Performance: Lovers

Dance artist Brita Grov and architect Maria Helena K. Nerhus are working together on a multi-disciplinary collaboration project under the working title ‘ Lovers’. Here, we are looking into longing and belonging. The performative piece explores how intangible emotions connected to the notion of love can be transformed into relations between handmade textile sculptures and body through movements, gestures and interactions. Keywords are weight, balance, compositions, constellation and union. Love is an integrated part of human nature, and we ask ourselves how to teach a non-human to love? 

In ‘The myth of Sisyphus’, Albert Camus discusses the absurd human being, and that the absurd arises when there is a gap between the inner life and the world around. Author Olga Ravn gives objects human characteristics in the book “The Employers, a workplace novel of the 22nd century.”  Inspired by Camus’ explanation of the world as absurd, as well as Olga Rawn’s thought experience, including human hybrids with feelings, a sense of attachment, we are exploring spatial and bodily compositions of affection. 

The performance is building up on the tension between the dancer’s body and the object in space. The thematic starting point for ‘Lovers’ is a spectrum of emotions linked to love transferred to the relationship between object and human being. In foresight, we shift from exploring inner emotional life to the world around us and how they relate to each other. The individual has a subjective influence on how the world is perceived, what defines right and wrong, ethics and morality. In the work leading up to the exhibition, we examine how objects can become active actors in the situation.