INvisible_ planet
Monica Emilie Herstad in solo, discreet dancing in mediated videoscape, to the most wonderful reviews.
"herStay's "_INvisible _planet" a solo that lies between the expressiveness of butoh, and Robert Wilson's minimalistic visual concretizing"
-Danjel Andersson, DN, Stockholm
Costumes, music editing, video directing, choreography, dance and stage design: Monica Emilie Herstad
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She remain honest to her her psychophysical initiatives
What the audience say about herStay: "Vital monotony" [Anders Øhrn], "Ambient dance", "New performance", "Dance of energies"
Quoting the American art analysts Leah Garland: "It is a meditation upon and a form of self-interview on how the body reacts to the stress of a high frequency urban life.
Within the structure of the live sound and the pre-selected film backdrop, she slightly changes her choreography each night, sometimes more frenetic and others more scilent. But each night, she graces the stage with a quivering body as she explores a fresh disconnection between the isolated limbs and her whole organizm. A forearm may flick itself into space several times as with no thought behind its decision as if it were unaware of its attachment to the rest of the body, as if it could make that decision on its own, movement without agency.
Monica Emilie Herstad, whose education is based in classical and modern dance in Oslo and Paris, and butoh in danceperformances by Min Tanaka in Tokyo, explains that she allows her body to move as impulse desires, without visible judgement.
The result is both a meditation upon and a form of self-interview on how the body reacts to the stress of a high frequency urban life.
Glimpses of her three-quarter exposed legs turned inward awkwardly, indeed rickety, sustaining body upright conveys the frailty of the structures of social supports.
While herStay performances are fundamentally personal, it beckons social readings. Sometimes simultanelously, she recognizes her long shaddow against the wall, a gesture that connotes both selfreflection, and a larger social awareness.
Her performances at once, are about the state of bodies at the state of a new millenium, and, more specifically, about her personal life, one marked by her femininity.
Her slender body, her thinness accentuated by her dress and the illumination of the video and lightdesign, looks at moments like the strings of a female puppet.
The images beckon contemplation upon the gender codes impacting the body´s response to life in a high-tech world, one informed by power dynamics.
In this context, her arm jerks and twist in a repeated readiness to action, it is seen as a resistance to another`s control, yet in its resistance the gesture is revealed feminine. She interrogates the moment of impulse to reveal its social imbrications.
The close reading her light and sound performs on her mood and gesture creates a visual and visceral harmony that highlights her subtle whims and subsequent transformations. The presence of the DJ is as is the audience`s, reverberates as her psychophysical initiatives remain honest to her immediate response to changes of conciousness one`s experiences in relationships to others.
The Oslo based performer and choreographer Monica Emilie Herstad ushers the new century with her look at the now."
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