Marcus Lindeen to direct a short film with Cullberg
Award-winning director Marcus Lindeen makes a film of associated artist, choreographer Deborah Hay’s new work Horse, the solos for Cullberg. The short film Dear Dancer depicts the work prior to the premiere, and will be shot in Stockholm starting at Dansens Hus this week, March 26.
Deborah Hay’s new work Horse, the solos was scheduled to premiere at the Dance and Theater Festival in Gothenburg last summer, but has been postponed several times due to the pandemic. The premiere, planned to March 24, is cancelled due to the restrictions, but will be carried out to an empty auditorium. At the same time, the shooting of the short film Dear Dancer, about the work, starts, with director Marcus Lindeen, the Guldbagge Award-winning film photographer Ita Zbroniec-Zajt, composer Hans Appelqvist and producer Jesper Kurlandsky.
”For me, dance is something abstract, difficult to touch, as I am more used to working with text and stories. I am looking forward to experience what happens when my expression meets a choreographer like Deborah Hay and Cullberg’s dancers. Directing will of course be a challenge due to the pandemic, the dancers can not be too close to each other and everything needs to be done with restrictions”, says Marcus Lindeen.
Cullberg’s associated artist, choreographer Deborah Hay who lives in Austin, Texas has not been able to travel to Sweden throughout 2020. Dear Dancer is about how Hay has worked with the dancers in Sweden online and prepared them to perform Horse, the solos for an empty theater in Stockholm. From her home in the US, she writes a letter to the dancers and reflects on what it means to work as a dancer and perform in a time that does not allow it.
”I recently became aware of Marcus’ work and felt his aesthetic appreciation of language and how it is transmitted between individuals in film parallels my appreciation of language and how it influences the the whole person who is dancing”, says Deborah Hay.
The stage version of Horse, the solos is scheduled to premiere with audience at Stora Teatern in Gothenburg in the coming autumn. The premiere date for the film Dear Dancer is not set.
Dear Dancer is produced in collaboration between Fasad and Cullberg. With thanks to Dansens Hus.
Artistic team Horse, the solos
Choreography: Deborah Hay
Music: Graham Reynolds
Set and lighting design: Minna Tiikkainen
Costume: Behnaz Aram
With: fourteen dancers in two casts of seven
Artistic team Dear Dancer
Director: Marcus Lindeen
Cinematographer: Ita Zbroniec-Zajt
Music: Hans Appelqvist
Bios
Marcus Lindeen is a Swedish writer and director. His latest theater play is called L’Aventure invisible and premiered at Théâtre de Gennevilliers during Festival d’Automne in Paris in October 2020. His feature documentary film The Raft premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen in 2018 where it won the main award. The Raft has since been shown in over fifty festivals (IDFA, BFI London, Zürich, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Moscow) and was theatrically released in eleven countries, among them France, Mexico, the UK and the US. The film became a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was broadcasted on BBC Storyville. In 2019 it won the Prix Europa for Best European Television Documentary. The same prize was awarded to Marcus Lindeen’s debut film Regretters in 2011. Regretters is both a theater play and a documentary film about two Swedish men who change their sex twice. The play has been translated into several languages and the film went on to win numerous awards, among them both the Swedish Academy Award (Guldbagge) and Kristallen (Swedish Emmy) for best documentary film in 2011. The same year his second film Accidentes Gloriosos premiered at The Venice Film Festival where it picked up the prize for best medium-length film. Marcus Lindeen lives between Paris and Stockholm, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts, exploring the subject of ”The Staged Documentary” through an artistic film project consisting of a trilogy of studio-based documentaries.
Deborah Hay, born 1941 in Brooklyn, has achieved icon status among choreographers. Her work was formulated in 1960s experimental Judson Dance Theatre in New York, one of the most radical and influential post-modern art movements. Hay’s dances center on undoing the body’s reliance on learned behavior by enlarging the field from which a dancer can resource movement. She spent many years choreographing solo works for notable artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov. The choreographer William Forsythe helped influence her international career after seeing the premiere of her quartet The Match in 2005 at the Montpellier Dance Festival. She has been awarded many grants and awards including the inaugural and groundbreaking Doris Duke Artist Award in 2012. On May 5, 2015 France’s Minister of Culture and Communication awarded Hay the title of Chevallier de L’Ordre Des Arts et Des Lettres. In 2015, Deborah Hay created Figure a Sea for Cullberg Ballet, to music by Laurie Anderson. The work has been highly acclaimed by audience and critics all over the world, toured in the US, and all over Europe and been presented at prestigious festivals such as Montpellier Danse and the International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Biennale di Venezia in 2018. Deborah Hay is associated artist at Cullberg, 2019-2022.
For interviews and more information, contact:
Erica Espling, Marketing and PR Manager Cullberg
+46 (0)70-602 27 01
erica.espling@cullberg.com
www.cullberg.com
About Cullberg
Cullberg is the national and international repertoire contemporary dance company in Sweden, continuously co-creating to make cutting edge dance relevant for the many. Together with choreographers from all over the world, we are exploring ideas on how dance can be defined, produced and presented. Those explorations are the pillars of a company that is constantly in motion at the heart of the international arena. 2019-2022, Cullberg works exclusively with three associated artists: Alma Söderberg, Deborah Hay and Jefta van Dinther. The core of the company consists of 17 extraordinary individual dancers with a central role in the creations. Cullberg’s works emerge from the times we are living in, as part of the socio-political environment including equality, diversity and sustainability. Cullberg is led by artistic director Gabriel Smeets and managing director Stina Dahlström. Cullberg is part of Riksteatern – The Swedish National Touring Theatre.