tovagerge

I went to the first two blocks of the Last Minute Festival Dec 6 2025. A block meant three artists
presenting directly after each other. Each block was around an hour long, and the performances
were around 20 minutes each.

I went there with my thirteen-year-old kid. He saw a few performances before in his life, but
he isn't a representative contemporary dance spectator. I will take the liberty of making my
review partly through his gaze. I think it's a good change of perspective.

We were quite early so we first followed a spatial score that Erik Linghede made, starting
from a small camping tent. We were listening to pop and R'n'B in headphones while
walking along a thread of suspended photos that we could direct a miniature flashlight beam towards
in order to see them properly along the dimly lit walls. Some photos were harder to see because
they were so high up that the beam didn't reach them. I followed the thread and
walked behind a screen made of flowery cloth that was clearly prepared for something else. I
was a bit unsure if I was allowed to do that. My kid walked around it instead and missed some
photos. I remember images of young people, houses and nature, but no specific motive comes
to my mind in retrospect. My kid said there were several pretty cool photos and that it felt
forbidden to just take the headphones off the rack. He put it back very carefully.

The first block started. We sat down in one sun lounger each on the main stage. We saw Esta
Kirabo channeling and receiving spiritual energy through her voice. She talked and sang and
live-composed a song from three statements audience members made about how their day was
(soft, very sweet, expectations). The audience felt kind and supportive and at the same time a
bit careful so as not to put themselves in the direction of attention too quickly even though it
was probably not a dangerous kind of attention. Then it was suddenly over, I mean, it felt like
my body could have dived into that and stayed for quite long. My kid said that it was really
great and I agreed and said I didn't know what it was but I liked it. He said he was really
vibing with the music and that it was the best thing he ever saw in his life.

Then the chairs and cushions were moved around and we didn't know where to sit and where
the next thing would begin until we saw people gathering around Freddy Houndekindo in the
corner of the stage. Then we went there and sat on the floor, moving around a lot because
Houndekindo was progressing diagonally through the audience. There were also cameramen
moving along and it made me think of seeing shibari performances where the performance
logic is often like "high-res pics taken close up by semiprofessional photographers or it
didn't happen". The festival photographers seemed very professional though. I was a
bit busy with who they were and what they saw and I was wondering if that was part of the show
or if I was supposed to just disregard them. Meanwhile, what Houndekindo did was to go through a set
of repetitive movements that mixed a rhythmical aspect with attacking the own body with
strikes and stabs and strokes, and then after a while he started using words in an abstract way,
like saying "my name is/I wrote a poem." I felt like the audience was very enthusiastic,
maybe because they were suddenly so many. Also, I met a friend before the shows who said she
didn't want to miss Houndekindo and then I saw another friend in the audience who I knew
has worked with him. So, I guess I remembered how nice it can be to be carried through by a
community when you perform. Houndekindo made a funny end, dropping the performative
quality so abruptly it made the audience giggle, without any sense of holiness.

My kid didn't say anything after except about where to sit next, so I don't know what
he was experiencing. When we got up from the floor, we saw that we had almost been sitting in dog
poo! That was a close call. We were considering telling someone but there were already
cushions being spread out in new places and everything went so quickly.

Dog poo apart, I enjoy this way of using MDT's main stage as a social space. I also saw The
Lustholmen Cabaret – Wallmans Ballonger (June 14 2025) with a similar format where
audience seats and shorter performative acts populated the whole area. There's a twofold
benefit of doing this. Firstly, when you preserve the 234 square meters of the main stage for one single
performer, that performer becomes so infinitely lonely. That's an aesthetic effect that you
might desire or not. With Last Minute Festival, the goal was clearly something more informal
and quotidian. Secondly, there is something about the MDT foyer that kills intimacy. The
narrow L-shaped hallway makes it impossible to sit down or move comfortably if you're any
more than ten people. And there's no overview of the space since it bends. It's like y
ou're close to everybody and no one at the same time. Instead moving freely all over the main
stage and the multi-level auditorium, allows you to be as far or close as you want to others while
still sharing the same world. That nurtures a sense of community.

The next act, with Spacewife Nova Sutra, entailed a drag-queen-like character with a big
carefully crafted styrofoam egg and something that resembled a garden tool (?) that I don't
know the name of in any language. This character alternated between reading a story about a
Kinder Surprise alien that hatched inside the throat of a friend, and attacking the egg with the
tool. The different layers of the story shaped and shifted the meaning of the egg attacks,
which also functioned as a refrain in the storytelling.

My kid joyfully gasped next to me the whole performance and said again afterwards that it
was the best thing he ever saw. This is me interpreting, but I think he recognized the queer
aesthetic and felt at home somehow. He also said: "I would like to come with my friends to
one of these things. We should arrange that." I agreed and told him that most dance or art
venues would be over the moon to receive a group of young teens. I think that's true, but then
I also started thinking a bit about why we would be more likely to bring his friends to the
cinema or something, and why I wrote like three times to Ravel asking them to clear with
MDT if I could bring my kid to this event. I guess it's because while cinema has its age rating
systems and trailers, with dance and art you often don't know what you get. It's like we
assume it's for grown-ups until the opposite has been proven? And at the same time, if
something would explicitly proclaim itself family friendly, grown-ups would instead shy
away from going there without their kids? Maybe there is some work to be done there, with
how audiences are addressed and described.

