Sylph

Sylphs are ethereal beings with the power to shape-shift. Rougher, rawer and louder than humans, sylphs have an airy voice and a giant body with many heads, a sort of a swimming library of sound and movement. Like the wind, sylphs are constantly on the move, they are all-encompassing, they are the air that caresses your skin as well as the breath that you breathe deep into your lungs. They are quite curious creatures and love smacking on gossip. Obsessively listening, they wander in and out of the ballet’s mysterious forest, dancing, whispering, chewing and rustling through the air. 

Sylph is a dance performance that takes inspiration from the 1909 ballet Les Sylphides by Michel Fokine, which is considered the first ballet based entirely on mood and dance with no real narrative. Sylph dabbles in the occult as well, merges it with classical ballet and explores ASMR sounds that generate a sensorial experience, a sort of a low intensive euphoria that creates a secret bond between dancer and audience.

Sylph is created in collaboration with the dancers of Cullberg, composer Shida Shahabi, set-/light designer Chrisander Brun and costume designer Hanna Kisch and is a performance that examines what happens choreographically when sound, costume, set design, lights and dance have an equal role.

“Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Read review from Helsinki. 

This is a joyful collective, artistic universe, one feels in the body as soon as you step into the forest of rustling plastic shocks, flickering colors, misty smoke, smacking and dripping sounds. Invited by the curious and viciously flirtatious sylphs. They have their own world here.

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