FIKSDAL/LANGGARD/BECKER
author: Hedda Abildsnes
Fiksdal, Langgård and Becker are graduates of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. They make projects merging visual arts, concert and performance art. The Orchard Ballads, their previous project, was presented in several versions in Norway, Sweden and New York, where it was received with great acclaim. Ingri Midgard Fiksdal, a choreographer, Ingvild Langgård, a composer, and Signe Becker, set designer, explore the idea of nature as a place of both healing and destructive forces, immanence and transcendence. Their actions combine elements of concert, ritual and social event.
Ingri Midgard Fiksdal (b. 1982) is a Norwegian choreographer and performer. She is based in Oslo and has been making work since graduating from the MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2006. Her work tours internationally to venues such as brut-Wien (AUS), Kampnagel (DE), Inkonst (SE), MDT (SE), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (FI), The Armory Show (US), LIMIT Festival (RS), HIFA (ZIM), Nordwind (DE), Baltoscandal (EST) and Homo Novus Festival (LT). Fiksdal has recently been admitted into the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Program, and has from October 2013 commenced on a three-year artistic research project (PhD).Fiksdal’s work deals with perception and affectivity, and several of her pieces take shape as part performance and part live concert. The audience is always integral to the work, which aims to produce temporary collectives between performers and spectators. This notion of collectivity here refers to modes of attention and sensorial transference, rather than to interactivity. An ongoing theme within Fiksdal’s work is the ritual, and the rituals‘ inherent capacity of transforming and ultimately transcending its partakers. This is approached from various angles to research how these capacities could be transferred to the performance-concerts created. Within this, the relation between cognition and affectivity, and how they operate in perception and in production of meaning, is central.
Ingvild Langgård is a composer, musician and artist, educated from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (2006), specializing in sound art She works in different media, and composes and performs music for stage, film, and in her own main music project, Phaedra. Phaedra released the album The Sea for Norwegian avant garde label Rune Grammofon in 2011. Phaedra’s music is a mix of folk and psychedelia with a dash of blues and soul; sacred deadth hymns and shimmering atmospheres, combining crystalline vocals,m folk instruments and deep bass lines, with a touch of pure Scandinavian darkness. As with all of Langgård’s work it blends homegrown mythology, baroque esthetics and the possibility of altering the perception of the audience. Her work is shown in national and international museums and galleries, such as The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Lydgalleriet, Bergen, and Chashama Gallery in New York. Langgård has been awarded several grants for her work, an received the Norwegian State’s Working Grant for young artists twice.
Signe Becker is a freelance scenographer and artist. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad (2006) and a Master’s Degree in visual culture from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2008). Her artistic projects include theatre- and dance productions, as well as personal art projects as installations, pictures and video work. In recent years, she has worked on a number of productions in Norway, and since six years she has been a permanent scenographer at Verk Produksjoner. Their The Eternal Smile won the price of The performance of the year 2011, and Becker was nominated for best scenography for the performance Stalker 2013. She also curates and orgnizes ++, a monthly art event held in the foyer at Black Box Theatre, Oslo.
FIELD_WORKS
The group consists of Heine Avdal, Fabrice Moinet, and Yukiko Shinozaki. The main goal of their work is to find a balance between technological and human forms of communication. In each of their production one can find traces of what remains of the destroyed opposition between the artificial and the organic. The recurring themes of their work include: focusing on space, processing information and replication. They consider video, sound, light, and distribution of space in the creative process as equivalent elements with dancers, performers and the audience. They seek poetry in everyday life, shifting and transferring sounds and actions. Details are changed in order to increase experiencing the reality, not to replace it.
IMPURE COMPANY
Impure Company was founded in 2000 by Hooman Sharifi, a choreographer of Iranian origin, living and working in Norway. Sharifi’s dance performances are filled with an expression of physical power. Spontaneous and intense at the same time, they result from meticulous thinking and choreography, and their motions are somewhere in between theatre, dance, and visual arts. Sharifi is one of few contemporary dance artists directly confronting social and political issues in his work, in accordance with the motto The Art Equals Politics, referring to the history dance theatre, deeply rooted in the work of two German artists: Rudolf Laban and Kurt Jooss.
