Zodiak Laboratory is Zodiak's residency concept. In January 2024 the ZodLab residency artists are Burning bridges aka Pipsa Enqvist & Camilla Rantanen.
We work as a team (Pipsa Enqvist / Camilla Rantanen) under the name Burning bridges. We formed a collective to create time for artistic hanging out and thinking. As human beings, in addition to our training in dramaturgy, we are connected by a shared understanding of essay-like stage aesthetics, absolute honesty, justice, and common enemies. The work of Burning bridges is instinctively and partly related to these themes. Our goal is to create a working approach that both reflects our values and integrates them into our content and aesthetics. During our time at the residence, we turn our practice into a manifesto:
“For us, feminism is not a performance to seek attention or pity, or to gain more followers on social media. If you are not ready to complain, protest, boycott, raise a storm, take responsibility for your actions, and ignite fire, you can't sit with us. At our table, everyone has lost contacts, friends, and reputation for what is right.” (An excerpt from our collective's manifesto in the making.)
We embrace a transversal aesthetic that avoids submitting to drama, or to a specific type of motion or technique. Our aim is to create performances that merge dramaturgical thinking, dance, grandiloquence, essay-like text, the parallelism of full images, movement, and amusement, leaving you dizzy. During our residency, we’ll also develop our upcoming stage piece Hard Things to Swallow:
“During swallowing, breathing ceases.”
In Hard Things to Swallow, cowardice and disputing are our main themes, and swallowing serves as a repetitive action. We try to answer to what is too much, what can't be swallowed and what can be instead, even if it's intolerable.
The way we initiate our movement seems and feels challenging. Contortion is a traditional discipline of circus art that focuses on presenting the human body from unexpected angles.
While contortion aims to convey seemingly effortless movements, we focus on portraying struggle, fumbling, and grunting, and capturing the aesthetic of a sweaty locker room. We try to shift from the illusion of ease. What if a performer attempted a trick on stage they might never master? What if the most courageous act failed at the height of climax?
Bodily materials are combined with text and speech. The flood of topics is inevitable, even if they are ungovernable, or sometimes sickening or poorly digestible. What can't be swallowed must be spit out or thrown up.
In the demo, we show glimpses of the observations born at the residence.