tilmano’donnell

Trio Variations
Reflections by Tilman O’Donnell

Introduction: How I Choose To See It

Trio Variations, choreographed and performed by Hana Lee Erdman and Louise Dahl in collaboration with Liz Kinoshita, premiered on the 15th November 2025.

Though presented at MDT Stockholm, a theater venue for contemporary performance, the work is not a typical performance experience, having other concerns than the theatrical event and the criteria by which theater/performance is usually judged. Its dramaturgical logic is not literary or semiotic, its coherence not narrative. It does not rely on character, archetype, symbol, plot, or psychological arc.¹

The concerns of Trio Variations are corporeal attention and spatial articulation: it is, as far as I can tell, a dance about the act of dancing.

It presents this act as inhabiting an autonomous and singular logic. Accordingly, I will make that logic the central focus of this piece.²

and generative. Mutually beginning on the ground floor goes a long way toward softening the blow that abstraction can levy up front. By signaling that the sharing of the material as an act precedes any one meaning it might have, it diverts us from expecting the dance to operate symbolically from the outset. This enacted share becomes a crux of the work, almost the subject itself, and it develops in surprising ways as the piece progresses.

Over the next fifty minutes, the trio reworks this raw material. Sequences surface as solos or trios, dissolve, and reappear altered by a dancer’s phrasing or orientation. Patterns stretch, collapse, slide, fall, and drift into new arrangements. This creates an inner logic that is accumulative and recursive. Watching the material change hands and feet can feel like observing listless clouds reorganize themselves in fast-forward or reverse, or like popcorn popping, the tempi of which are thrillingly unpredictable. Things moving despite themselves. The result is not confusion but a sense that time bends, and you could watch it infinitely.

The spatial design is equally clear. Pathways sweep front, back, diagonally, and in arcs. Gestures rise and fall with gravity; bodies tilt, spiral, and rebound. The dance remains distilled, almost spare.

Dahl is a wild, magnificent performer. She has a rare capacity to dance choreographically, allowing us to sense the thinking inside the dancing. Kinoshita, in equal measure, rounds and eddies the material; her phrasing creates pockets of density where gestures loop back on themselves and motifs echo across the trio. There is patience and aplomb to her dancing.
This iterative, relational practice is an invitation. The viewer is not made to decode symbols but rather to consider their relation with what appears and disappears. The abstraction is not opaque; it simply refuses to be reduced to narrative causality. The spectator is invited to perceive first and interpret from there.

The whole endeavor brings intuition to the foreground, and by consequence a wide-open, engaging attention to detail.

Lineage, Event, and the Strange Pleasure of Not-Being-the-Subject

The work isn’t completely alien: hovering around are recognizable lineages. The modern and postmodern North American dance makers Brown, Rainer, Paxton, even a faint echo of Duncan; the choreographic rigor of European and Asian makers

And still, it all feels like something big, wide open, and even at times quietly hilarious.

Consider, then, how the dancers need to approach this particular material. They do so in a way that avoids becoming theatrical “subjects” in the conventional sense. This includes gently resisting the urge to become too personal while still being sound agents of their own device, navigating the push–pull compulsion to assert a coherent self in aesthetic acts.⁶ Erdman, Dahl, and Kinoshita dance with a kind of objective subjectivity, or gently unstable objecthood, that allows a third presence to emerge between performers and audience. The result is less about who they are and more about what is happening.

Why This Matters: A Small Rant About Narrative Dominance in Dance, Generally

It might seem obvious that dance should be understood as dance rather than as failed theater. But contemporary discourse and critique still lean heavily on narrative templates: causality, motivation, development, climax.

a “life coursing through life living.”⁷

Trio Variations operates close to that register by sharing the material and insisting on its ineffable kneading or churning in, on, and around itself, ultimately pointing back to a common sense—a world of the senses we all inhabit but tend to forget about.⁸ It foregrounds the co-presence of bodies, space, and time without subordinating them to story. Moreover, it shows us how that presence can be a source for real-time decisions about space and movement.

Space, Scale, and the Conditions of Making Work Now

One of the piece’s striking achievements is generating a sense of scale in a relatively modest venue. The dance activates the room so thoroughly that the space can feel too small, and at the same time it points toward what might be possible in larger architectural contexts. Like music, which needs acoustic space to resonate, dance needs space to reverberate and, metaphorically, to bounce off the walls.

Artists today are pressured to cultivate a recognizable brand, chase relevance, and appear to change while staying legible to the market. This logic, shaped largely by online distribution platforms, replaces the multi-voiced ecosystems of earlier decades with a more flattened consensus. Swedish dance is no exception. Yet the responsibility to revalue the field, to privilege depth over easy distributability when the work calls for it, still lies at least partly with its practitioners.

Still.⁹

Trio Variations feels like a quiet but insistent argument for that choice.

About the Dance: Materials, Methods, Structures

Trio Variations reveals, rearranges, and transforms its choreographic material in real time as a study in movement.

The work opens with a solo by Hana Lee Erdman that sets the choreographic contract with unusual clarity. Like a first lesson in improvisational comedy, she gracefully reveals the building blocks, presenting an essential vocabulary of shifts of weight, pivots, gestures, swings of the arms, dynamic changes, and spatial traversals. Everything needed to read the work is laid out from the start. This strategy lets us in on the nuts and bolts of the dance.

From there, the viewer is primed to follow the dancers (and the dance) into new uncharted territory as the workunfolds, letting us have a stake in the future of the work, though we have no idea where it will go.

