Smoke begins the piece. The smoke camouflages itself against the white room, which in turn
is camouflaged by the smoke. This opening theatrically obscures the room, suspending the
time and place of what is to come. Suddenly, a person appears in a window, taking down one
of the shutter pieces covering it. The smoke begins to dance as the sun rays move through it.

The person walks around. Their movements remind me of a janitor. The janitor becomes an
archetype, and it gives the room a definition. The janitor begins to dance, and the archetype
fades as the dance moves through it. The room changes connotation again, I now feel more
familiar with MDT’s architecture. It is silent, save for the sound of cowboy boots against the
wooden floor, even though the floor is covered in white marley.

The person leaves and re-enters accompanied by a fangirl’s scream. “Harris!” We soon get to
know Harris as an almost-pop icon. Here, he lives the story that never came to be: a boyband
megastar just entering an arena in the 90s. I’m still not sure if Harris is real or a fantasy. I take
him for a conglomeration of imagination, desire, and plausibility.

Things appear to me as references. In the dance phrases, I glimpse friends who are also
referenced as co-creators of these phrases. The phrases themselves refer to a particular
discourse of dance which the rest of the piece doesn’t necessarily reference. The storytelling
references a personal fate, a dream of fame and success fed by empty promises. Harris’ dream
of being chosen as a Backstreet Boy, devouring in his hopes while waiting (“don’t call us,
we’ll call you” references another time—no one calls these days) is strikingly relatable. In a
room presumably dominated by artists, this reference detaches from its original context to
reattach somewhere else, relatable to the extent that it ceases to be a reference and becomes
embodied. While fame in this sense is foreign to our line of business, where success means
you can afford to continue to hustle, we can all recognize ourselves in the suspended time of
waiting. Amidst these references, narrative trajectories are cut, interrupted, and picked back
up.

The smoke that continues to pour out of the delicate scenography leads me to the phrase
“smoke and mirrors.” The deception Harris is put through; the deception of the possibility of
fame; the theatre’s capacity to deceive the present with its fiction. I take pleasure in the
boldness with which the apparatus is approached, the scenic choices marked by a directness I
personally associate more with a German discourse than Stockholm’s minimalism.

I take another position. Departing from the point of reference, I let it carry me to the thing
referenced. The reference makes a portal away from the here-and-now. The cowboy boots
bring me to the South of the United States. The auditions for Backstreet Boys bring me to the
early 90s. Harris is wedged between archetype and ghost, the re-performance of this 90s
wannabe boyband star marked by a certain nostalgia. The performance of gender and
especially masculinity isn’t quite in the category of drag, but instead a referenced imagery,
itself somewhat an idolization/iconography. It references work like Eisa Jocson’s "Macho
Dancer", and works by Halla Ólafsdóttir and Amanda Apetrea, among others. Other
references operate otherwise: the fangirl in the audience leads me back to Hannah, to perceive
her embodiment of Harris as an act of fangirl-ing itself. I wonder what about Harris—whether
real or not—is alluring enough to make a piece about him. I wonder what it is about the
performance of celebrity or stardom that continues to amaze. As a kind of myth-writing,
Harris becomes a token for the “almost” where the phantasm of the idol is both reinforced and
undone. In its spectrality, the idol lives through the system of fandom which accompanies it.
By letting Harris take this stage to live his boyband dream, I’m produced as a particular kind
of audience. I enjoy the cheerful group of fans I’m now a part of.

Gry Tingskog (they/them) works with choreography together with dance, sculpture, technology, DIY programming and text, making experimental scenic and sensorial experiences. Their practice moves between making performances in a collaborative manner, performing for others, institutional critique, teaching, dramaturgy and writing. By crafting how various scenic mediums come together to choreograph the audience's perception and attention, Gry explores how to set the conditions for a dance which takes place more in the body and imagination of the audience, then on stage in front of them. Their work has been presented in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway and France in theatres as well as in museums and galleries. www.grytingskog.com

BY GRY TINGSKOG

HANNAH KREBS / u n f i n i s h e d

b u s i n e s s