Land Lost

 

Solo.

Premiere: 11th April 2008, Dansescenen, Copenhagen.


In Land Lost Anders Christiansen explores ‘the lost land’ – the space that emerges in the absence of people, things and places we no longer have any connection with. A slightly melancholy dance performance with home video, photo albums and a record player.


Concept, choreography and dance: Anders Christiansen
Music composed for the piece and sound design: Jørgen Teller
Recorded music: Alessandro Moreschi, Vera Lynn, Ennio Morricone, etc.
Set design: Nanna Arnfred
Video and costume design: Lise Klitten
Light design: Lars Egegaard Sørensen
Producer / PR: Aline Storm
Production: (stillleben)

Minimum stage measurements: 14 metres deep x 16 metres wide
Duration:60 minutes

 

See video trailer from the performance [!video-link?filid=316&linktekst=here!] See promotion video here

Press quotes:

Anders Christiansen is his own dancing universe.
”A scratched vinyl record crackles ”Ave Maria”, while pictures from childhood click by on a slide screen. Pictures from hot summers and snowy winters in the privet hedge neighbourhood, pictures of great-grandparents, of rainy streets, green trees and endless railroad tracks on film in the background.

A man and his past. Told by Denmark’s strangest dancer, Anders Christiansen, in his usual slow style.

Harmoniously flowing movement patterns, rounded in the body, tough and soft at the same time, and then with this naked and vulnerable face that unites the inexplicable choreography with melancholy weight and sorrowful significance.

As always with Anders Christiansen it is both pathetic and moving, absurd bordering on the complacent and yet given its own original dignity, that makes the piece fascinating to watch. In the midst of all the grotesque.”
Henrik Lyding (Jyllands-Posten, 13th April 2008)

”His method creates an expression that cannot let go of melancholy. It hangs in the piece as a fog. For the land of childhood has really and definitively disappeared. We see Christiansen in a white shirt and flounces, like a torso dropped on the floor. Like a root. A tough tree. Down there at mould level, his body crawls like smoke. Down there it can find itself in the middle of the shame that it also is to remember – for the one who remembers knows that he is closer to death than ever before. To cultivate memories is in itself an extremely private enterprise.

I like Anders Christiansen as a creator of dance works, because he always puts himself far out on shaky ground. It pitches out there, and much is at stake. Christiansen performs with a poker face, but not in order to keep something from us. It is because he does not want to make belief that he has really changed into one of the figures (either his family lineage or historical icon) that he identifies. He is too smart to act.

But he has to dance these figures in order to understand them. We in the audience feel that in our stomachs: This is real. The dance, the empathy, what happens right there on stage, it is real! It is actually a strange change from the childhood pictures which tick through the slide projector and which are technically supposed to be the most authentic element in the piece. But it shows that in yet another choreography, Anders Christiansen has dealt with a very difficult material and moulded it into a unique and moving dance piece. He is our professor of broken hearts.”
Janus Kodal (Politiken, 18th April 2008)

”Land Lost is the title of Anders Christiansen’s new nostalgic, slightly melancholy and evocative solo piece at Dansescenen. A dance performance which, in the words of Marcel Proust, could also be called Á la recherche du temps perdu. For it is the memories of and the longing for the lost land and time of childhood and other stages of life that Anders Christiansen focuses on with optics that are at once private, personal and collectively historical.

… As always he recycles movement patterns from earlier works, which also gives the dance a personal historical reference when the body is familiarly shaped as a bird with clipped wings or a trunk-like amputated torso. Repetitions that open up to new meanings in the many fine auditive, visual and bodily time layers of this melancholy work so full of imagery.”
Vibeke Wern (Berlingske, 14th April 2008)

Venues:

Archauz, Århus, 20-22 November 2008.
Dansescenen, Copenhagen, 11-26 April 2008.

 

Land Lostwas produced with support from The Danish Arts Council, The State Arts Foundation, Danmarks Nationalbanks Jubilæumsfond, Augustinus Fonden, Wilhelm Hansen Fonden and Tuborgfondet.

 

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Photograph: Christoffer Askman
1 Grandpa, grandma, little sister, big sister, Anders Christiansen
2 - 6 Anders Christiansen