Enter a world of truck driving; long work hours with irregular schedules, solitude, as well as loneliness, heavy regulations, precarious working conditions and lots of time spent away from home, friends and family. Meals are often eaten on-the-go or at a truck stop. Before lunch wonders about the distribution of time – having lots or none to spare – and what do we want to have done before lunch?
Before lunch is created through conversations with truck drivers about work, their identity, structures of their industry and workplace; the road. It deals with truck driving as a practice of timekeeping, orientation and traveling, made into dancing.
DRIVER is a choreographic work consisting of two acts (Act 1, White line fever and Act 2, Before lunch). DRIVER investigates the act of driving, a paradoxical situation of movement; being in motion, whilst sitting still. It is a play on preconceived notions of perception and agency, a play on who is moving who, at what pace, through which spaces.
THE ARTISTS
Lara Vejrup Ostan is a Slovenian/Danish choreographer and dancer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. In her works she challenges perceptual frameworks, exploring how these are used to navigate reality. Notions of dayliness inhabit her world building, embodiment and movement. Other mediums, such as film and text, are used in her choreographic practice to mold and carry, or further develop logics of dancing. Most recent works are THE SWIMMER (2022), HIKE (2022), 9 to 5 (2023) and the ongoing Body Maintenance series with Agnes Grelinger. Lara holds a BA in Dance and Choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts and is soon a BMC® Somatic Educator graduate. She is co-founder of KOMMA Performance Productions, a collective association supporting the development and production of dance works, as well as chairwoman of De Frie Koreografer. www.laravejrupostan.com
Yeong-Ran Suh is a choreographer, performer, and researcher based in Copenhagen and Seoul. Based on autoethnography, decolonizing, shamanism, traditional dance, modernization, and mythology, she has created multidisciplinary/dance performances. She is a member of , a climate activism performance group, and writes and makes performances upon traditional ecological knowledge and collective future-making. She studied for an MFA in Choreography at the Korea National University of Art and an MA in Religious Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Eva Johanna Forsehag is a dancer based in Copenhagen. She graduated with a bachelor in fine arts from the Danish National school of Performing Arts in 2020, and has since then worked in various productions by Norrdans, Cantabile2, Kasper Ravnhøj, Fabio Liberti and Jernej Bizjak. Johanna is interested in pedagogy within performance art and has worked as a dance teacher at a musical school for the last three years. Johanna also performed in Lara’s debut work THE SWIMMER, which premiered in 2022.
Ella Östlund (she/her) is a dancer and performer based in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Since 2022 she holds a BFA in dance and choreography from The Danish National School of Performing Arts. Ella’s artistic ground and interests lie in the materiality of performing and where it meets dance’s virality and production of meaning. As a dancer Ella has worked with various choreographers like Alma Söderberg, Malin Elgán, Matija Ferlin, Renan Martins, Julie Rasmussen and Samuel Feldhandler. As a maker, she performs her own work, which traverses questions of voice, body, and gathering, as well as collaborating on the project ‘YOUR HEART OUT’ with Ottavia Catenacci.
Thora Eriksen (she/her) is a freelance light designer, based in Copenhagen. She graduated from The Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2023, with the graduation performance TO LIVE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE. Thora debuted at Blaagaard Theater with the performance TR!P in September 2023, a devised performance, directed by Emil Rostrup. Thora is driven by finding where the light both enhances and brings new aspects to the work and its context. She loves small nuances and big moments, and is not afraid to become banal or to repeat herself, as long as it serves the shared unique work.
Moritz Nahold is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer. He has worked with God’s Entertainment, Simon Mayer, Akemi Takeya and Peter Kutin among others. His works have been displayed at Elevate Festival, ImPulsTanz and Brut. Under his moniker Subletvis, he explores the facets between post-digital pop aesthetics and abstract compositions. His music has been released on Ventil Records, Denovali, Ashida Park and Tender Matter. https://subletvisions.net/
Max Schwidlinski is a scenographer based in Leipzig, Germany. He Studied theater, film and media studies at the University of Vienna and stage and film design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The main feature of his stage space is the combination of raw materials and finished objects that tell a well-known reality bordering on fiction. He is intensively involved in the use of projections in theater and dance. His goal is to use the video screens not as objects, but as playful and acted situations. After working in the independent scene in Copenhagen and Vienna, Max Schwidlinski’s first works were seen at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Theater Bonn and Konzerthaus Berlin. In addition, he created the work “The Swimmer” with Lara Vejrup Ostan in Copenhagen in 2022. The premiere of “The Cat Eleonore” by Caren Jeß (director: Simon Werdelis) was awarded the Acting Prize and the Audience Prize at the 48th Mühlheimer Theatertage 2023. From the 2023/24 season, Max is the in-house set designer at the “new Theater Halle”. https://maxschwidlinski.com/