Sonya Lindfors

Black & Blue is serial work that consist of several independent iterations that each investigate a decolonial stage by diving deeper into the power of Black performance to revitalize, energise, change and transform. The traditions of Black performance shake, connect, summon and exorcise. They seek and produce forms that can simultaneously carry grief and joy, pain and liberation, individual experiences and affective states shared by the community.

The title Black & Blue refers to multiple parallel frameworks and meanings. It conjures the history and ghosts of Black music – particularly the tradition of the blues – and at the same time connects to Blackness as identity, as colour and as mood. The title carries both individual and collective memories and points to the fact that Blackness is always both embodied and affective, both individual and communal.

Black & Blue, premiering at Zodiak - Center for New Dance in Spring 2027, is the third part of the series (Living in Color / In Living Color, 2025, and Sketches of Blue, 2026). Five performers of different backgrounds – two contemporary dancers, one street dancer, one ballroom dancer and a musician – take us on a journey through time and space, moving from one energy and feeling to another. The combination of live music and historical soundtracks functions like a time machine, bringing together Marvin Gaye’s revolutionary moans and traditional West African rhythms, making pulse and warmth, pleasure and pain palpably present.

ONE DROP is a speculative summoning, a decolonial dream, an autopsy of the Western stage and an operetta. Slipping in meanings, leaking through different categories the work dives into the poetics and politics of relations, creating a stage that awakens the ghosts, connections lost or forgotten.

The title of the work refers to two separate frameworks, the one drop rhythm which is a reggae style drum beat as well as to the one drop rule of the Race Separation Act, created in the United States in the early 1900s, according to which a single drop of “Black blood” made a person “Black” despite their appearance. Through its multiple starting points the work interrogates the ghosts of the Western stage and its entanglements and relationalities to capitalism, coloniality and modernity.

ONE DROP was premiered in Pannu hall (Dance House Helsinki) on May 6th, 2023.

something like this is a performance that looks at the possibilities of the stage and hip-hop culture to serve as a platform for telling diverse stories, taking over space, empowerment and communality.

In this work aimed at young audiences, four street dance background performers meet on stage. A rich whole is built from a simple starting point, where the scenes are constructed in front of the viewers' eyes. Performers from diverse backgrounds dance, tell stories and have fun – together. There is room for many kinds of stories on this stage.

something like this turns the stage into a dance floor where stories, identities and ways of doing things can meet. Together with the viewers, the work asks: How should a performance be viewed or experienced, how does dance or movement move from one body to another, what kinds of things can be told through dance or movement? What is a communal dramaturgy like?

The work was produced as part of Zodiak's Zodiak Youth project and it toured in the cultural houses of the Helsinki capital region in 2023-2024.