A Dance for a Dress in the Forest

    I miss a teenager girl that escaped to the forest. 

    Her purple sports trousers with low waist and her white lycra crop top. 

    Her oversized jacket. 

    Her forbidden cigarettes and her scrambled poetry. 

    Her euphoric nostalgia and her humorous naughtiness. 

    I miss her carelessness walking through the woods, disappearing as a protest. 

    I am this girl sometimes.

A Dance for a Dress in the Forest is an attempt in motion to recover feminine absences of my body. 

What does it mean to be queer when you are alone away from another's gaze? What is queerness as a relation with oneself? During the last months while the world withdraw in isolation I started spending long periods in the forest whilst thinking, fantasising and experimenting this dance. Spending time in the forest made me notice and relate with matter in transformation. The way the same matter assumes shapes as a tree, a bug, a mushroom, a bear or a berry. Also the way the berry becomes the bear when it is eaten, how the tree becomes a mushroom when ocupied by the fungus, how the mushroom becomes part of my body when I eat it. 

I feel how close our bodies are of becoming the tree and the mushroom - How matter transports itself from constelation to constelation of life - at the same time that my mind is ocupied with gender questions - what things I was not expected to do, to feel, to wear, to become. Gender as the forest feels for me like a mutable constelation, where one thing can become another but can also decompose and rest in the space in between, when the tree is neither the tree or the fungus but an unnamed process in bettween.

This dance is building a fictional body searching a relationship with a dress, while paradoxically dissolving itself in continuous metamorphoses, hosting emotions, imageries, trauma and sensations. Impressions, flashes, vague memories, and emptied out narrative fragments. Moving through desire.

A dance for a dress in the forest is  commissioned by Anna Asplind for Sjösala Dansbana - Unexpected Movements within the context of Movements of Change.  This dance is an in progress variation of the solo Yellow Puzzle Horse that will premiere in 2021 coproduced by Weld (Stockholm), Skogen (Gothenburg) and ZDB (Lisbon) and with the support of Kulturrådet (SE)

Performances
Movements of Change @ Sjösala Dansbana - Unexpected Movements // Östra Ämtervik, SE // 5 Sep 2020