Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else is an immersive contemporary dance performance for two dancers and a musician over the duration of four hours as well as an integrated installation to be experienced before and after the performance in the beautiful spaces of AROS art museum.
The work is encapsulated by a kinesthetic sculpture in the form of a rotating stage and a neon light sculpture, inviting performers and audience to share the space, creating an interactive situation.
The performance is created by an internationally renowned artistic team, consisting of choreographers and dancers Tim Matiakis and Rachel Tess, in collaboration with musician and composer Ulrich Ruchlinski and lighting designer Jacob Bjerregaard.
From our conception we are predetermined to a certain type of pulse for our manifestation in the world. Our heartbeat in the womb is 135 beats per minute. This is the same beats per minute that DJs use to lead a floor full of dancing people into a state of euphoria. Subsequently, bouncing up and down has the potential to lead us into several states of experience; from relaxed and content, as when you bounce a baby to sleep, to euphoric and transcendental, as when you bounce to the beat, in the midst of many, at a party. Our bodies use motion to generate experiences.
Transformation through repetition is the guiding choreographic practice that informs all aspects of the work, from dance, sound, and space, and all the way to the audience relationship in the form of kinesthetic empathy as the choreographic principle for the meeting between performer and audience.
The music will be created in tandem with the choreography and played live during the performance by Uli Ruchlinski. Ruchlinski will experiment with the circular form and looping, inviting audiences to experience sound outside the framework of the usual concert format.
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else is a work of continuous changeability and propulsion, producing a sense of decentralization and dissolution of the self, multiplying performer and audience. The artists guide the audience to experiential and empathetic states, through a physical pulse, the transformative logic of the sound and the rotating and encapsulating sensation of both the kinesthetic sculpture and light sculpture.
You can experience the installation in the opening hours of AROS. Each day there will be a live performance in the installation for 4 hours with two performers and a live musician. Find the time slots here below:
Wednesday October 11. from 16:00-20:00
Thursday October 12. from 16:00-20:00
Friday October 13. from 16:00-20:00
Saturday October 14. 12:00-16:00
Sunday October 15. 12:00-16:00
Access to the installation/performance requires entrance to AROS.
Us Us / Us Else U Else Us / Else Else has been developed through residencies at MARC (Milvus Artistic Research Center), Forsøgsstationen and Dansstationen and is presented and co-produced by Dansehallerne, ARoS, Teater Momentum and Dansens Hus in Stockholm.
BIOGRAPHIES
RACHEL TESS:
Rachel Tess is an American choreographer and dancer living and working in Sweden. She is the director of Milvus Artistic Research Center (MARC) in Knislinge. She received a BFA in 2004 from The Juilliard School in New York where she was the recipient of the Princess Grace Award (2002), and was presented with the Martha Hill Dance Award by the faculty.
Tess has been a member of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Gothenburg Opera Ballet, and Cullberg Ballet. She has a masters in choreography from the NPP program at DOCH. She won and completed a Princess Grace Foundation Works in Progress Residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City with her ongoing project ‘Souvenir’, a mobile choreographic architecture, in 2013. ‘Souvenir’ was exhibited as part of the ‘Dance Me’ exhibition at Wanås Konst in 2014. She has completed commissions with and for Corpus (DK), Norrdans (SE), and Skånes Dansteatern (SE).
In 2019 Tess received the prestigious Birgit Cullberg stipendiat for her work with MARC with the following motivation:
Rachel Tess is constantly working to find new arenas for dance as an art form. She seeks outside the established stages and instead meets the audience in unexpected places where she acts as an enabler, educator and apostle for the art of dance – not least in the Scanian countryside. In the true spirit of Birgit Cullberg, she makes the complex accessible and understandable.
As a dancer Tess works with choreographers Peter Mills, Anna Pehrsson, Frédéric Gies, and Benoit Lachambre. As curator of performance at Wanås Konst she has invited choreographers and dancers to present and create new works at the sculpture park between 2016 -2021, including Dinis Machado, Xavier LeRoy and Scarlet Yu, and Maria Hassabi among others.
TIM MATIAKIS:
Tim Matiakis is a Danish based, Swedish/Greek, dancer, choreographer and artistic director who has his roots in classical ballet. Tim began exploring choreography in 2008 and has to date created 18 works for stage, film and gallery/museum spaces.
Notable collaborations include; Ben Frost, Christian Lollike, Maja Brix, Ulrik Martin Larsen, Mikkel Hess, Jacob Bjerregaard, Esther Lee Wilkinson, Staffan Valdemar Holm & Bente Lykke Møller.
His works have been performed at The Royal Danish Theatre, Corpus, Sort/Hvid, Aarhus Teater, Bellevue Teater, HEART (Herning Museum Of Contemporary Art), Det Classenske Bibliotek, Malmö Opera, Musikhuset København, D.A.P Festival (Pietresanta, Italy).
Tim was the artistic director of Corpus, a choreographic project and contemporary dance company, within the structure of the Royal Danish Ballet, between 2012- 2021. Corpus worked with co-creation, experimental collaborators, cross-disciplinary approaches and formatting of creations, processes, and seasons and worked with, among others, Bobbi Jene, Kristin Ryg Helgebostad, Christian Lollike, Rachel Tess, Hilde I. Sandvold, Alexander Ekman, Tilman O’Donnell, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ioannis Mandafounis.
In 2022 Tim initiated and formed KINISI that is a dance and choreographic project that centers around embodied sensemaking, embodied knowledge and embodied logic.
Tim is also a member of the art collective Motherboard, consisting of composer Signe Lykke, soprano, performer and composer Katinka Fogh Vinderlev, film director Cille Hannibal and film director and photographer Frigge Fri.
