Get immersed in a work at the intersection between dance performance, installation, and a live concert – and maybe something completely different. All at once.
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else, is an engaging contemporary dance performance that extends over four hours, where the audience can freely interact with the work on their own terms – choose to stay as long as they want, take breaks and come back to a new experience.
Two dancers, a musician and a rotating stage, a light sculpture of fifteen meters in diameter and twelve speakers form the framework for Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else. A single repetitive bodily pulse is the starting point of the work and drives a continuous transformation. Empathetic relationships arise between viewer and performer, through the tireless propulsion and synchronization of the three performers.
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else is a total experience where dance, sound and space merge – from the almost imperceptible to the ecstatic – and where movement creates connections between people in a fragmented, polarized and chaotic time.
The performance is created by an international artistic team, consisting of choreographers and dancers Tim Matiakis and Rachel Tess, in collaboration with musician and composer Ulrich Ruchlinski, and lighting designer Thomas Zamolo.
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else has been developed through residencies at MARC (Milvus Artistic Research Center), Forsøgsstationen and Dansstationen. The premiere was at ARoS Kunstmuseum (Aarhus) in 2023 and the work has since been presented at Dansens Hus (Stockholm), Dansstationen (Malmö) and Teater Momentum (Odense).
Us Us / Us Else / Else Us / Else Else, is co-produced by Dansehallerne.
TIM MATIAKIS:
Tim Matiakis’ choreographic practice relates to kinesthetic, physical and dynamic potentials and how choreographic situations create experiential states that explore relationships between performer, work and viewers.
Matiakis is a Denmark-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. His works have been performed at ARoS, Dansens Hus (Stockholm), Dansstationen, Det Kongelige Teater, Corpus, Sort/Hvid, Aarhus Teater, Teater Momentum, Bellevue Teatret, HEART (Herning Museum of Contemporary Art), Det Classenske Bibliotek, Malmö Opera, Musikhuset København, Teater Får302.
Matiakis was the artistic director of Corpus, a choreographic project and contemporary dance company, within the organization of the Royal Danish Ballet, between 2012 and 2021. Corpus worked with co-creation, experimental collaborators, cross-disciplinary approaches and formatting of creations, processes, and seasons.
In 2022 he initiated and formed KINISI, a dance and choreographic project that centers around embodied sensemaking, embodied knowledge and embodied logic.
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 City, where she received a Princess Grace Award (2002), performed as a member of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, 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 Dance Company and Cullberg Ballet. In 2013, Tess received her masters in choreography from the New Performative Practices Masters 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.
She is also engaged in the ongoing project ‘These are Bodies, These are Motions, This is the Place’ with choreographer/performer Benoît Lachambre. In 2019 Tess received the prestigious Birgit Cullberg prize for her work with MARC and the premiere of the piece ‘Any number of sunsets…’. She is the recent recipient of Skånes’s regional culture prize in 2023. She has created choreographic works for Corpus (DK), Norrdans (SE), Skånes Dansteater (SE), and Danish Dance Theater (DK).
An interest in new modes of production and presentation for performance is the link between her artistic practice and her roles as curator, choreographer, and dancer.
