> BAKLÄNGESEN
BAKLÄNGESEN
BAKLÄNGESEN
12th of May 2023
Take a step back, back into your back, through your core and to your past.
A step back to what’s behind in order to lean into what will come.
A shift of your awareness from front oriented to back oriented.
A move towards the back as an attempt to soften your gaze and allowing your skin to listen and articulate in all its direction.
Accepting
Yelding
Sensing
What if you would make a front with your back?
BAKLÄNGESEN is a perfomance made for Public Something at Stockholm University of the Arts 11th - 13th of May 2023.
It is part of Matildas ongoing research within her Master degree in Choreography.
In the north west European society where I live and work I am experiencing a strong culture of a front. Future-forward-leaning, goal oriented, uprightness. A culture where vision, knowledge and control are strongly related to each other and to our front. Strength, health and success are highly valiued and prefearbly being fronted in social media on screens in front of us.
As a dancer I grew up in a dance studio with a mirror as the clear front, always witnessing the frontside of my body.
Nowadays as a performer I am fronting an audience constantly...
But what about my back?
What about the backspace of our bodies? The parts of our bodies we can’t see ourselves.
What about the spaces behind us?
What about our past? The hidden parts. The shaddowed or dark sides of our lives that makes us complex human beings?
What's inbetween?
What about our vulnerabilities?
How could a shift in our awareness from front oriented to back oriented have an affect and maybe even re-shape our perception of time, movement, and relation to oneself and others? In other words, by bringing awareness to our backspace and periphery I’m curios how it will affect our being and relating in the world we are living in.
What if we would make a front with our backs?
And by doing so, I’m wondering if it, the shift, can deconstruct or diminish structures of norms and power?
Since I am interested in, and working with the dance that is to be performed and seen by others, I am wondering: how could such a bodily experiment include both the witness and the performer?
I’m curious what is, or becomes, the relation between our back/front and witness/performer when we play with facts, fantasy and fiction to swop places of front and back.
Hopefully, this exploration creates an observation that requires our concepts of things to shift.
Link to research
Credits
Concept and choreography: Matilda Bilberg
Dance: Rebecka Berchtold, Philip Berlin, Matilda Bilberg
Sound: Luz González
Light: Mali Dönmez
Costumes: Matilda Bilberg
Video and photography: Malin Korkeasalo
With the support of: Stockholm University of the Arts, Jennifer Lacey, Martin Sonderkamp, Hannah Krebs, Ekin Tunçeli, Gergö D. Farkas, Zak Valenta, Ira Wuolle, Vilma Mankonen, Linda Wardal