Transportation from the hotel, departure time will be announced
TRIPTYCON* is a collection of three solo works that marks Jonas Øren’s fascination for idealization: It portrays the desire to be something else – something unattainable.
“Someone must see me so that I can be possessed by whoever sees me”
Luce Irigaray (Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist) writes in “Invisible of the Flesh”.
Together, the works marks Øren´s entrance into a praxis using movement, dance and choreography as a way to investigate self-performance and how bodily references, quotations and mirroring defines, builds and marks identity. The dance works deal with personal as well as general understandings of (bodily) ideals – and what opposes them – objectification, glamourisation and queer performativity strategies.
*The term tryptich– triptycon – refers to an artwork that can be displayed as a single piece or opened to reveal three parts.
Somewhat Deconstructed (2019-2021)
A choreographic approach to the idealization of William Forsythe. using the words of Arthur Rimbaud, “Je est un autre”. In this case, the (great) Other is the clean spectacle of the male solos and the famous pas de deux with Sylvie Guillem from In the Middle Somewhat Elevated, sourced from Youtube-videos. Material from the iconic ballet is extracted and analyzed emphasizing my body as a cognitive medium. It is then given personal meaning through personal or fantasy-driven narratives. Idealization yields autonomous imitation. This project is first and foremost about mirroring; seeing oneself as something different than what is possible.
Somewhat Deconstructed explores what self-portraiture can be through a symbiotic deconstruction of music and choreography: The work is about finding parts of a musical composition and a ballet that work, but also challenge the body in such a way that the dancer has to fail. The aim is to actively objectify the dancing ‘Jonas’. On stage, the dance interpretation and Jonas are staged in such a way that the lines between reality and fiction are erased. The performativity plays on and challenges the meeting with the audience.
The two parts are based on the movements of two of the dancers in the original production of the ballet, which also gave the name to these roles – Sylvie (Guillem) and Laurent (Hilaire). ‘These are dancers and are roles that had and require an extreme physicality. The encounter with the dance material is an impossible task. With this as a starting point, I created a choreography in which I utilize individual movements from the choreography and recompose them. In this way, the original work is deconstructed – reconstructed – in my staging of myself as one of the elite dancers in a classical ballet company.
Concept, dance and choreography: Jonas Øren, Music: Erik Spanne, Re-admission supported by Fond for Lyd og Bilde