“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” ― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Ditching a “neither/nor” in favour of a “yes/and”, Make Hay While the Sun Shines is a dance of constant change. Saying yes to both the habitual and the unknown it samples the dance history of a cross-generational cast of dancers and merges them into new forms. If each moment is a possible future, why not catch them all?

Make Hay While the Sun Shines departs from the incoherency of movements and histories. It engages in time specific and partial views, the uncategorized details that pre-exists the whole, and the chaos called reality. Stemming from a movement practice based on disharmonious change, a dance which might be more like life itself is created: irregular, fascinating, unsuccessful, stumbling, loving and pretty unpredictable.

Make Hay While the Sun Shines is a series of dances developed through movements between Stockholm and New York. Previous iterations have been presented at Center for Performance Research (NYC), Performance Mix (NYC), Dans.Hall (Farsta), La Mama Studios (NYC) and on the grass field outside of MDT.

This performance is a conglomerate and development of several of the previous dances, with an extended cast of dancers, light design by Josefin Hinders and new music by KABLAM.

“Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom. (…) Meanwhile the cheering lights of science and art, ever increasing in intensity, illuminate our path, and the marvels they disclose, and the enjoyments they offer, make us measurably forgetful of the gloomy future.” (Nikola Tesla “The problem of increasing human energy” 1900)

Thunderstruck walks in the footsteps of the genius and madman Nikola Tesla. In the end of the 19th century, the Serbian-American inventor brought us several of our century’s most important innovations in electricity and communication. He also invented the Tesla coil, an electrical resonant transformer circuit used to produce high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity. Basically, a device that produces lightning bolts and now can be used for entertainment in live electricity shows.

Thunderstruck departs from the 19th century phenomena of touring electricity shows. At a time when electricity was still a scientific novelty it was displayed in public performances as acts of magic. Today, a contemporary heir to the electricity magic show is the Tesla coil performance, making use of the spectacular sound and light effects the coil produces, but often performed in hyper-masculinized, technique-masturbatory and rock’n’roll-fetishistic shows.

In Thunderstruck, Stina Nyberg returns to a time when the artist and scientist believed in transforming the forces of nature into the forces that propel society, harnessing natural energy for crafting nearly magical devices.

Creating an alternative to the existing macho-spectacular Tesla coil shows, Thunderstruck pairs effective technical innovations with a long-term research on science and magic.