Choreographer Cristina Caprioli describes TREES as an up-side-down make-believe forest that triggers odd sensations. Impenetrable, softly embracing, in a whirlwind, in stillness. Tree trunks in a row, clearings with no enclosure. Passing glances, fleeting encounters. Between the trees, through the interpersonal. The forest as a grid of in-between spaces, where the intimate is framed and constantly cropped. A no man’s land, void of overview, in the middle.

In The Enchanted Forest, TREES shimmers in its quiet splendor. The visitor observes from a distance, steps into the woods, loose its way, rests in wonder. As if the forest were a fuzzy sensory image. Irresistible. Empathetic.

choreography Cristina Caprioli
concept & design Cristina Caprioli, Panagiotis Michalatos
digital landscape & programmering Panagiotis Michalatos
sound alva noto, Opiate
dance Anton Borgström, Louise Dahl, Samuel Draper, Annika Hyvärinen, Frank Koenen, Hana Lee Erdman, Adam Schütt, Sigrid Sjöholm, Elinor Tollerz Bratteby, Kristiina Viiala

As part of this Summer’s divertimento, Cristina Caprioli and team are in residence at Artipelag.

Every Sunday, they perform an interactive version of TREES at 12.30 and 3 pm. Silent figures move amongst the trees and together with the visitors, dance a collective choreography. Mysterious and alluring, in participation. Tree trunks, light and shadows. Suggestive sounds and undulating moves. The dancers reach for your fingertips, wrap their arms and legs around you, guide your steps, follow your mood. TREES becomes a forest to dance in and dance with – dark, caring and uncertain.

Every Sunday the dancers also step out of their forest and familiarize their dance with ‘The Things Around’. Other choreographies, only suggested, sometimes overexpressed, mingle with The Enchanted Forest and linger a different gaze.

by and with Cristina Caprioli

handled and gone abandons herself to the faintest timbre of dancing, in a clear stillness with no expectations. In lack of a predetermined prospect, relieved from the promise of improvement, dancing remains in place and moves with no restraint.

Quiet in the spot, moving at raging speed, she shifts tonality, measures and upbeat, lingers a driveway, becomes a modulation in low-intensive pulse. Dancing ceases to perform herself as primary matter, to instead act as connective tissue between substance and perception. A third condition emerges. We see. And in step with the frugal dancing, we sense* all the thread-thin shifts that make this solo so incredibly sparse and at the same time so saturated. We step over a sensory threshold**.

In contrast to the current hysterical oh-so-static pursuit of increased growth with rapidly consumed utility value, this solo proclaims a radical tress-pass. For the dance, through the dancing. In the singular common.

handled and gone has been around several years as a line of thought in several previous choreographies
and in a short order of words named gone

gone

when falling, you stretch out your hand and catch the falling onto the bottom of the fall
in the groundless abyss the helpless is falling into there is no flatness to counter the falling by

yet the startled perplexed finds immediate mitigation to the crash in the hand itself
in the pit the hand bends itself into as to comprehend that which otherwise would rush out of sight

the perplexed that is falling into the pit of her hand is a quiet image, not the least inappropriate, rather a resourceful one
one that is ready, ready to catch the sight of the groundlessness as it falls into the pitfall of her hand

this onehanded dance claims to be falling into the smallest nook of language where the speechless turns into many
bold and invincible, caught by and cared for in the narrow pit of your hand

cc 2020

*A sensation is the reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus. Sensation is the conversion of the nerve impulses formed at the end of signal transduction (a cascade of chemical reactions in a sense cell that begins with the activation of a receptor) into neural signals that can be interpreted by the brain. This interpretation is called perception, and in psychology sensation is therefore not the same thing as perception, even if the concepts are often used synonymously in common language. It is very difficult (if even possible) to experience a pure sensation, the brain is quick to interpret the direction and then the sensation becomes perception.

**The sensation diminishes with repeated or long-term exposure to the same stimulus (so-called habituation or adaptation). When attention to the sensation is low or absent, that is, when impressions are registered in the unconscious, the impression is called subliminal perception. The level at which stimuli are too weak to be perceived is called sensory thresholds.