Dancing with Ghosts           - A haunted machinery






When seeing Trio Variations danced by Louise Dahl, Liz Kinoshita and Hana Erdman on the opening night I had a recurring feeling of déjà vu. A sense of it being familiar, yet unfamiliar, at the same time – have we been here before?

Maybe so. But not in quite this way.

One aspect of familiarity might simply be that I have strong affinities to the work of Hana and Louise - as fellow dancers in other ́s work, as dancer in their work and as co-author of our work. Companioning their work from being inside, or very close to it, means something different than seeing it from the perspective of an audience. This in and of itself might serve the experience of familiarity with a glitch, a kind of déjà vu.

But apart from that, what was it that I felt I had already seen? What am I re-viewing?

There are some elements that stand out strongly in my initial reading of the work. The aesthetics of the space - clean, bright, open, focused - in combination with the upright body posture, the composition of (more or less) set movement material, accompanied by the precise music composition by Shida Shahabi and the geometrical shapes of Jonatan Winbo ́s lighting design. Slick costume in black. Formality. Beauty. Resemblances of pieces I have seen in the past, that I place in a minimalistic or post-modern tradition, calling some “dance-ghosts” into the room. But there is more to it than the significant features described above. Seeing with, through and past the ghosts – what do I see?

I see a very particular relationship to the how . How each of the dancers, in their singular and specific ways, are relating and attending to the body, space and each other.

I see embodied experiences from previous works and years of practicing dancing through certain physical principles.

I see Hana ́s longtime research on companionship, interspecies relations and the more than human (Animal Companion, Companion, Companion XL) manifested also in this work. The vibrant space between bodies. How bodies are sensed rather than seen. Attunement to forces inside and outside oneself. I even recognize set spatial patterns and relations deriving from Companion, but in Trio Variations it is integrated with another type of dancing and technology of the body.

I see what is going on in the body through the dance technological landscape of Anna Grip and Cristina Caprioli. And all the dancers that has been around that work - influenced by and influencing that landscape. A machinery that gets going, where the causes and effects are constant rather than sequential. A closed circuit. Push, twist, fall. No single direction. One thing
at the time and all at once. Attention all over the place. A thickness of speed and information.

These parameters – of companionship and specific technological approach – are examples of what, for me, brings this work into the realm of the current, parallel with traits that resemble another era.

Is the critical project to write oneself into a tradition and to challenge, “own” and change that tradition from the inside? To stay with something known to the point that you no longer know what it is, as a way of finding out more about it? Maybe I need to shift my initial question “have we been here before?” to the more speculative “What if I have never been here before?” (Deborah Hay).



Hana entering, curving, bending the space. Not only walking on a curved trajectory, but bringing the whole room with her, sets it off for me to read relationships and forces rather than shapes. My attention goes low. Feet, lower legs. I start listening to the dance. I listen to rhythm, trajectories, movement quality, patterns, composition, sensation. There is a lot of dancing
happening with very little means.

Louise joining. The space between bodies gets vibrant. Edges challenged. Never arriving. Lightness and speed. I think the speed here is happening both in the dancer ́s perception of the present and through the act of taking new initiatives before the previous one has come to an end. Breaking with normative expectations of time. An example: I think I know how long a skip jump takes to leave the floor and land. But here there seem to be no preparation and no arrival, and in the air, there is already a shift of attention to the next thing. And the next. Fully present in each single thing, never holding on to the previous. A very quick conversation between inside and outside. It is not natural. It is not human. It is astonishing.

Liz entering. Music. Once more I am listening, but something has shifted, tonality has entered the room, now I read movement like music. I start to listen to the music of the dance. It seems like a paradox that groove can appear in this vertical dance, but it does. Another dance technological heritage that I know less about. Pelvis more than feet? I see attack. Following the movement through. Weight. Softness. Flow. Precision.



At moments there is something in the female trio dynamics that opens for another, more psychological, reading. There is a charge and an intensity in the trio form that sometimes reads as a shifting dynamic between characters, a kind of psychodrama, evoking associations of the dark side of femininity. I would be surprised if this is the intention of the work, however it is a side effect that I am both disturbed, as well as intrigued by. Disturbed because it gets in my way of reading subtle and dance specific qualities of the work. Intrigued since it adds a dimension that I didn’t expect, that has to do with mental states, psychic tension and charged situations.

I wonder what this dance would be like if the volume was turned up on the psychodrama-meter? A dance driven by state of mind and psychic tension. Where do psychodrama fit into a post-modern, post-romantic aesthetic? How does the machinic aspect of minimalism influence our view of emotions and affect?

I watched the piece twice. Once for ghosts and psychodrama. And once for the dancing. Although everything is there at once, always, all the time.

BIO: Ulrika Berg is a Stockholm based dance artist. She has worked with, amongst others, Cristina Caprioli, Deborah Hay, Philip Berlin, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Ludvig Daae, Tino Segahl and with Cullberg in works by Ezster Salamon and Deborah Hay. She has a master's degree in choreography from New Performative Practices. Since 2015, she is an assistant professor of dance at Stockholm University of the Arts, SKH.