My European Love

by Iryna Serebriakova

When Russian forces invade Ukraine, Marina flees the war to start a new life in Western Europe with her former lover Christian and his son. “The European dream” is something she shares with many of her compatriots, but reality seldom lives up to our dreams and she is torn between love, jealousy and a sudden longing for things she never really appreciated until they were lost.

Directed and translated by: Richard Asker
Choreography: Anette Jellne
Ensemble: Anette Jellne, Oscar Rosberg, Richard Asker
Music and soundscapes: Richard Asker
Lighting design: Thomas Dotzler
Produced by: SpaceTimeLab

The Dream of the White Raven

by Richard Asker

In a dreamscape inspired by Carl Jung and Edgar Allan Poe, we meet the refugee boy Mark, growing up to be a young man in London’s East End under the shadow of his parents traumatic experiences of a war, as victims as well as perpetrators. He struggles to form a world view of his own and a place to exist outside the boundaries enforced upon him by his family background. One day, an elderly lady across the street gives him a pair of binoculars, and through them, a new world opens up, in which he encounters life, love and death.

Directed and choreographed by: Anette Jellne
Music: Hilding Asker Sjöberg
Script, set design and sound design: Richard Asker
Sound mix: Calle Asker
Technical supervisor: Johan Söderberg, Barnens Scen
Produced by: SpaceTimeLab

Grounded

av George Brant

A woman torn between the passion for her vocation as a fighter pilot and the love for her family. Brant’s play from 2012 is written as a stark premonition of a global big brother monitored society that Edward Snowden would expose the following year, prompted by an article about PTSD affected drone pilots. Grounded eplores the dilemma of a contemporary woman in a Stand Up form echoing Orwell, Macbeth and the Greeks – a modern classic. Listed as Top 10 London Play in 2013 by The Guardian as well as The Evening Standard, awards include Off West-End theatre Award for best production. Brant is currently working on a film version of the play.

Voices from the audience:

Not to be missed. Strong. Honest. Raw. Anette Jellne in a fantastic performance that leaves noone untouched.

 – Malin B. Erikson, director

Unique in its approach and tone. With total faith in the text, Richard Asker and Anette Jellne use her strength as a dancer in a liberating, surprising and striking way. Rather than physically flamboyant and ”dancy” outbursts, använder the dancers musicality and feel for timing is used combined with acting with minimalist physical precision in driving the story forwards, relentlessly. Grounded is a disturbing and important tale. SpaceTimeLab tells it in a way that crawls under the skin of the spectator, it leaves noone untouched. The faith in the story is liberating, it needs no superfluous attributes. This may appear simple but relies on very deep knowledge and faith between director and actor. 

– Åsa Söderberg, CEO/Artistic director, Skånes Dansteater 2007-2019

This is a fantastic, brutal, poetic play, the intensity of a fighter jet, with a gripping performance. As you see, I’m a professor of Psychology, and I take an interest in how technology and algorithms affect our reality – what happens when our world is buffered by screens,  and here it is presented. I want my colleagues to see it. I want to see it again! It awakens a lot in me. So much to discuss.

 – Åse Innes-Ker, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Lund University

It is a touching performance about a person gradually falling into mental disorder /…/It is enacted realistically and the severity of the illness grips you as a spectator. The monologue is very powerful an the whole performance regardng the mental disorder is respectfully enacted. A fine balancing act. Sadly, knowledge about PTSD is limited in our health care today, which makes it even more important to shed light on.

 – Victoria Emilsson de Heras, M.D., Specialist Allmänmedicin, P7 Revingehed

As an engaging ”one person monologue”, I haven´t seen the like since I saw ”Krapps last tape” in Dublin five decades ago. The performance was excellent.

 – Olof Arwidi, Professor emeritus, Företagsekonomiska institutionen, Lund University

Cosmic Space

Cosmic Space is a Dance/Art film shot in Faeroese artist Tróndur Patursson´s glass- and mirrorinstallation in Copenhagen.

Imagine being born of a wave into an infinite space in which you are the sole inhabitant. As you open your eyes to explore it, the space becomes a multiverse with endless reflections of potential versions of yourself. You live through the cycle of your day, your life, exploring  projections of yourself, and with nothing to relate to other than yourself, the distinction between inner and outer space dissolves…

When we first visited the Cosmic Space in June 2019, it was like entering a different universe, it threw our senses overboard. We wanted to share the experience somehow, and thanks to the artist Tróndur Patursson, Nordatlantens Brygge and Skånes Dansteater, we spent a couple of afternoons in August exploring the space, seeing what could grow outof the relationship between the dancer and the work of art.

Inspired by the situation that created the installation in the first place: Patursson looking up into space while standing with water up to his waist in a small boat, sinking in the middle of the Pacific, we conceived a dramaturgy: a microcosm of a life cycle in the form of a wave. The music also takes on this shape, small waveform cycles that build into the amplitude of a big wave. The mirror images of the installation stand out as a metaphor for consciousness, the intelligence of the human mind contrasted by its obsessive projections.

The pandemic of the spring 2020, lends a different actuality to the Narcissos motive: We see social media flooded with posts of isolated people interacting with their mirrors. The psychiatrist Carl Jung describes the effects of isolation on the human mind: when the energy we spend on our daily social interactions has nowhere to be expressed, our subconscious conjures up subpersonalities, imaginary characters for us to engage with. And so the isolation generates a situation where we may be confronted by our demons.

The score (Music for H2o, breath, heart, tabla, double bass, mandolin and Oberheim) is a fantasy about Tróndur Patursson´s cosmic sea, the sounds of the different states of the sea and the waves.

WaveShapes

WaveShapes is a site-specific dance and music performance commissioned for the opening of Ångfärjeparken in Helsingborg 2021.

Choreographed and performed by: Anette Jellne,
Music and staging: Richard Asker