METTE EDVARDSEN
author: L. Bernaerts
The work of Mette Edvardsen is situated within the performing arts field, also exploring other media or other formats such as video and books. She has worked for several years as a dancer and performer for Les Ballets C. de la B. with Hans Van den Broeck (1996-2000) and Christine de Smedt (2000-2005). She presents her works internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists, both as a collaborator and as a performer.
She has been developing her personal work since 2002; she has created several important theatre productions and performative actions appreciated by international audience: every now and then (2009), Black (2011), and Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010).
HAPPY GORILLA DANCE COMPANY (HGDC)
author: Aurélie Guinot Alcaraz
HGDC is a working collective where the projects are developed through process related dialogue and by continuously seeking and trying out new ways of gathering mindblowing knowledge. HGDC was founded in 2011 and is a group of artists from different fields who work cross disciplinary and present dance, music, text and space in a playful manner.
HGDC focus on the process of creation and seek to blur the difference between the process and the finished expression. The company refuses to be limited by defined expressions. To HGDC history is dance and music, movements, text and form flows through social structures where it separates and merges. The stage might as well be the stock market or the engine room of a container ship as a traditional theatre space.
THE “USTA USTA” THEATRE
author: Marta Bruszewska
“Site sensitivity” is one of the distinguishing marks of the Poznań-based group – and, at the same time, one of its biggest assets. Departure from the classically understood theatre hall instigated a multilevel game with space in which its individual parts began to function not only as elements of scenography, but also as characters of a drama. Projects of the Poznań-based Usta Usta Republika Theatre require activity of its spectators. In critics’ opinion, for last six years the Usta Usta Theatre has been specializing in actions and performances involving body, mind and imagination of a viewer. There are no comfortable chairs from which one peeks at the efforts of the actors. A spectator becomes a performer, sitting inside a cramped car, creating a performance by pressing consecutive buttons of a mobile phone, answering intimate questions in the embassy’s surveys, or betting on winning in a mysterious gambling cave. Paradoxically, the staging’s impetus does not destroy an intimate and personal nature of these experiences.
THE “STREFA CISZY” THEATRE
author: Adam Ziajski
The “Strefa Ciszy” (Zone of Silence) Theatre specializes in outdoor performances, street actions and happenings, very consciously and consistently refer to urban culture. Their performances are built on an intense dialogue with the audience and space. The group’s productions are characterized by large dose of absurdity and sarcasm, as well as ability to make the audience reflect deeply on the nature of interpersonal relationships. The “Strefa Ciszy” Theatre was established in 1993 in Poznań. The founder and leader of the group is Adam Ziajski. Since the beginning, an important role in the theatre’s activities has been played by an interactive relationship between a spectator and an actor, and by the element of carnival frolic fun. However, in many productions, humor and fun would become a peculiar tool for exposing human attitudes and rules governing social life. In the 2008/2009 season, the theatre turned again to interventions in urban spaces. The last two premieres – “Smacznego!”, prepared in the theatre’s own place and Autobus re/mix, accomplished within the project REMIX of Komuna Warszawa – are indoor performances. Since September 2012, the theatre have been working on the artistic project “Centrum Rezydencji Teatralnej SCENA ROBOCZA” in its own site.
LUDOMIR FRANCZAK
author: M. Zakrzewski
A visual artist active in the domains of multimedia, painting, printmaking, installation, design, performance art and theatre. His projects are presented in galleries, museums, public spaces and theatres in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, England, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Italy and Hungary. He collaborates with musicians (Marcin Dymiter, Robert Curgenven, Pogodno), visual artists (Magdalena Franczak, Karin Danielsson, Leo Palmestal). He received the scholarship of the International Visegrad Fund (VARP) and the grant of the Marshal of Pomorskie Voivodship; he is a winner of the awards for best experimental film at the Euroshorts 2007 Festival. His main interest is the issue of memory and identity. By means of intermedia actions, he creates complex projects, using both visual arts and history, or literature. He is the author of several artistic publications.
