Lisa Colette Bysheim & Katrine Patry: Blue Carousel (2024)
Friday, 27 November 2026, at 8:00 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
dance performance, festival opening
Duration: 47 min.
A club setting, techno music. When the objectification and stereotyping of female bodies is pushed beyond the boundaries of realism, unexpected, humorous and absurd moments break open, revealing the choreography of ideology.
In human life, a range of natural processes have social equivalents in which a society may consider itself to have failed in its own peculiar way: when rituals remain functional and naturalised, that is, when the ritual scenario fails. Besides the various natural tactics of mimicry, which are interesting to consider in relation to bodies within the social sphere, mating is certainly one of the most potent processes on the border between the natural and the human. In recent years, the forms of its cultural coding have become an important arena of political clash, one in which the battle for the equal standing of human voices and bodies is being fought. Not only are gender classifications in conservative political thought often reduced to natural functionality through questions of what is natural and what is not, but nature in these views largely becomes a disguised stand-in for morality.
In Blue Carousel, Lisa Colette Bysheim and Katrine Patry, together with the techno set asiangirlsonly, explore choreographically the natural processes of mating, seduction and conquest within the social field. The drama of meaning unfolding in Blue Carousel becomes clearer when we link it to the traditional and somewhat forgotten literary genre of the fable, in which the collision of the animal and human worlds serves to humanise the animal and animalise the human. In this way, pressing social contradictions become more visible to us. In the choreography, through supple, beat-driven repetition in a club ambience, the absurdities of bodily objectification, self-objectification and the theatralisation of the female body are gradually taken apart. The two artists examined closely the lives of birds and their mating processes, which are marked by various natural tactics, including visual ones: an animal, after all, must draw attention in order to be noticed. Things get interesting when these processes are transferred into the social sphere. If ornithology, together with mating rituals, has played a relatively important role in European dance history, in Blue Carousel this commonplace is sharpened humorously and moved beyond fairy tales and fairies by the lakes. Reality, after all, is less romantic.
Concept & choreography: Lisa Colette Bysheim & Katrine Patry
Dancers: Katrine Patry & Lisa Colette Bysheim
Sound Design & live DJ: asiangirlsonly (Thea & Miriam Michelsen)
Lighting Design: Eirik Lie Hegre
Costume Design: Golnaz Adham
Set Design: Sophia Gatzkan
Dramaturgy: Janne-Camilla Lyster
Production: i.c.a.p (Lisa Reynolds & Elisabeth Gmeiner)
Co-producers: Dansens Hus Oslo, BIT Teatergarasjen, & Carte Blanche.
Funded by: Arts Council Norway, The Audio and Visual Fund, Fund for performing Artists, & Bergen City Council.
The tour is funded by: The Audio and Visual Fund, Performing Arts Hub Norway
AFTERPARTY
DJ FUGENTORPEDO (Warrego Valles)
Friday, 27 November 2026, from 9:30 pm
Kino Šiška, lower foyer
Free admission
Organised by Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenija