Diagonals and other love stories

2019

Diagonals and Other Love Stories is a multidisciplinary project that intersects Text, Choreography, Music, Live Sound and Video. The project develops around the two creator-performers, Kate and Mari, building on stage a specific set design made of small objects including toys and mini furniture. The childlike game of creating a universe and playing within it and with each other as playmates is for the audience like a “sour-candy” – sweet and enticing, drawing focus on the relationship between the performers and the dramaturgy of the objects and their composition, while the live-spoken text acts as the sour center, taking the audience into the performers’ visions of speculative futures, as well as their immediate troubles and tensions, both personal and political.The toy world becomes apocalyptic, but never without hope. At the same time as the object play, spoken words and the two bodies are in a physical exchange: responsive physicality that is focused on rhythm. The bodies and their movements are instruments creating beats, breaking them, coming in and out of sync. By the coming together of all these elements, as well as the original music score and performer-operated light design, the work is a puzzle, that in parts and then as a whole, dreams on the question of love in the face of imminent disaster and the problem of enjoyment of life and love’s small details when the big picture is so bleak. As a duo, the two women on stage in their physicality and dialogues, create a sense of tenderness, naivety and playfulness. The work probes at the philosophical questions we are currently asking ourselves about progress and progressive thinking, our actions and ambitions, what details make a life worth living, and the paradox we face as we dream for a new world and wish to affect its creation while we recognize the need to slow down, to find fulfillment in human life that is beyond or resistant to progress itself.