REYKJAVIK DANCE FESTIVAL

20-23 NOVEMBER 2019

For four days, dance is ours, the city is ours, with its many voices, bodies and communities.

For four days, we’re taking over the city with a festival of national and international dance, performance and choreography.

For four days, a festival built on hope, love and care. Performances, happenings, parties, hangouts, talks and more.

RDF is an international centre for choreographic practices in Iceland – seeking to curate an all year round conversation with its audiences – through the artists we present, support and produce.

Founded in 2002, RDF’s central activity has always been its international August festival. Since 2014 however, RDF has extended beyond its activities in August – to include national and international initiatives throughout the year in the form of mini-festival formats, workshops, and residencies.

In place where everything is leaking and dripping strange ecosystems and uncanny causal relations emerge. Matter becomes entangled and stuck in strange loops and unfamiliar systems. The stage becomes an other-wordly ecosystem, in some way similar to ecosystems as can be found in nature, but here things are not as they seem. The relation between cause and effect, living and nonliving, artificial and natural, become uncertain and the chain of production, consumption and decomposition gets challenged.

Various landscapes appear briefly and then blur together again. They morph between swamps, mountains, underground landscapes, bacterial cultures and dystopia. They melt and drip and morph and mix, they get stuck in an endless loop until they dissolve, disintegrate, sulk and spill.

Invisible forces play a leading role: humidity, waves, gravity and the electromagnetic field become a moving force in this uncanny ecosystem where something so simple as causality, becomes like a magical affair.

Concept and performance: Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Scenography: Dora Durkesac
Music by: Nicolai Hovgaard Johansen and Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Sound design: Nicolai Hovgaard Johansen
Light installation, light design and technical manager: Hákon Pálsson
Light assistance: Kjartan Darri Kristjánsson
Costume: Kristjana Björg Reynisdóttir
Dramaturgy: Ingrid Vranken
Artistic Assistance: Ana Dubljevic
Production: Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek
Co-Production: Chaillot Theatre National de la Dance, Bora Bora Dans og Visuelt Teatre, Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek and Tjarnarbíó
Supported by: KAAP Brugge, C-takt, Dansverkstæðið, Reykjavík Dance Festival, Icelandic Embassy in Paris
Special thanks for advice and assistance: Inga Huld Hákonardóttir, Vala Ómardóttir, Védís Kjartansdóttir, Sveinbjörn Thorarensen, Gulli Már, the crew of Tjarnarbíó, Halli í Þjóðleikhúsinu, Nicolas Bouscaud, Nicos Xenos, Michael Janssens, Jurica Seva

REYKJAVIK DANCE FESTIVAL

20-23 NOVEMBER 2019

For four days, dance is ours, the city is ours, with its many voices, bodies and communities.

For four days, we’re taking over the city with a festival of national and international dance, performance and choreography.

For four days, a festival built on hope, love and care. Performances, happenings, parties, hangouts, talks and more.

RDF is an international centre for choreographic practices in Iceland – seeking to curate an all year round conversation with its audiences – through the artists we present, support and produce.

Founded in 2002, RDF’s central activity has always been its international August festival. Since 2014 however, RDF has extended beyond its activities in August – to include national and international initiatives throughout the year in the form of mini-festival formats, workshops, and residencies.

In place where everything is leaking and dripping strange ecosystems and uncanny causal relations emerge. Matter becomes entangled and stuck in strange loops and unfamiliar systems. The stage becomes an other-wordly ecosystem, in some way similar to ecosystems as can be found in nature, but here things are not as they seem. The relation between cause and effect, living and nonliving, artificial and natural, become uncertain and the chain of production, consumption and decomposition gets challenged.

Various landscapes appear briefly and then blur together again. They morph between swamps, mountains, underground landscapes, bacterial cultures and dystopia. They melt and drip and morph and mix, they get stuck in an endless loop until they dissolve, disintegrate, sulk and spill.

Invisible forces play a leading role: humidity, waves, gravity and the electromagnetic field become a moving force in this uncanny ecosystem where something so simple as causality, becomes like a magical affair.

