Helena Franzén is a choreographer with over 35 years of activity as a dancer and choreographic work. She has created nearly 100 scenic works that have toured nationally and internationally. Helena Franzén physical practice covers stage performances, workshops, mentoring, exhibitions, and dance films, primarily in Sweden but also internationally. In her work, the keywords are empathy, tolerance, courage, and personal appeal.
Helena Franzén strives to work and be presented through touring, residencies, and workshops. In recent years, she has sought out new venues through collaborations with art museums, county museums, libraries, and in public spaces.
Helena Franzén has made commissioned works for Skånes Dansteater, GöteborgsOperans danskompani, Norrdans, The Edge, Nytt Dansk Dansteater, Stockholm 59 North/ The Royal Ballet in Stockholm. Helena is a mentor and a teacher at various dance educations mainly in the Nordic countries.
In 2019- 2020 Helena Franzén presented her retrospective exhibition, My Dancing Life at the Dance Museum in Stockholm with photographs, films, costumes, publications, photo books, interviews with experts from the dance community, and excerpts from her stage works from 30 years of artistic work.
Helena Franzén is a choreographer whose work is characterized by her precision of movement quality and expression. She has developed a personal movement vocabulary, charged with intricate, physical challenges and explosiveness. Her work is often described as physically intelligent, movement poetry with nerve and presence. Recurring themes are about memory, how they take up the space and what they do to us, about the influence the environment has on human kind, and about the phenomena of finite time.
Since 2011 Helena Franzén has collaborated with the photographer and filmmaker Håkan Jelk. Many of their dance films have been presented in several dance film festivals like Moving Body Film Festival – Bulgary, Exeter International Film Festival – England, In Shadow Lisbon Screendance Festival, Thessaloniki Cinedance International – Greece, Multipliè Dancefilm – Trondheim Norway, 11 international Dancefilm festival – Brussels, among others.
In recent years, Helena Franzén has created works that have been performed in alternative spaces such as museums, art galleries, and libraries. In spring 2024 her new creation Brytpunkt/Breaking Point, was presented at the Uppsala art gallery – an exhibition with projections and art objects together with a solo she is dancing herself.
In 2007 Helena Franzén obtained a 10-year grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. In 2014 she was awarded The Gannevik prize, the Swedish Art Grant Committee “A choreographer who´s artistic work appeared as mature and detailed already from the beginning. She is uncompromisingly and consistently investigating in the eternal possibilities of the movements in her dance. She is a dance artist that together with her dancers create the poetry of the articulated body.”
In 2024, Helena Franzén was awarded the Dance Prize by the Cooperation Council for Regional Dance Development in the category of Choreographic Contributions/Artistic Development, with the criterion of raising the status or professionalism of the field.
The jury’s motivation reads: “Helena Franzén has, throughout her long career, been uncompromising and consistent in her dance and artistic language. Since the 1990s, she has tirelessly created dance performances based on the premise that dance, too, can be an art form. Regardless of where and how Helena’s work is presented, there is an unmistakable artistic integrity. In recent years, she has also focused on a younger audience without compromising her unique artistic movement language. Helena is a strong voice in dance that resonates throughout Sweden, and she does not conform to political correctness to secure necessary financial support. Instead, she maintains her focus on dance as an art form.”
AVAILABLE WORKS 2025-26
MIRAGE (2023)
MIRAGE is a dance performance that explores humanity’s complex relationship with nature. The background of the work begins with the acknowledgment that we have been depleting and destroying nature’s resources for a long time, without considering the consequences. But now we are facing a new reality where climate change threatens our existence, and the performance examines the individual’s responsibility versus the collective. In MIRAGE, uncertainty, powerlessness, and guilt are depicted when we try to take responsibility for our planet and approach nature in new ways. The performance also explores the feeling of lacking the ability to influence and questions whether our efforts truly make a difference.
– In nature, I feel like I am a biological being. I am a part of these different life forms, their cycles, textures, repetitions, and patterns. I get to be a part of something timeless, something organic. I get to exist out of necessity, says Helena Franzén and continues: – I think about how we humans are depending on all the life that nature provides us in the form of soil, air, water, which allows us to exist.
I also want to be able to give something back to nature, by sharing my dance and showing the poetry and its necessary existence. /Helena Franzén
Franzén’s phenomenal focus on the body’s movement both in the spatial dimension of the room and in microdetail makes Mirage constantly subdued and super-intense at the same moment. Beautiful, sad, awakening both feeling and thought. DN, Maina Arvas
Whether mirage or not – hope arises nonetheless. The choreography shows a care for details, with four excellent dancers and a cellist, choreographer Helena Franzén shapes an associative work about our existence. Here are both frightening images of human incapacity and tight interaction. Jennifer Wallén emits an energy that goes right through the room, her strong flame lighting a wedge of light that spreads. SVD, Anna Ångström
Premiere at Dansens Hus, Elverket, Stockholm Oct 2023.
Choreography: Helena Franzén
Dancers: Janne Marja-aho, Jennifer Wallén, Joseba Yerro Izaguirre, Kaho Yaganisawa
Music: Emma Augustsson
Costume: Anna-Sara Dåvik
Set design, lightdesign: Håkan Jelk
65 minutes
TWO AND A MIRROR (2023)
Two and a Mirror is a dance performance that plays with the idea of how we perceive ourselves and how others see us. Every day we mirror ourselves and compare ourselves to each other. Do I exist if you don’t see me?
