What does it mean to inherit a dance?
German choreographer Kurt Jooss made his last piece Dixit Dominus in 1975 as a gift for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger, who gave it to Rani Nair to reconstruct in 2003. Future Memory (2012) returns to Dixit, this time focusing not on the choreography but on the stories around it. It is a second-order performance — a performance about a performance — that uses the personal responsibilities of inheritance to move towards larger questions of history, memory, and legacy. A review from the premiere described it as combining “Humor, warmth, and intellectual sharpness, all in one.” With a combination of gentleness and challenge, Future Memory embraces the possibility of an alternaive history, one in which a “minor” dance takes ten years of another artist’s life, and where insider and outsider are more complicated than we might think.
Here both identity and dance history are understood not in terms of Indian versus Western European, but in a hybrid way that uses real and imagined archives to allow for shades of Indianness, Swedishness, and Germanness. Nair’s one-hour solo uses dance, spoken text, film, and singing in more and less spectacular forms. There are moments when audiences are invited to touch and smell. And there is a duet between a hair-dryer and a costume that was never worn in performance.
Performed at
Dansstationen - Malmö
Dansstationen - Malmö
Lunds Konsthall - Lund
Performing Arts Biennaln- Jönköping
Festival of Dance and Cultural Heritage - Skånes Dansteater, Malmö
The Royal Institute of Arts - Stockholm
The House of Dancen - Stockholm
Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance - Salzburg
IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance - New Delhi
ImpulsTanz - Vienna
Singapore International Festival of Arts
Stenkrossen - Lund
Artistic Team
Concept, Choreographer, Performer: Rani Nair
Concept, Choreographer, Performer: Rani Nair
Dramaturg, historian: Kate Elswit
Styling: Amanda Wickman
Technical consultant: Tobias Hallgren
Graphic designer: Cecilia Höglund
Press
Material
Technical rider
A4 programme sheet
Image press pack
Tack!
