September 5+7. Anna Pehrsson (SE): Unthinkable objects

Düsseldorf, march 5, 2013, 12.03. Erkrather Strasse 70. The system is looking at itself in hesitation. A woman walking under the german sun. Action: Sensation! In between a step, drawn into the event. A suspension, a falling, breaks the habitual laws of gravity, into what is a passing through falling. A shift in equilibrium, and a registration and resonation of the new: “Sensation is the transformational call-back to feeling of the so-automatic as to be ignored” (B.Massumi). A woman is walking under the german sun, and sensation all of a sudden calls habit to system alert.

/Anna Pehrsson

Weld open the performance autumn season 2014 with the premiere of the swedish choreographer and Cullberg dancer Anna Pehrssons project Unthinkable objects. This piece is the result of a two year long process at University of Dance and Circus, DOCH in Stockholm 2011-2013.

 
If loss of equilibrium is the task of a dancer, it risks established norms of conduct and brings them into a state of dissolution. It breaks reproduction and favors redistribution. It reinvents bodies, affects and senses. Loss of equilibrium calls for a critical view on the idea of freedom and the creative industry as a whole. "Being other than well-balanced" does things differently.
 
Unthinkable Objects is grounded in a series of studies of choreographic works. In chronological order, Pehrsson worked with Deborah Hay I think not, Rachel Tess Souvenir, Cristina Caprioli Very Very (with Anna Grip as a coach) and the practice behind Paz Rojo's Lo que séa moviendóse asì.
Through these studies, she negotiates body politics, ideas of embodiment and presence. The choreographic proposals become a map of confrontation and formulation, a practical bodily analysis that creates a network of linking strategies. Juxtaposed, and placed next to each other, these practices impose their own frictions. Pehrsson searches for the relationship between activation and crisis.

At the edges, she looks for the in-between through various speculative methods, unclear concepts and paradoxes. Moving back and forth between transformation and retrospective, non-linear thinking and logical stopping, she constructs an environment that produces a loss of equilibrium, a freed thinglyness.

 
Choreography and dance: Anna Pehrsson
Mentor: Siegmar Zacharias
Lights: Thomas Zamolo
 
Thank you:
Deborah Hay, Cristina Caprioli, Rachel Tess, Paz Rojo – for your choreographies
and to my mentors Mårten Spångberg, Anna Grip and Siegmar Zacharias,
Thomas Zamolo for the collaboration, Rachel Tess and Frédéric Gies for artistic advice.
 
Anna Pehrsson
received her education at Balettakademien in Stockholm and at Dansarutbildningen at the University of Dance, between 1997 and 2001. After her education she has been active as a freelance dancer in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. She worked at The City Theatre in Stockholm between the years 2005-2006 followed by a position at Alias Compagnie/ Guilherme Botelho in Switzerland. She has danced and collaborated with companies and choreographers such as Recoil Performing Group, Denmark, Christoph Winkler, Germany, Alexandra Waierstall, Germany and Deborah Hay, USA. Today, she is a dancer in the swedish Cullberg Ballet. During 2011-2013 she received her MA in dance and choreography at The University of Dance and Circus (DOCH) and started along with her own project Unthinkable objects, a close collaboration with the American, Sweden based choreographer, Rachel Tess, previous a dancer at Cullberg Ballet.