organic and emotional body rub against the strict and minimal electronic loops. The piece is playing with ambivalence and illegibility as an escape from binaries, while questioning hegemony is a “natural” trait.

Jules Fischer is a visual artist and choreographer. Their practice is centered around large-scale performances and creating immersive experiences through different media, a multitude of perspectives, senses, and bodies. Basic feelings such as love, loneliness, and grief, are often central for Jules, but always from an ambivalent and queer perspective. julesfischer.com

Josefine Opsahl is a composer and artist. Extending her background in classical music into contemporary medias of expression, her works unfold in the intersection between tradition and renewal, the analogue and the synthetic. With an emphasis on tactility, movement and virtuosity she pushes the limits of what genres and artistic expressions can be focusing on renewing larger formats like the opera, the ballet and symphonic
sound worlds.

22:30 / Peony – a singing bar / Intervention by Barbora Vilkaitytė

Peony (Pinavija) gathers romance, religion, longing, and dreams. It is a reminiscing of early 2000, when we listened to CocoRosie, Antony and the Johnsons, had friends over and travelled to Berlin and Paris… Everything was far away, yet so possible. One moment like a dandelion, yellow and full of happiness, another moment like a pappus in the air, spreading new lives.

Barbora Vilkaitytė is a dancer, choreographer and performance artist based between Stockholm and Vilnius. Creating sight – specifically, she brings New Eastern European identity, hybrid performativity, feminism, personal archive, and today’s consumerism from the perspective of the ancient, ‘expressionistic’ and the emotional.

PROGRAM JUNE 24th

18:00 / Doors open

19:00 / Pattern Recognition / Performance by Angela Goh

Pattern Recognition is a new work by Angela Goh that brings into proximity recurring gestures of the mouth from her previous works, specifically Desert Body Creep (2016), Body Loss (2017), Uncanny Valley Girl (2018) and Sky Blue Mythic (2021). ⁠
Across these works the mouth has represented an uncanny passageway between the inside and outside of the body. The mouth is rendered as both flesh and void, and as a threshold breached——an alien-like tongue escapes, a voice erupts and is sucked back in, liquid is ingested or seeps out, hands reach in only to reemerge as another image of a mouth. ⁠
By looping back and collecting these gestures together, Pattern Recognition highlights an evolution of form, expanding and entangling a body of work into new territories and trajectories formed by processes of recursion and deviation. ⁠
Pattern Recognition is originally created as an exhibition of performances at Fine Arts, Sydney in May 2023.⁠
⁠
Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. Her work has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Performance Space New York, Auto Italia, Baltic Circle, Shedhalle, and Taipei Performing Arts Center. She lives and works in Sydney.⁠

20:30 / carry gather assemble fold / Intervention by Storm Møller Madsen

how do we carry⁠
how do we gather⁠
how do we assemble through sites of tenderness and accountability⁠
how do we fold together and apart⁠
who is the we and the I that carries, gathers, assembles, folds …. together⁠
⁠
Storm Møller Madsen is a queer, non-binary performance studies scholar, dramaturg, and curator. They are a PhD fellow at The Department of Arts & Cultural Studies at The University of Copenhagen. Their PhD project focuses on performance art by trans artists. In both their academic, dramaturgical, and curatorial practice they are invested in critical reflection, political awareness, and forward-thinking methodologies. ⁠
⁠

21:00 / Masterpiece / Performance by Luisa Fernanda Alfonso

Out of her fascinations and frustrations, Luisa Fernanda Alfonso embodies and turns around the archetypes of the Character Dancer and the Mariachi – characterized for being hyper-dramatic, hyper-virtuous and hyper-gendered. Masterpiece explores both their excesses in the tumult of nostalgic and Latin American associations, hijacking the dance from its legitimacy, legacy and traditions. ⁠
⁠
How can we create conditions for these archetypes to exist with us today? How to find pleasure in spaces where we no longer know how to position ourselves? What resonates through our simultaneous fascination and irritation?⁠
⁠
In collaboration with composer Peter Rubel and an abundance of loudspeakers, Masterpiece deals with the poetics of building, unbuilding, repeating, modulating, interrupting and abandoning dances and songs, which attempt to exist within consonance and dissonance. ⁠
⁠
Luisa Fernanda Alfonso (Colombia, 1995) studied Limón Technique in NYC, the B.A. in Dance at the Folkwang University in Essen and the M.A. SODA at HZT in Berlin. Her work Masterpiece has been part of Les Urbaines Festival, TanzNRW Festival, The 200th anniversary of the Kunstverein München, and was an opening act for The Düsseldorf Düsterboys.⁠

22:30 / LOVERS REVENGE / Concert by Heva Vaupel and Camilla Lind.

A show in between each of the two artists’ fields: music, sound design, dance and choreography. Within the format of a concert consisting of 15 shorter songs, they are searching for a place for performative exploration ranging from energetic pleasure to more intimate vulnerability. Here they weave an almost genre dysphoric experience and with songs as dramaturgy, they take the audience through several doors from something well-produced to more raw and intimate material. 
They aim to push the boundaries of both formats and the relations of art and life.

Camilla Lind works as an interdisciplinary artist with performance, painting, sculpture, music and styling. As she is educated in dance and choreography the body is a continuous entrance point in her work. 

Heva Vaupel is a composer, sound designer and artist. She is affiliated with the local cassette label Janushoved, where she has released multiple albums since 2015. In live settings, Heva often searches for performativity that is challenging the usual ways of playing both improvised and composed electronic music.

23:00 / DJ set 

This year’s edition of thecarrierbag festival has a set design by Anna Moderato throughout the program.

Curbside Gathering is a sculptural set design for the periphery, for the actions and events that happen off-stage and in between the acts. It brings together elements and textures from the cityscape, and features from home decor, molding these into an active backdrop against which backs can be rested, conversations begun and narratives acted out.

Anna Moderato is a visual artist working primarily with sculpture, and the setting up of spatial narratives and site-specific interventions that seep into the spaces of everyday life.

CONTEXT
​​thecarrierbag festival is a project initiated by Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore, but it has previously been realised in collaboration with Sandra Liaklev Andersen in 2017 and Stine Frandsen in 2019. In the previous editions, the festival has taken place at Danseatelier. Danseatelier has, in this way, continuously supported and framed the festival. The concept of festival has grown from the tissue of Danseatelier and the ongoing curiosity into that which holds an artistic practice. Within the context of Danseatelier, it is the physical space, the group and organisational structure that is in focus, whilst within the context of thecarrierbag festival we zoom in on that which holds pieces.

THE CURATORS

Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore have worked together as a curatorial duo since 2015. They are interested in giving attention to the around and in between, with the festival format as a departure point. Their duo practice exists as a way to be carried next to their individual dance and choreographic practices.

Their curatorial practice takes shape around ideas of curation as selection and curation as situation-making. In this curation is seen both as a process of choosing and sorting and as something that forges an encounter, shapes moods, builds scenarios and invites for ways of being together. Throughout their practice they are drawn to the affective – from pieces that spark small itches of feelings or large crushing states, to understanding where emotions are placed and what they do. With the belief that organisational or curatorial frames are not neutral, they actively deal with making all layers involved in creating a festival visible. They are both a part of the Danseatelier, a collective and space in Copenhagen. www.danseatelier.dk