Re-imagining Duet #1 – creating the first stage work as part of a dancer-initiated longterm process reformulating the duet as form in dance.

Re-imaging Duet is a long-term, dancer-initiated artistic research into re-investigating, re-imagining and re-formulating the duet as form in dance. Opening for a multifaceted investigation into yet imaginable ways of being in relation, we - dancers Karolina Ginman & Marlon Moilanen - invite three choreographers during 2022-26 to dive into this research with us, each through their respective artistic practices creating three self-standing works for stage or gallery spaces. We are now applying for a residency for the first artistic outcome of the project: a stage work created for and with us by Berlin-based, Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir that will premiere in Helsinki in the spring 2024. In the history of Western dance art, duet is often danced/constructed as a natural co-dependency between a female and male dancer, where they support and challenge each other physically or emotionally - many times straightforwardly associated with an image of a dogmatic bourgeois cis-heterosexual relationship. Duet is also often danced as a symbiosis where, rather than forth-articulating two subjects in reciprocity, two dancers appear as one entity. The desire for collaborations that challenge such apparent aesthetics and practices in dance art (and wider societal discourse) has guided our invitation of choreographers. Gudjónsdóttir's deep-investigative work and distinct aesthetic persistently keep challenging what dance and reciprocity can be. Deepening our practice of her FULL DROP method and the artistic dialogue that has commenced between us in 2019, the aim of the residency is to work with HYPER STATES that allow us to explore altered modes of perception of our bodies, each other, our borders, insides and outsides. Experiencing the duet through deeply subjective and corporeal states of the psychic body can explode/dissolve/melt simplified or outdated models of being in relation.