Cosmic Body

Event Type
Performance
Event Description

Presented as part of IN>TIME Festival

“A surprising and all-consuming experience . . . with hypnotizing music . . . leaving an
object in the center of the performance, and changing its character
throughout, Fiksdal and Langggård show that a dance performance can be
actualized even without dancers on stage.”

Aftenposten

Simple yet powerfully affecting, Ingri Fiksdal opens up a new performance plane with Cosmic Body, an interactive event that resists classification and channels writer-artist William Burroughs’s Dreamachine.
This device, composed of pulsating light, produces complex patterns
behind closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, and the
user feels surrounded by color. Fiksdal believes in making art that is
“utterly useless” and at the same time a motor for change. Part
performance and part live concert, Cosmic Body is her latest collaboration with electronica/EDM artist Ingvild
Langgård and visual artist Signe Becker: a collective and affective
event where new experiences, thoughts, and ideas can occur. The
collaborators challenge traditional ideas of audience engagement,
removing the burden of any expectations to release something in the mind
mysterious and wholly alive.

Fiksdal is naturally inquisitive, constructing Cosmic Body as something joyously hypnotic and mischievously spacious. Her
expansion of choreography as patterns of social units, gorgeously
arranged, flows out of a neo-religious idea about ritual. Similarly,
William Burroughs often described the Dreamachine in his novels
as a weapon “of unearthly brilliance and color” against mind control.
The prototype device was constructed by Brion Gysin, ejected years
earlier from the surrealists by André Breton and who lived with
Burroughs in the Beat Hotel in Paris, along with Allen Ginsberg and
other counterculture pioneers. Cosmic Body
is Fiksdal’s updated pillowy expanse of choreographed lights, illusions,
sounds, and bodies. She invites audience members to be seated or stand
close to the performers—to experience a transformative visual and
cultural complexity.

This performance is designed for a small audience: capacity is limited.


About the Artists

Ingri Fiksdal is a choreographer
and performer and the current Research Fellow at The Oslo National
Academy of the Arts. Her work has toured to brut-Wien (Austria),
Kapnagel (Denmark), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (Finland), the
Armory Show (New York), Harare International Festival of the Arts
(Zimbabwe), and Homo Novus festival (Lithuania). Her collaborative
creative process engages human phenomena, such as the revulsion, or
uncanniness, experienced when facing almost-human creatures (HOOD, 2014) or the paradox of a concert experience without musicians, instruments, or sound (BAND, 2013).

Ingvild Langgård (Phaedra) studied at the Academy of Fine Art Oslo and is a composer and
performer of music for stage and film. She has an electronica/EDM music
following as Phaedra, and her core projects employ sound art, analogue
film, and video installation. As a curator, she cofounded the artist-run
gallery Rekord. Her artwork is shown in Kunstnerforbundet and the
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Lydgalleriet (Bergen),
Chashama Gallery, Pulse Art Fair, and the Armory Show (New York), as
well as other museums and galleries.

Signe Becker studied at the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA) and the Oslo National Academy of the
Arts. As scenographer with Verk Produksjoner, she received two Norwegian
Hedda Award nominations for Performing Arts and Performance of the Year
awards for Det eviga leendet (2011) and Stalker (2013). She represented Norway in 2015 at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space with her installation work.


Funding

Generous support for MCA Dance is provided by David Herro and Jay Franke.

Cosmic Body is supported by Royal Norwegian Arts Council and the Royal Norwegian
Consulate General. Additional support for Ingri Fiksdal is provided by
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Dance Styles
Multi-disciplinary
Modern / Contemporary

Location

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 397-4010