NYXXX

Avatars, play and performance

Month: October 2018

Twelve Talking Dolls: The Subjects

By

On October 16, 2018

In English, Event

(In Swedish)

You take care of the dolls. The dolls will take care of you.

Meet the twelve talking dolls. They scream, cry and comfort, threaten and pray, seduce and order, invoke and plead, explain, hypnotize, confess and terrorize. As an audience member you can pick the dolls up and hold them, take care of them and manipulate them. Or just listen. Together with the other participants in the piece, you create the condition that enables the dolls to appear as a part of your human kinship.

The doll is a thing, but also a body. It has arms and legs, eyes and mouth. When you look at the doll, it returns the gaze. It is speaking and singing. It becomes one of all these objects that ting and pling around you, demanding different types of response. We can have feelings for the doll, tenderness and care, but also nervosity or unease. It is in a borderland creature between life and death. The doll is undead. And it wants something from you.

The piece presents unique handmade stoneware dolls equipped with responsive but pre-recorded voices belonging to twelve different actors. The voices create a polyphonic soundscape that the participants enter, shape and are shaped by. They can also choose to just listen and watch.

Here, a door opens to a playful and eerie world where the dolls are in power precisely through being dolls.

Idea, text, composition, dolls: Nyxxx Voices: Nyxxx, Adriana Aburto Essén, John Alexander Eriksson, André Nilsson, Ellen Norlund, Benjamin Quigley, Francisco Sobrado, Ylva Törnlund and Malou Zilliacus. Costume design: Sofia Luna Carpentry: Johan Andrén

Someone You Trust at Skogen

By

On October 1, 2018

In English, Event


In November, Nyxxx project Someone You Trust premieres in a first version at Skogen in Gothenburg.

Someone You Trust uses the practice of rope bondage to explore trust.

For us who made Someone You Trust, trust is based on listening, consent and clear frames for participating or opting out. Someone You Trust is an attempt to establish conditions for that, both in the encounter between two people, and in the encounter between audience and artists.

The performance is divided into two acts. You can choose to come to both of the acts or just one of them (whichever you prefer). In connections to the rehearsals, there will also be a theoretical outlook on Japanese rope bondage.

SOMEONE YOU TRUST – THE PARTICIPATORY ACT
You and someone you trust book a common ticket, and you come to the performance together. Together, you will follow instructions for how to use a number of ropes. The instructions are calm and invite you to listen to each other and yourselves in a meditative way.

Though in different places, you share room with the others who participate in the first act. Just like you, they follow instructions for tying and being tied.

The instructions are in English.

You need no previous experience of bondage to participate.
Don’t decide on forehand who will tie and who will be tied.

The participatory act will play
– 23–24 of November 18.00–19.00
– 25 of November 16.00–17.00.

SOMEONE YOU TRUST – THE WATCHING ACT
You book a ticket and come to the performance alone or in company, whatever you prefer.
You and the rest of the audience sit down and watch what happens on stage.
On stage, Tova Gerge and Britta Kiessling follow instructions that are both similar to and very different from the instructions in the first act. It becomes a dance with ropes, trust, risk and listening.

The performance is in English.

The watching act will play
– 23–24th of November 19.30–20.30
– 25th of November 17.30–18.30.

SOMEONE YOU TRUST – THEORETICAL OUTLOOK
18th of November. More information soon.

WITH AND BY
TEXT: Tova Gerge and Britta Kiessling

PERFORMERS: Tova Gerge and Britta Kiessling
TEXT EYE AND ROPE RESEARCH: Christian Nilsson
SOUND: Elize Arvefjord
LIGHT: Josefina Björk
ROOM: Josefina Björk, Tova Gerge and Britta Kiessling
ARTISTIC SUPPORT: Gabriel Widing och Ebba Petrén

Foto: Ekaterina Lukoshkova

Thanks to
Everyone in the performing arts collective Nyxxx.
Everyone who helped us to develop the participatory act.

With the support of: Japanstiftelsen, Längmanska kulturfonden, The Swedish Art’s Grant Committee, Cirkör LAB, c.off, The Swedish Author’s fund and Stockholm County Council

Nyxxx member Tova Gerge published acclaimed novel

By

On October 1, 2018

In English, Process

Tova Gerge, Pojken (”The Boy”), publishing house Albert Bonniers

Nyxxx: We had a conversation with you on how to write this book years before it was actually published. What do you want to tell our readers about it?

Tova: It’s a novel about the fragility of power, and in a way it is influenced by role play. On the level of the story, the characters in the novel are absorbed by a role play of dominance and submission. But there is also an aspect of role play in how I wrote it. The novel plays with the glitch between myself and the narrator. He is a man trying to break with his working class background through a relationship, and he has no ambition whatsoever to be a good feminist. At the same time, just as in role play, he is also busy with questions that are mine, just from another perspective.

Nyxxx: Do you want to tell something about the reception in the media?

Tova: The reviews I liked the most focused on the riddle in the text. The fact that the reader is forced to answer for themselves who has the power, when, and in what way. It’s also been quite interesting to see how gender is read and remediated in the media. There is an ambivalence in how one of the characters ”should” be read, and some handled this through making a firm decision, while others embraced that ambivalence. The most fun about interacting with the media has been longer interviews, because they allow a dialogue, a difference, a discovery.

Here, you can read more about Pojken in Swedish.

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