The Basics

You are a choir. If you are too good you have failed, your greatest task is to blend. You are a workers union with pride. You are the salt of the social democracy, being part of the grey mass that sustains society. You bring your packed lunch and your coffee on a thermos to work every day, and listen to your co-worker’s boring stories from their weekend with a warm heart. You are a volunteer for the local marching band, baking cakes for the bake sale, driving kids here and there, listening to badly executed trumpet playing and off pitch clarinets many hours a week. You love the community. You do morning gymnastics every day. You are a sturdy character.

The Basics is a performance based on an on-going exploration of the potential sustainability, ethics, resistance, and beauty of leading a mediocre life. With a specific starting point in the municipal aesthetics of Norwegian social democracy, my hope is for this exploration to reveal new ways of addressing success, failure, value and care, specifically in the practice of artistic and organisational dancemaking, but also for anyone who is grappling with their own mediocrity.

In attempting to perfect mediocrity, I already failed before starting, seeing that anything perfected can no longer be mediocre. So what am I then left with? Can this failure make a shift in what I value as a mediocre experience? Can I find a resonance in my own body that can enrich my understanding and appreciation for the seemingly boring and irrelevant?

The past year I have tried to pull threads between questions of value, neutrality, standards, and bare minimums, to the history of standardised sizes in fast fashion’s basics sections, to the invisible but irreplaceable grey mass of the predominantly female work force in the municipality, through «Jantelov» and «Dugnadsånd»- defining elements of Scandinavian behavioural norms. And in the middel of this web of threads we find the Basic Bitch in a sustained collapse between high and low culture, feeling the sometimes melancholic, sometimes liberating irrelevancy of her own mediocrity.

When / Where

• 5th May 21:00 - 21:50
• 6th May 16:30 - 17:20
• 7th May 15:00 - 15:50

At Weld

Credits

Choreography by Maja Hannisdal

Performed and developed by Alexis Steeves, Laressa Dickey, Tove Skeidsvoll, Valentina Parravicini, and Maja Hannisdal

Sound by Dehendrik Lechat Willekens

Supervision by Ilse Ghekiere and Jonathan Burrows

Special thanks to Alexis Steeves, Laressa Dickey, Tove Skeidsvoll, Valentina Parravicini, Sara Kaaman, DeHendrik LeChat Willekens, Chrysa Parkinson, Tove Salmgren, Frank Bock, Martin Sonderkamp, Martin Hargreaves, Unn Faleide, Amy Crowther, Pie Kär, Natalie Price Hafslund, Alexandra Tveit, Kajsa Wadhia, Femke Snelting, Karin Hauptmann, Weld, Ine Kim, Louise, Linda, and Morten Hannisdal. Extra special thanks to my beloved NPP colleagues for your love and support.