Concept and performance: Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Scenography: Dora Durkesac
Music by: Nicolai Hovgaard Johansen and Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Sound design: Nicolai Hovgaard Johansen
Light installation, light design and technical manager: Hákon Pálsson
Light assistance: Kjartan Darri Kristjánsson
Costume: Kristjana Björg Reynisdóttir
Dramaturgy: Ingrid Vranken
Artistic Assistance: Ana Dubljevic
Production: Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek
Co-Production: Chaillot Theatre National de la Dance, Bora Bora Dans og Visuelt Teatre, Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek and Tjarnarbíó
Supported by: KAAP Brugge, C-takt, Dansverkstæðið, Reykjavík Dance Festival, Icelandic Embassy in Paris
Special thanks for advice and assistance: Inga Huld Hákonardóttir, Vala Ómardóttir, Védís Kjartansdóttir, Sveinbjörn Thorarensen, Gulli Már, the crew of Tjarnarbíó, Halli í Þjóðleikhúsinu, Nicolas Bouscaud, Nicos Xenos, Michael Janssens, Jurica Seva

REYKJAVIK DANCE FESTIVAL

20-23 NOVEMBER 2019

For four days, dance is ours, the city is ours, with its many voices, bodies and communities.

For four days, we’re taking over the city with a festival of national and international dance, performance and choreography.

For four days, a festival built on hope, love and care. Performances, happenings, parties, hangouts, talks and more.

RDF is an international centre for choreographic practices in Iceland – seeking to curate an all year round conversation with its audiences – through the artists we present, support and produce.

Founded in 2002, RDF’s central activity has always been its international August festival. Since 2014 however, RDF has extended beyond its activities in August – to include national and international initiatives throughout the year in the form of mini-festival formats, workshops, and residencies.

The Beauty of Living Together is a guided tour around downtown Reykjavík where the guides are young disabled and abled people. The guides will invite audiences to different places that are them meaningful. They will share stories, songs, dances, dreams and moments or fantasies at each place. These places can be restaurants, a hidden nature paradise, an important institution or anything in between. Each member of the group has chosen a place that is special to them and they want to share with other people.  We know Reykjavík differently, have different experiences, moments and memories from the same places. With this work you are given a chance to travel in a big diverse group around the city center and get to know it differently.

Artistic directors: Ásrún Magnúsdóttir, Gunnur Martinsdóttir Schlüter, Olga Sonja Thorarensen

Assistant director:   Björk Sigurðardóttir

Performers:  Anna Björk Eldker Emilsdóttir, Glódís Erla Ólafsdóttir, Gunnar Þorkell Þorgrímsson, Haukur Hákon Loftsson,Hrannar Halldórsson Bachmann, Rebekka Sveinbjörsdóttir & Salóme Sól

In Piece no. 1,5 we are invited into a world of multilayered movement and music. Where movement is clean and crisp, but full of attitude and aggression. Practical and plain, yet painful and private. Distant, but devoted. It is a paradoxical world where the frictional relationship between the internal and external is explored and exposed.

Piece no. 1,5 is the second piece in a series of pieces emerging from the research project EXPRESSIONS: the power and politics of expectations in dance where we continuously search for the other dance, another dance, our dance.

Höfundur / Choreography: Steinunn Ketilsdóttir

Flytjandi / Performer: Snædís Lilja Ingadóttir

Tónlist / Music: Áskell Harðarson

Búningur / Costumes: Alexía Rós Gylfadóttir

Ljós / Lights: Kjartan Darri Kristjánsson

Verkefnisstjóri / Project Manager: Erla Rut Mathiesen

Pop music and true stories about youth, sex and gender.

Working with nine teenagers from Reykjavik, Iceland, the Teenage Choir of Love and Sex sing
songs they have written themselves based on their own romantic and sexual experiences. As the
choir travels it invites different young people locally to write songs with them and join the choir. They
sing for themselves and each other. They sing for love, curiosity and heartbreak. They sing for every
virgin, every slut and every thirsty bitch – so they never need to feel alone again. The project was
realised in collaboration with composer Teitur Magnússon.

Cast and Crew:
Creators: Ásrún Magnúsdóttir and Alexander Roberts
Composer: Teitur Magnússon
Co-authors and performers: Lísbet Sveinsdóttir, Marta Ákadóttir, Salóme Júlíusdóttir, Una
Barkadóttir, Karen Nordquist Ragnarsdóttir, Egill Andrason, Haukur Guðnason, Hanna Gréta
Jónsdóttir og Karólína Einarsdóttir.
Choir-conductors: Sigríður Soffía Hafliðadóttir and Aron Steinn Ásbjarnarson
Duration: 45 minutes
Details: Co produced by: BiT Teatergarasjen, Unglingurinn í Reykjavík and apap – Performing
Europe 2020, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

REYKJAVIK DANCE FESTIVAL

20-23 NOVEMBER 2019

For four days, dance is ours, the city is ours, with its many voices, bodies and communities.

