Video documentation

The performance takes place in a scarcely furnished room. The only set design are some tables and chairs, a few biscuits, some yoga mats litters the room. The performers move through a set choreography of expressions of emotions. Contrary to the seemingly improvisational and unspectacularly sloppy movements, the work is in fact very precise. Each performer has to struggle through his or her own trajectory and muscle up the right emotion for each bodily posture and movement. Their aim is to at all times truthfully perform the emotion demanded of them. We become aware of the different performers´ strategies on how to handle this specific form of emotional labour. The audience is taken through a dramaturgy that flows through 4 archetypical emotions, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and happiness and through compositions and juxtapositions of variations of these. The actors perform choreography, solo and ensemble, create secretive and mystical fictions that are dissolved continuously and relate to each other in non-determined situations that opens up to the imagination of the audience. The Expressions of the Emotions is an interdisciplinary theater productions that bases itself on the production of gestures and muscular movements that can be perceived as naturalistic expressions of emotions, and try to choreograph these in spatial and temporal compositions for an audience in a proscenium situation. The performance tries to merge the concept of dance as a dance in itself, that does not try to tell a story, with a physical vocabulary strongly associated with traditional realism in  theater, namely the realistic expressions of human emotions. In the theater the expression of emotions are believable inside the aesthetic frames of the performance, but always explained from the action. The dancer has on the other hand found abstract gestures for expressions of emotions. We are neither interested in explanations nor sublimation. You could regard the performance as a meditation. When you meditate, emotions come and go, pleasant and unpleasant. The meditative practice, speculative as it may seem, consists of observing thoughts and emotions and their effects, acknowledge them and let them be. The expressions of emotions, the intensity and emotionality that are produced on stage in this performance do not want anything from the audience, the emotions exhibit themselves with their effects through the actors and it its up to the audience member to create logic, possible narratives or just observe themselves and the work. We want to get out of a territory where emotions on stage support an overarching manipulating scheme to persuade or influence the spectator, where emotions can just be emotions as themselves that are represented.