Immediately after the performance, a workshop is offered by the dancers.
30 minutes + workshop 25 minutes.
Target audience: The performance is for ages 7- 14 as well as for public viewing. Touring 2023-24 in schools and as a public performance.
Choreography: Helena Franzén
Dance: Jessica Andrenacci & Linn Ragnarsson
Music: Stefan Johansson
Set design & lighting: Håkan Jelk
Costume: Helena Franzén
I see You (2022)
In the dance performance, I See You, we explore the theme of identity by examining how we shape ourselves in relation to others and what creates an Us versus Them. The performance begins with four unique solos where each dancer carves out their own personality. As the performance progresses, a sense of unity emerges, and a collective expression arises without words. The audience sits on either side of the venue, thereby becoming a physical part of the performance, sharing the same space as the dancers. The questions “Who do you see when you see me? Who do I see when I see you?” permeate the performance, which becomes a reflection on the mutual interaction between visibility and identity.
Audience: age 13- 16 and adults
Choreography: Helena Franzén
Dancers: Anna Borràs, Noelle Guinoo Deriada, Ninos Josef, Jimmie Larsson
Music: Stefan Johansson
Lighting: Håkan Jelk
Set design: Håkan Jelk
Costume: Helena Franzén
Photo: Håkan Jelk
40 minutes
REVERBERATE (2022)
Helena Franzén has created an artistic work in connection with the exhibition of choreographer Noa Eshkol’s “Rules Theory and Passion” at the Norrköping Art Museum. It is the first major retrospective exhibition in the Nordic region featuring works by Noa Eshkol (1924-2007). The exhibition encompasses Noa Eshkol’s entire life and collected production; her research, theory development, studies of language comprehension, textile art, and movement notation.
Helena Franzén connects her own choreographic work with Noa Eshkol, who also dedicated herself to the body as the ultimate expression, as the messenger of movement. In their dance, it is the stripped-down expression, the non-hierarchical, and the passion for movement as language, that connects them.
In every dance, I want to celebrate the intangible, what cannot be explained but is touching – a kind of hypnotic simplicity… I see myself as a messenger of the body and all it can express. It is precisely this, that the body is the ultimate means of expression, that connects me with Noa Eshkol’s choreographic work. It feels meaningful to be a part of the exhibition at the Norrköping Art Museum with this inspiring dance artist. Like Noa Eshkol, I want to assert that everything is interconnected; dance, art, life. Together, we share the passion for movements.
Choreography and dance: Helena Franzén
Music/mix: Håkan Jelk
25 minutes
TRIA SOLO (2021)
Helena Franzén continues to deepen her collaboration with musician and composer Jukka Rintamäki, who here creates, in his very special way, a rhythmic landscape full of strings. Photographer and filmmaker Håkan Jelk covers the backstage space with flowing projections, filled with dynamic, organic images. An evening dedicated to dance and the experience of the richness of movements.
Choreography & dance: Helena Franzén
Music: Jukka Rintamäki
Light design/ projections: Håkan Jelk
40 minutes
Here- Us- Now (2024)
In 1996, Helena Franzén premiered her first solo piece, Kantra, at the Moderna Dansteatern. Now, 28 years later, she returns to perform the same solo at MDT as part of the compilation work Here-Us-Now. Here-Us-Now is a collection of excerpts from Franzén’s extensive career as a choreographer and dancer, featuring works from the mid-1990s alongside more recent pieces, either directly translated or reinterpreted. Accompanying Franzén are dancers and long-time collaborators Katarina Eriksson, Annika Hyvärinen, Åsa Lundvik Gustafson, and Elizaveta Penkova.
Here-Us-Now carries important dance history but also looks ahead; two third-year students from the Royal Swedish Ballet School are part of the process and join the original ensemble. This marks a significant meeting and handover of movement material to the new generation.
“It is exciting to dive into older works and get to know them anew, like returning to an old friend and discovering new aspects of something familiar. Together with the dancers, this becomes a journey of memory through our muscles and our minds. We carry a living archive together!”
—Helena Franzén
Here-Us-Now was first created in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition My Dancing Life at the Dance Museum in Stockholm in 2019-2020, which showcased Franzén’s 30-year career as a choreographer and dancer.
Why Franzén has been awarded for her uncompromising and consistent work is clearly evident. At the same time, the distinct and precise elements hold within them a soft core, something tender and searching. Here-Us-Now is like a dance archive of movement memories being created in the present.
—Maina Arvas, DN, 2024
There is a concentration that nonetheless carries an outward charge. There is something both fragile and strong, constantly open and searching in these female figures who fill the space with, at times, explosive energy and, at other times, contemplative pauses. Now, they turn their gaze back toward us. It is both beautiful and commanding.
—Anna Ångström, SVD, 2024
Choreography: Helena Franzén.
Dancers: Katarina Eriksson, Helena Franzén, Annika Hyvärinen, Åsa Lundvik Gustafson, Elizaveta Penkova och alumnerna Assa Davidsdottir and Dalina Bagheri from the Royal Swedish Ballet School
Music: Jukka Rintamäki
Lighting design: Håkan Jelk, Magnus Pettersson
60 minutes