Against the Current, Glow

Choreographer: Cristian Duarte

Against the Current, Glow (2015) was Brazilian choreographer Cristian Duarte’s first work for Cullberg. Set to new music created on theremin and synthesizers by Brazilian composer and musician Tom Monteiro, the piece comprised four unique solos for Cullberg’s Anna Pehrsson, Samuel Draper,
Agnieszka Dlugoszewska and Daniel Sjökvist. Against the Current, Glow was to be combined with another repertory production to create a full evening.

The starting point for the solo was the idea of an expedition into the depths of a dancer’s sensory archives. In his work, Cristian Duarte has previously focused on the dancers’ training history and on movements they have created in previous dances. He has worked specifically with the idea of a mashup between these former and current works, between what is passed and what is to come, and how this coexistence affects the movement choices of the dancers and the subsequent choreography.

“For this solo creation, I will be attempting to activate the dancer’s memory by blending his/her past and present movement patterns to flow into new sensation and perceptual currents. I wish to unlock those “archives” through an embodied mashup of chemical and electrical synapses, where gaps turn into a concrete place to inhabit. An ocean of minimal details, to be grasped and forgotten. When mind is muscle, there arises an opportunity to make thinking processes more elastic, to defy linearity, like an organism that could suddenly swim against the current to set aglow other life forms in the surroundings.”

– Cristian Duarte

Music: Tom Monteiro

Sound Design: Niklas Jurander

Costume: Marita Tjärnström

Dancers: Anna Pehrsson, Samuel Draper, Agnieszka Dlugoszewska and Daniel Sjökvist