The first steps

After being getting the comission to create the piece I started to search for music. My first thought was to use the chance to work with the live music of the Royal Court Orchestra here in Stockholm. Dance is an elusive artform, fragile and unsolid. It happens only now and is (for the time being) not the same in documentation or on film. I think it is therefore that it facinates me. It is mu believe that in our post-industrial digitalized society there is a growing need to return to the magic of the live performance right infront of our own eyes. In its pursuit of perfection the dance cannot escape human frailty.

Marcus Fjellström, composer

The choice therefore was Degenerator composed by the young Swedish composer Marcus Fjällström for the Nordic Chamber Orchestra in Sundsvall in August 2006. I am facinated by the world that Marcus has created with the music. He himself explained the music with following words in a letter adressed to me in January 2007:

Degenerator is pretty much about falling apart, being broken, wilting away...
In a manner such as a diseased or injured body or a ruin... It is like the ruins of what was a Romantic symphony piece, but it is broken, wilted, in fragments...

I see myself between the two worlds of tradition and progressiveness and it is therefore I have choosen the music Degenerator. The music piece swings between harmony and dissonanc, sounds sometimes familiar but otherwise totally alien to ones ear. For the stage of the Royal Opera I think it is important that there exists a vitality and a reflection of what a younger generation strive for in their creativity.

I have choosen to complement Marcus Fjällströms world. The piece has the same name as the music and is for six female dancers wearing pointshoes.
Something falling apart, a forest, plant or an organism that continues to grow or wilt away. Movements that are awake or asleep, the estetique in the unproportional and the deformed. Classical ballet always strives for perfection but for me perfection is without a soul. Degenerator is an attempt to create a dancepiece that is both perfection and imperfection, classical and contemporary dance, minimalism and maximalism, harmony and dissonance.
These are the thoughts that I ponder now in begining of October while the piece is being born.