Sep 18. Lichen Dances / Dinis Machado (SE/PT)
Lichen Dances
initiated by Dinis Machado with youth from Filipstad.
Performed by: Fthawit Habtom, Barwako Mahad Yusuf, Dinis Machado, Linda Boatemaa, Nahom Gebrhwet, Susanne Berggren, Rahma Mahamed Aadan.
Lichen Dances is the sharing of the process of a series of 21 encounters throughout 6 months. These encounters with a group of teenagers and young adults of Filipstad were Initiated by Dinis Machado, accompanied by musician Rayo and photographer Lo River Lööf and made possible in partnership with Filipstads Kommun. During these meetings, we researched possibilities of what can be a future Filipstads Summer company in this context – an industrial city within a vast forest, and definitely a space of encounter and negotiation of migratory trajectories of Machado and so many others towards living and dancing together.
Dinis Machado has since 2019 shared their base between Stockholm and Filipstad. Throughout the Pandemic, Filipstad’s forest became a safe space for research of their individual work exploring relations between ecology – as the artificial development of the sustainability of nature – and their transition – as the sustainable consubstantiation of their trans body into the future.
Lichen Dances, as a gesture into collectivity, is the launching project of a homonymous artistic structure – Lichen Collaborations – that has now its beginning. A next step, where Machado aims to create a platform for exchange research and production with other artists in the city as well as provide first experiences with art to local young adults.
A lichen is a symbiotic organism composed of the collaboration of an algae with a fungi in a mutualistic relationship. The algae share its photosynthesis with the fungus, and the fungus shelters the algae. Inspired by the survival strategy of lichens, these dances are a group of small symbiotic experiments between different people, activities, patrimonies, ideas of what dance can be, strategies of enacting them, translations and re-approximations. They weave through practice a ritualistic space of common dancing and understanding, both uncanny for all and hopefully progressively familiar. Departing from dancing together while sharing favourite music and favourite places, they translated movement into words, words into movement, and back again. They sang movements and moved to sang songs, slowly sedimenting a mysterious movement maze.
Artistic initiative and choreographic coaching by Dinis Machado.
Dance development and performance Fthawit Habtom, Barwako Mahad Yusuf, Dinis Machado, Linda Boatemaa, Nahom Gebrhwet, Susanne Berggren, Rahma Mahamed Aadan.
Photography by Miranda Svendsen, Mohamud Aden and Adam Emretsson with the coaching of Lo River Lööf.
Singing by Ida Eckerwall and Sara Boatemaa
Original soundtrack by Rayo
Dj’ing by Linda Boatemaa with the coaching of Rayo
Special thanks to Susanne Berggren.
The project had its first showing September 9 in Spångbergsgymnasiet’s auditorium in Filipstad
A Production by BARCO productions/Dinis Machado and LICHEN Collaborations Association in co-production with Kulturskolan and Ungdomens Hus in Filipstads Kommun and Weld Stockholm // Project Financed by Kulturrådet
Weld is supported by Stockholms stad, the Swedish Arts Council and Region Stockholm