Ginman & Moilanen with Gujónsdóttir

Re-imaging Duet is a long-term, dancer-initiated artistic research into re-investigating, re-imagining and re-formulating the duet as a 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. 

At the Saari Residence, we work on 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 of 2024. 

In the history of Western dance art, a 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 two dancers appear as one entity rather than forth-articulating two subjects in reciprocity. The desire for collaborations that challenge such apparent aesthetics and practices in dance art (and broader societal discourse) has guided our invitation to 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 commenced between us in 2019, the residency aims 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the duet through deeply subjective and corporeal states of the psychic body can explode/dissolve/melt simplified or outdated models of being in relation.