Brewer & Blennow is an artistic duo based in Malmö, who started to collaborate in 2018 during the research project ‘Sounding Bodies’, initiated and led by Jenny Gräf Sheppard at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. They have been in residency at Inkonst in June earlier this year, and during the month of August they have been working in Berlin at Uferstudios.
Working in the field of performance and contemporary dance, Sanna Blennow & Elise Brewer incorporate sound in their movement practice as a way to think around and create dance and performance from another angle. By developing and executing exercises where they drain our vocabulary of words, investigating the connection between gestures and spoken word (hand to mouth connection), reading stories in a scrambled and vertical order (as opposed to the horizontal left to right order), they are scattering, shifting and peeling off what makes sense in a speaking and communicative body. This creates a playground where fantasy is invited, and also where new ideas can expand and unfold.
Sanna Blennow & Elise Brewer are looking at the format and content of folk tales (“folksagor”), playing with the connections to both our contemporary dance/performance field and to the times we’re living in.
“The folk tales is an oral tradition, taking place somewhere anonymous in an unspecific time. They usually start “once upon a time…”, the characters seldom have any names, the geographical location is anonymous, and they are stripped from any moral preaching. Today when we read the transcribed tales, we perceive them as childish, but they were never really meant for children. Later on, the Grimm brothers and H.C. Andersen developed this storytelling into fairy tales. But we’re more interested to look at the folk tales, which were told from person to person, belonging to no one and everyone at the same time, existing in as many versions as the amount of people who told them. During our residency at Uferstudios, we’ve started to combine the folk tales with the question of what a sounding body is and can be. This gave birth to an ensemble of sounding and moving performative characters.”
Visit Sanna Blennow’s homepage – samesizeworks.com
Read more about Workshop #1, Emptying which took place on February, 23 2020
Workshop #2, Filling scheduled for March, 29 2020 was cancelled due to Covid-19
Workshop #3 scheduled for May, 31 2020 was cancelled due to Covid-19.