PAWEŁ KULA
author: Paweł Kula
Visual artist and photographer. He constructs archaic optical toys and primitive devices for photographing, drawing and showing illusion of motion. He uses a non-standard photosensitive materials: plants, luminophores, his own skin, exploring the fringes of the invention of photography. He is the co-inventor if solargraphy, and the author of foundations of the global photographic project based on this technique.
Along with Maria Stafyniak he elaborates educational activities for cultural institutions, schools and galleries using language of photography and elements of visual arts. He belongs to the team of Flying Animators of Culture of the Society for Creative Initiatives. He works as an assistant at the Department of Painting and New Media of the Art Academy in Szczecin. His works are held in the collection of “Zachęta Sztuki Współczesnej” in Szczecin and in private collections. He graduated from the faculty of Photography of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan.
AKADEMIA RUCHU THEATRE (MOVEMENT ACADEMY)
Akademia Ruchu (‘Movement Academy’) is a group of artists formed by Wojciech Krukowski in Warsaw in 1973. AR were pioneers of artistic performances in civic space, working on the threshold between theatre and visual arts. They have organised around 200 such performances since the 1970s. Described as a theatre of gestures and visual narrative, their performances relate to the most basic of situations and signals to be “found” in social space.
THEATRE OF THE EIGHTH DAY (TEATR OSMEGO DNIA)
author: Paulina Skorupska
was founded in 1964 as one of the most original and most significant groups of the very animated student theater movement from which Polish alternative theater arose. Its name derives from the Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski: “On the seventh day, the Lord God rested, and on the eighth, He created theater”. But the theater’s name carried yet another meaning – the “eighth day” symbolized a day of freedom that existed outside the official calendar. The theater’s style was influenced mostly by the work of Grotowski, but the group developed their own acting method and their own approach to creating performances through group acting improvisations. Their independence and their willingness to speak with their own voice about the surrounding world and the individual’s existence entangled in this world all got the group into trouble with the Communist state apparatus, even though it had never been intended as a political theater of opposition. Kept under surveillance by the secret police, plagued by the regular police, and accused of committing common crimes, the theater managed to create some of the most important Polish performances of the seventies, an example of extraordinary creative vitality and determination, both human and artistic: In One Breath, 1971; We have to Confine Ourselves to What has been Called Paradise on Earth…?!, 1975; A Sale for Everyone, 1977; Oh, Have We Lived in Dignity, 1979. During Martial Law (December 1981 and further into the eighties) the theatre was forbidden to present its performances in spaces other than churches (which at that time were one of the few areas more or less independent from the state authorities, and open to various activities that went beyond religious art, however defined, in their form and content). In 1985, part of the group, thanks to all sorts of subterfuges (among them fake marriages with foreign actors), left the country. One of them, Marcin Keszycki, barely managed to get out of Poland in May, 1988, after he had been refused a passport 23 times. The Theatre remained “emigre” until 1989, when they returned to Poland at the invitation of the first non-communist Minister of Culture. In the nineties the group became famous for their visually stunning, socially and politically engaged outdoor performances. They are now back in Poznan, one of Poland’s most interesting centers of alternative culture, where along with presentations of performances of their own and of other theatres, there is much creative ferment in educational, artistic, and social fields.
THE SZWALNIA THEATRE 
The Centre of Independent Culture – the Szwalnia Theatre is an open space for artistic and educational activities. It is a place of exploration, collaboration and meetings of professional and amateur artists representing various domains: theatre, film, music, and visual arts. The Centre was established by Marcin Brzozowski and the “Targowa 62” Society, an association of graduates and lecturers of the Lodz Film School, initiated in 2004.
KAROLINA FREINO
author: S. Mielnikiewicz
Karolina Freino, born in 1978 in Poland.
Studied at The Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław (sculpture), Edinburgh College of Art (School of Sculpture) and The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (MFA Public Art & New Artistic Strategies).
Since 2007 the assistant lecturer at The Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław.
Scholar, among others, of the Alfred Töpfer Stiftung (2005/6) and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2012).
Since 2006 collaborates together with Dušica Dražić (SRB), Sam Hopkins (UK/KEN) and Teresa Luzo (P) as usually4.