In Object and despair, Ingun Bjørnsgaard examines human fallibility, in close collaboration with the dancers Catharina Vehre Gresslien, Edith Strand Askeland and Ludvig Daae.

Fumbling attempts at flawless behavior in recognizable habitual situations become the subject of guilt and vulnerability in Bjørnsgaard’s new work. Against a vague sense of collective dismay, three performers struggle with the feeling of fault to be corrected at any time, and the self-criticism that can easily take over. With various intertextual references, among others to a Norwegian etiquette manual from the 1960s, the performance explores the fine line of proper ways of moving without exceeding the risk of shame and abandonment that can otherwise occur.

In the methodological development of the performance, thematic studies of impeccable etiquette and social conventions are fragmented and abstracted through Ingun Bjørnsgaard’s signature movement structures. The trio format invites a further exploration of the company’s uncoordinated harmonies as a form of choreographic idiom.

The dancers find themselves in fragments of distressed situations where they try to listen to eachother and do their utmost, based on limited possibilities for appropriate movements. While engaged in individual challenges, they also await solutions to their struggles outside of themselves.

The gender aspect is as always at stake in the company’s work, and masculine and feminine qualities are distributed between the performers, as in the attempts to shield other people from their own errors. Bodily self-censorship is at risk in the many practical tasks and tools that life consists of. And at the same time, the primal, underlying chaos becomes all the more visible in the performers’ aim to navigate without fault.

Through a complex layering of the performance, well-composed sculptural movement patterns and detailed physical references create an ambiguous, dynamic landscape, in a private space that the performers try to transcend. In the construction and deconstruction of visual tableaux, human fragility becomes a separate poetic idiom in itself, and clumsiness ab essential component in the experience of beauty.

The choreographic work is developed in close cooperation between movement, music and the physical space, created by set designer Thomas Björk and costume designer Solveig Holthe Bygdnes.

Bjørnsgaard works for the first time with the Norwegian composer Jan Martin Smørdal. Smørdal is known for experimentation and improvisation as a method, where the music becomes a product of social factors. The composer himself performs parts of the music live on stage, and through everyday instrument-objects created for Object and despair, the musical score also suggests the likelihood that sublime moments arise through relational interaction and lack of control.