Since its foundation in 1992, Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt has presented some of the most remarkable productions in Norwegian contemporary dance. Ingun Bjørnsgaard’s style and vocabulary derives from her close cooperation with her dancers. Their technical skill, areas of specialization, personal expression, and creativity are vital resources in the development of the choreography and dramaturgy of the work. Through such collaboration, the Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt cultivates a genuine openness to the new and unexpected, the current, and the extravagant. IBP receives funding by the Norwegian Arts Council.
Available works 2018 – 2019
A list of things he said
(Dansens Hus, Oslo, October 19th 2018)
A new independent choreographic work by Ingun Bjørnsgaard, unfolding in a double-bill and dialogue with her acclaimed performance Notes on Frailty (2017). Featuring four female dancers and the composer live on stage, Notes on Frailty explores “femininity” as a category in an intriguing composition of music and movement.
In A list of things he said, the complexities of gender again is at stake. Four male dancers move in solo sequences as well as in dynamic encounters, exploring the weight of human existence. Questions regarding gender has consistently been an artistic lead-motive for Ingun Bjørnsgaard, taking place in ambivalent games of identity and relationships. Through abstract movements and a sensitive interaction with music, the dancers further develop the company’s exploration of the contradictory fragility of contemporary life, in subtle choreographic observations of femininity and masculinity across gender.
A list of things he said is Ludvig Daae’s first collaboration with Ingun Bjørnsgaard Project, performing together with Vebjørn Sundby, Erik Rulin and Matias Rønningen, all entrusted dancers in the company for a number of years. The performance is a further development of the affinity for the interconnections between movement and music that characterizes Ingun Bjørnsgaard’s work.
NOTES ON FRAILTY
(Bærum Kulturhus October 19th 2017)
In an intriguing live composition of music and movement, Notes on Frailty investigates the complexities of womanliness.
Four dancers move between the sublime and the habitual in a choreographic exploration of the fine line between human beauty and failure. The women share inner conflict and friction, but also a longing to transcend existential solitude. Fluctuating between pure presence and dynamic expansion, they get entangled in each other’s inclinations and break free in solos. Composer Christian Wallumrød performs new electronic and acoustic music on stage, with the company’s signature affinity for the subtle relationship between music and dance.
Physical fragments, sampled from a 1950s iconography, are displaced and fall back to the body’s everyday intricacy, with literary reference to French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The choreographer’s language of movement ambiguously draws attention to the bodily construction of the «feminine», in tune with Beauvoir’s situation-based understanding of gender, beyond the dualities between biology and culture. The dancers move in time and space with the precision and casualness of Ingun Bjørnsgaard’s compositional virtuosity.
GOLDEN FLEECE | Dansens Hus January 28th 2016
With five dancers and a violinist on stage, Bjørnsgaard’s new production is an exploration of the relation between the private and the mythical. Bjørnsgaard and her precise and distinctive dancers have honed a signature expression, comprising an ambiguous dialogue with contemporary music predecessors, and a unique choreographic language characterized by femininity, humour, tenderness and distance.
In Golden Fleece the dancers would appear to move about freely, while at the same time they are partially controlled by an underlying force field which never acquires sufficient clarity. A destiny-driven game systematically and randomly controls and plays with them.
Here one can perhaps find parallels to the ancient Greek myth about Medea and Jason: impulses of love, escape and betrayal are mobilized in the search for a golden fleece; or Pasolini’s cinematic exploration of the same myth with Maria Callas as an unrivalled and fascinating fulcrum.
Or perhaps they find themselves adrift on a luxury vessel, without restrictions, on an odyssey in a post-post-modern stagnant sea?
Composer Henrik Hellstenius has written the greater part of the music especially for the production, but also existing music from Paul Hindemith and Georg Philipp Telemann will be used. Hellstenius has composed for one of Europe’s most important violinists within contemporary music, the Swedish Karin Hellqvist, who will perform the score life on stage.