For four days, we’re taking over the city with a festival of national and international dance, performance and choreography.

For four days, a festival built on hope, love and care. Performances, happenings, parties, hangouts, talks and more.

RDF is an international centre for choreographic practices in Iceland – seeking to curate an all year round conversation with its audiences – through the artists we present, support and produce.

Founded in 2002, RDF’s central activity has always been its international August festival. Since 2014 however, RDF has extended beyond its activities in August – to include national and international initiatives throughout the year in the form of mini-festival formats, workshops, and residencies.

The Beauty of Living Together is a guided tour around downtown Reykjavík where the guides are young disabled and abled people. The guides will invite audiences to different places that are them meaningful. They will share stories, songs, dances, dreams and moments or fantasies at each place. These places can be restaurants, a hidden nature paradise, an important institution or anything in between. Each member of the group has chosen a place that is special to them and they want to share with other people.  We know Reykjavík differently, have different experiences, moments and memories from the same places. With this work you are given a chance to travel in a big diverse group around the city center and get to know it differently.

Artistic directors: Ásrún Magnúsdóttir, Gunnur Martinsdóttir Schlüter, Olga Sonja Thorarensen

Assistant director:   Björk Sigurðardóttir

Performers:  Anna Björk Eldker Emilsdóttir, Glódís Erla Ólafsdóttir, Gunnar Þorkell Þorgrímsson, Haukur Hákon Loftsson,Hrannar Halldórsson Bachmann, Rebekka Sveinbjörsdóttir & Salóme Sól

Doris Uhlich invited the dancer/choreographer Michael Turinsky to work with her in exploring the
body, its physicality, energy, and ecstasy. What are the movements that act like batteries for Michael
Turinsky to recharge his body? Where does the body depart to while its batteries keep filling up?
People with physical impairments are not usually associated with energy, energy discharge, or
ecstasy – we associate them with implosion rather than explosion, standstill rather than progress. In
sampling the sounds of her partner’s electric wheelchair, amplifying and translating them into
thumping techno beats, Doris Uhlich generates an energy that in turn seizes Michael Turinsky.
Energies of humans and machines are transferred and transformed, making the dialogue or even
the whole relationship between man and machine, ecstasy and form, charge and discharge come
alive. Ravemachine is a project in which two different bodies meet and mutually influence each
other, exchanging impulses and thereby expanding their own physical biographies.

“We shape the dynamics of energy.” Michael Turinsky

“We search for movements loading the body up like a battery. Theater is all about sharing,
transforming and exchanging energies between all elements – performers, audience, machines and
sounds.” Doris Uhlich

Choreography: Doris Uhlich
Performance: Michael Turinsky & Doris Uhlich
Light: Gerald Pappenberger
Sound advisor: Boris Kopeinig
Press, Communication: Jonathan Hörnig
Production: Theresa Rauter & Christine Sbaschnigg / insert (Theaterverein)
Co-production: brut, WUK performing arts & insert (Theaterverein)
International Distribution: Something Great
insert (Theaterverein) is funded by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna.
Premiered: 20/10/2016 brut Wien

A theatre show without words! Funny, playful and uplifting – for the big kids and the little kids. Two creatures come out of the shadows, find a bag of earth, they start to play and discover what life is all about. Life is perfect for the whole family to enjoy together! The youngest audiences enjoy watching the two figures on stage come alive, discover each other and the earth around them. They roll around with laughter as the two characters on stage, the boy and the girl or the man and the woman, taste the mud, play with it, create animals, lands, life and love out of the mud. But the older audiences read the same story on a different level, they read the history of earth, creation of Man, Darwin’s theory of evolution, how land is divided, borders made up, the cause of wars and how trough laughter and playfulness we can make peace and heal wounds. How everything starts from nothing – a story about the circle of life.

“All the stars in the house!” G.S.E. Djoflaeyjan.
“Four stars! Life is a beautiful show” MBL.
“Original, funny and visually stunning for people of all ages” S. J. Frettabladid.

Length: 40 min. – Age: 3 years and up
Author and designer HELGA ARNALDS
Director and co-author CHARLOTTE BÖVING
Co-authors and actors SÓLVEIG GUÐMUNDSDÓTTIR and SVEINN ÓLAFUR GUNNARSSON
Composer MARGRÉT KRISTÍN BLÖNDAL
Lightdesign BJÖRN BERGSTEINN GUÐMUNDSSON