And what’s more: whether or not this is indeed true, it doesn’t matter, because it feels generous

The trio effectively turns the room into a kind of shared chamber, where performers and spectators inhabit the same atmospheric conditions.

Space, in this sense, is not neutral or theatrically laden. It corresponds more to the notion of a “space-for,” an always relational opening rather than a fixed container.³ Here, space-for-dance comes into being through the dancers’ actions, rather than serving as a pre-inscribed stage onto which choreography is placed. It is wonderful and disorienting all at once.

Throughout, the dancers keep orienting and reorienting to the room and to one another, so that the theater transforms into a bespoke dimension, a collaborator rather than a backdrop. Louise Dahl’s entrance following Erdman’s subtle opening solo widens the field. She reshuffles the existing material, adjusting rhythms, sharpening diagonals, and flanging phrases toward instability. She appears almost always to be falling but never does completely. It is a virtuoso act peppered with the right amount of flippancy to keep it loose and richly erratic.

such as De Keersmaeker, Caprioli, and Teshigawara; the formal and the wild, the falling and the gliding. The disappearance in order to appear. The citations are worn not as badges but as shared physical principles: sequencing, repetition, formal reorganization, gravity as partner. They show us that a sense of freedom and agency appears through a rigorous choreographic framework first.

Within this frame, the choreography generates a special set of circumstances, something akin to what philosopher Alain Badiou calls an “event,” an action or constellation of acts “that interrupts the laws, the rules, the structure of a situation and creates a new possibility.”⁴ The piece establishes a clear structural coherence and then continually rewrites it from within, until the familiar becomes strange, even absurd, and then quietly sublime.

Trio Variations inhabits precisely this event structure by unfolding parallel processes, interrupting them, fragmenting them, and using repetition rather than dramatic arc—all hallmarks of the aesthetic event.⁵ Drama here is not built; it is suspended. Meaning is neither denied nor forced; it proliferates.

Dance, both inside and outside the field, is often read and practiced through the habits of language, which expect resolution and psychological coherence—or at least symbolic punch.

These expectations are reductive when interfacing with abstract contemporary dance. Understandably, they mirror some everyday strategies by which we compress a complex, paradoxical reality into something manageable, a world encompassing everything from diaper changes to nuclear fission. That is a well-worn human strategy and simply what we humans seem to do.

At its strongest, though, dance interrupts that compression for a moment. It proposes another mode of perception, one attuned to the ephemeral, the relational, and the more-than-linguistic.

We do not ask a flock of birds shifting in flight to adhere to a plot to find the spectacle mesmerizing. We recognize beauty, and perhaps our own small place in the same nexus of life. Perhaps we relate to their velocity. And we do all that without naming each bird or ascribing it a psychological telos. The emergent movement instead situates us within a perceptual vitality that feels like a thrillingly pre-individual share,

Some of my own formative experiences as a viewer come from witnessing large-scale abstract works in large spaces: sitting in New York State Theater as a child, watching Balanchine’s black-and-white ballets, or watching as a teenage student Margie Gillis fly across a giant stage in Toronto, seeing dancers play not only their bodies but the volume of the hall itself.

One body on an empty stage.
Some brilliant dancing.
Not so empty after all.

Could a piece like Trio Variations find a larger-scale home in the contemporary dance landscape today?

The current conditions for dance making in Sweden and much of Europe are sobering. Reduced funding and compressed rehearsal periods make a work of this formal clarity and performative precision an achievement in itself. One can wonder what Trio Variations might become given the months of process earlier generations of companies once enjoyed. This might also go a long way toward grounding the necessary dance and performance skills that this type of work demands.

Conclusion: On Noticing

Trio Variations opens a mode of perception less concerned with comprehension than with what might be called prehension: feeling-with, sensing-with, noticing.

The result is a distilled and demanding work. It asks time from us and gives time back in another form. One can only hope it is allowed to keep living, and to do so in larger spaces and with longer arcs. In an era thick with competing realities and shrinking horizons, a dance that opens a clearing for shared attention feels not only welcome but necessary.

To figure it.
Out.

Additional editing by: T.M. Rives

Footnotes / Endnotes:

1.      MDT (Moderna Dansteatern), housed in an old torpedo silo on an island in Stockholm, has for the past fifteen or so years often presented work whose primary concerns lie in symbol, archetype, and performance-driven dramaturgy. Much of this programming has engaged socio-political or pop-historical themes and invited a more semiotic or theatrico-dramaturgical mode of critique. Trio Variations, while equally contemporary, works through a different set of priorities. That Trio VariationsTrio Variations appears at MDT at this juncture is an interesting widening of the theater’s tent poles.
2.      The subtle, swelling, just-Cageian-enough original score by Shida Shahabi, Benahz Aram’s off-kilter blacker-than-black costumes, and Jonatan Windbo’s contemporary Scandinavian office lighting all support the work marvelously, though.
3.      Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Ch. III.
4.      Alain Badiou, “From Logic to Anthropology, or Affirmative Dialectics,” lecture, European Graduate School, 13 September 2012.
5.      Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to Do Things with Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
6.      T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920).
“In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal.’ Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
7.      Erin Manning, “The Dance of Attention,” Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 6 (2012).
8.      Miranda July, It Chooses You (New York: McSweeney’s, 2011):
“It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters—it was us. We had to whittle life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember.”
9.      I would hope that the producer/curator/director class, and most importantly the political class, would also be so bold. They still have, on the whole, more power of action vis-à-vis what is seen and not seen—the power to brand, lift, and discard. Most crucially, the power to communicate about the ulterior nature of art and to fight to uphold it. The ball is (mostly) in your court.