Choreographer: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Violinist: Karin Hellqvist
Dancers: Ida Wigdel, Erik Rulin, Marianne Haugli, Catharina Vehre Gresslien og Stian Danielsen Composer: Henrik Hellstenius Music by: Paul Hindemith and Georg Philipp Telemann Set & costume designer: Thomas Björk Dramaturge: Kai Johnsen Sound designer: Morten Pettersen Light designer: Hans Skogen Seem: Else Ciljan Jacobsen and Caroline Evju
Produced by: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt
Co-produced by: Dansens Hus Norway
Rotating Nora | Dansens Hus September 2014
In Rotating Nora Bjørnsgaard’s Nora sees children, sociability and external machinations as miscognized entities, and she apparently struggles with the feeling of never really having arrived. On these grounds new and investigative, playful and oversensitive situations occur. Here the tragicomic human, in another way, imperfect, sublimated, is exposed. In motion, the androgynous Nora is, true to character, ritually trapped in the Ibsen point of view: a tarantella – this beautiful, frivolous, erotic dance where existential desperation and longing meet sheer tourism. A dancing and dangerously un-dangerous woman charged with power, laziness, yearning, beauty, despair, reluctance and passion.
Choreographer: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Composer: Eivind Buene Dancers: Mattias Ekholm, Erik Rulin, Ida Wigdel, Matias Rønningen, Marta-Luiza Jankowska, Catharina Vehre Gresslien Set designer: Thomas Björk Lighting designer: Lutz Deppe Sound designer: Morten Pettersen Costume designer: Ane Aasheim Dramaturg: Kai Johnsen
Produced by: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt Co-producer: Dansens Hus
Praeambulum | Dansens Hus January 2013
Praeambulum means prelude, introduction, or preparation. In both music and rhetoric, a praeambulum is a virtuosic and artful opening that is meant to heighten our expectations of what is to come.
The present piece is structured around introductions and preludes on various levels. It is punctuated by continual beginnings and departures. Seven dancers try to break barriers, sometimes desperately—even heroically—sometimes more nonchalantly. Underlying their effort is the anticipation of a glorious breakthrough. But how can the physical play be turned into communication, the pose into a person, the conventional gesture into a gentle touch? How, indeed, can the gesticulating body become one with mind and feeling?
Choreographer: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Composer: Henrik Hellstenius Dancers: Mattias Ekholm, Erik Rulin, Ida Wigdel, Matias Rønningen, Marianne Haugli, Marta-Luiza Jankowska, Catharina Vehre Gresslien Set designer: Thomas Björk Lighting designer: Hans Skogen Sound designer: Morten Pettersen Costume designer: Ane Aasheim
Produced by: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt Co-producer: Dansens Hus
Omega and the Deer | The Norwegian Opera & Ballet October 2011
In Omega and the Deer the characters are moving along a threshold between city limits and a forest’s darker edge. In such a place various spaces and directions emerge that defines our movements: our body; our social selves; our past; our secrets, our yearnings and our self-contempt. This opens up dimensions, contrasts, and vulnerability – which in turn create moments, and produce movement, friction, despair and melancholy. Omega and the Deer, which with a density of movement paints over Edvard Munch’s series “Alfa & Omega” (1908 – 09), address among other things the complex self-perception of the modern man. In Munch’s archetypical and erotic universe Bjørnsgaard finds resonance for her flirtation with the battle of the sexes, obscenity and alienation.
Choreographer: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Composers: Rolf Wallin and Tansy Davies Dancers: Mattias Ekholm, Erik Rulin, Ida Wigdel, Matias Rønningen, Marta-Luiza Jankowska, Lone Torvik
Set designer: Thomas Björk Lighting designer: Hans Skogen Sound designer: Morten Pettersen Costume designer: Ane Aasheim Dramaturg: Kai Johnsen
Produced by: Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt Co-producer: CODA Oslo International Dance Festival