That was what was going on in my head during the small break. We also argued about what to
buy in the bar. He won.

After the break, Isolde Berkquist and a colleague put on their show. I don't know the name of
the colleague because I didn't find it written anywhere, which also made me attentive to the
absence of creds for helpers in all of the performances (like, did they all make their own
music and props or were there other people involved?). Maybe I missed some information?

Berkquist and an unknown colleague had brought out the screen of cloth that I walked behind to
look at photos before. They first used it to make a shadow play. Then they used it as a
backdrop. The whole thing was a completely erratic live commercial for a fictive weight-loss
product called Bunk. They were dressed as older men, one with a silicone mask and one with
an authentic beard, and spoke about how Bunk changed their lives and how they now can't
live without it. The erratic quality involved losing track of the publicity logic in an almost
schizophrenic trail of associations. It all ended in the desire to get a job, completed with the
distribution of small notes with a phone number and the message "hire me". My kid
glanced at me, like: "They are insane, right?" I was thinking that it looked a lot like
something he and his friends could have come up with. By that I mean a character-driven play that
endlessly makes fun of recognizable stereotypes until they're not really recognizable anymore. I
told him that. I just meant to tell him something I saw. But I felt he upgraded his evaluation of
what the show was worth through me saying that. Like I gave him a mirror and he liked
himself in it.

The space changed again and Amanda Apetrea entered wearing a bear costume with a bare
ass and the tail placed below the belly poking out like a half-erect penis. My kid found this
infinitely embarrassing and covered his face in order to not see. I whispered to him that
Apetrea is a colleague of mine that she very often performs more or less naked. For some
reason this seemed soothing, like then it's more normal or he didn't have to take
responsibility for the expected shame of the performer. Apetrea moved a very light cardboard as
if it was very heavy in a not very convincing mime and then uncovered a miniature grand piano.
She sat down on a tree stump she brought in a plastic bag from the local food store and mimed
playing an elaborate piano version of Over the Rainbow with her big bear paws. Then she
bowed in a concert pianist style and went out.

Lydia Ö. Diakité took over the space in a much more authoritarian manner than the other
artists of the first two blocks. Wearing a blue and yellow football t-shirt with the text
"Främling 99" ("Stranger 99"), she cleared a big square space mid-stage.
This made a lot of people including us go to the auditorium. Then she called us down to the stage
level again saying the show worked best from up close. We obeyed. An instrumental loop from Carola
Häggkvist's Eurovision Song Contest contribution Främling from 1983 started blasting, and
Diakité repeated a sequence of explosive movements stepping around her square, sometimes
breaking it up with a few moves on floor level. The expression seemed to originate in
commercial dance styles with elements of popping and locking, performed in a very executive
and almost military (or sporty?) way. After a while, the instrumental loop gradually slowed
down and Diakité did the same until dancing almost in slow motion while retaining the
rhythmical markers of the sequence, which highlighted the consistency and level of technical
skill of this dance. When Diakité got down on the floor, some people were cheering and then
kind of stopped mid-cheer, maybe because they were unsure about whether to celebrate the
possibly sexual expression in this dance or whether these qualities were more a part of an
ironic game. When the musical loop started to become more of a low growl, it disintegrated
into separate rhythmical patterns in a deep pitch until replaced by silence. Diakité then
grabbed a microphone and with a mocking voice sang a modified version of the Swedish
lyrics of the song until leaving the room: "Främling/vad döljer du för mig/i dina blåa
ögon?/En svag nyans/av ljus nånstans/men ändå/en främling" (Stranger/What are you hiding
from me/in your blue eyes/A vague shade/of light somewhere/but still/a stranger).

After this, the second block was finished and there was information about a slightly longer
show by Moa Cedercrona starting in one of the smaller stages downstairs in MDT. My kid
said: "We're going there, right?" and I was so close to yielding but instead I
said it was too late for us and that we needed to go home and sleep. He kept asking me if I was
sure we needed to go home all the way down to the bridge from the island and I almost turned around,
but I didn't. On the bridge, he said he liked the publicity for the weight-loss product Bunk the most
but that Spacewife Nova Sutra was still the best thing he ever saw and that it was so cool that
you could "do that" with the music of Främling (pitch it, I think is what he meant) and that it
was possible to dance so slow still in rhythm. "But what was it about? It was about football,
right?" he said. I said I thought it was more about Swedish nationality and racism; that maybe
Diakité heard this song many times thinking about how it's also about color, because Carola in
the original lyrics sings about the dark eyes of a stranger. As if you're a stranger if your eyes
are dark, you see? He said he got it. Then we saw some light installations across the water,
and I thought I should just have asked him what he was thinking about football. Now I missed
that chance.