Join us for an afternoon of work in progress showings by Stockholm, Sweden based artists Björn Säfsten and Stina Nyberg. Refreshments will be served. This event is by invitation only. If you are interested in attending, please contact Brian Rogers at brian@chocolatefactorytheater.org

1:30pm-2:30pm Björn Säfsten – Landscapes of I

Stockholm-based choreographer Björn Säfsten is in the middle of developing a new work, Landscapes of I, which opens at Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden in February 2018. The work is created in close collaboration with the performers Sophie Augot (Sweden), Ilyas Odman (The Netherlands/Turkey) and Will Rawls (US). The Chocolate Factory has provided the working group with two weeks of residency during 17/18.

Björn Säfsten‘s choreographic method deals with repetition, transformation and production of ambiguous modes of meaning. For Landscapes of I the process lingers between the personal and the fictional, the real and the fake, the biographical and the made-up.

Three longer solos are wowen together in Landscapes of I through which personal choreographic landscapes emerge. The process works with rhythm and musicality created through repetitive use of transformative movements and sounds, creating a landscapes of questions and answers. With a blend of crips details and humour the three performer highlight chosen images of themselves, constantly moving. What is real? What is fake? Whose landscape are you stepping into or out of? Is there still something that can truly be called personal?

The material has been created during scattered periods over a year in which Björn and each performer has worked separately. Now, for the two-week residency in New York in 2018, the performers work at Gibney Dance and at The Chocolate Factory, where they for the first time encounter and meet each other’s material.

Landscapes of I lingers among memories, around manners, reflexes, conscious and unconscious actions. A hike in the landscape of our self-awareness, or the lack of. A questioning of the wish to control how we present ourselves, playing with the uncertainty of a fixed reality. An experiment with the expressions of honesty and the so-called personal.

Choreography: Björn Säfsten. Created with the performers: Sophie Augot, Ilyas Odman, and Will Rawls. Set and Lighting Design: SuToDa. Costumes: Matilda Hyttsten. Produced by Säfsten Produktion and Nordberg Movement. Co-production: Säfsten Produktion and Riksteatern. Made possible with support by the Swedish Arts Council and Stockholms Stad.

In the work and practice of choreographer Björn Säfsten the body and the mind and its connected actions are scrutinized, dissected and exposed. The focus is on creating ‘another body’, another notion of human physicality, bringing images to life that visually problematize our notion of the human nature. The physical practice expose images that occur from a certain physical action, in a chance method. The work thus takes visual turns and bends, often moulding itself whilst being performed, establishing itself anew each time for each audience encounter.

Säfsten Produktion is a platform for choreographic creativity and experimentation. A node of theoretical and practical standpoints where artists come together to speculate and visualize criticism in choreography, politics, language and the production of identity. www.bjorn-safsten.com

3pm-4pm Stina Nyberg – a Tesla Project presentation

In October 2017 Stockholm-based choreographer and performer Stina Nyberg opened her latest work “Thunderstruck” in Belgrade, Serbia. The performance is based on her obsession with the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla who in the end of the 19th century brought us several of our century’s most important innovations in electricity and communication.

For two years Nyberg has been following in Tesla’s footsteps, from former Yugoslavia to New York City, to learn everything there is to know about electricity, magic and the art of being a genius. Now, Nyberg is spending January in New York City where she is a re-current visitor, to continue her research and develop a choreographed presentation of her endeavors.

Come and hear her tell the story of how she came to visit Tesla’s private library in Belgrade, have her photo taken inTesla’s room at the Hotel New Yorker, get a hug from the boss of the Tesla Science Center on Long Island, tried to break in into the remaining building of the legendary Adam’s Power Plant in Niagara Falls, failed to build a tiny tesla coil at the Maker Space Fat Cat Fat Lab in NYC, danced with a big tesla coil in the barn of a Danish foot therapist, and finally stopped doubting the magic of electricity.

Choreography and performance: Stina Nyberg. Thunderstruck is created with the help of choreographer Andros Zins-Browne. Music: Maria W Horn. Set and Lighting Design: Josefin Hinders. Technique and Coil: Katti Alm. Research: Sandra Linnell, Stina Nyberg, Zoë Poluch.

Co-production: MDT Stockholm, Station Belgrade and Riksteatern. Made possible with support by the Swedish Arts Council, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Stockholm City, Stockholm Municipality, Kulturbryggan and [DNA] Departures and Arrivals network which is co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Commission.

Stina Nyberg works with dance and choreography and graduated from the MA in choreography at DOCH in 2012. Her practice uses conviction and illusion to create new systems of logic in order to construct the world differently, and to act accordingly. Her departure point is always a feminist approach to the body; its social and political construction and ability to move. Often working in collaboration with others – moving in between independent productions, collectives, state institutions, art and the music scene – she creates a method specific to every situation, including how we work into what we work with.

Nyberg has presented several independent works on the relation between sound and movement, as well as investigations of the political history of the body. She choreographed the Shaking the habitual show with the Swedish band The Knife, performed on tour in Europe and US between 2012-14. In 2015 she choreographed a new work for the Cullberg Ballet. In 2016, she choreographed the performance Shapes of States which investigates the relationship between the healthy body and the healthy state, with a starting point in Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Nyberg have for several years collaborated with the choreographers Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch under the name Samlingen – investigating dance history from a feminist perspective, and is an intermittent member of The Bureau for the Future of Choreography. www.1200m.org/stina

Thanks for help and support from Brian Rogers / The Chocolate Factory Theater, Craig Peterson / Abrons Arts Center and Ben Pryor / Gibney Dance. This piece was rehearsed at the Mark Morris Dance Center.