‘If This | Then’ is an immersive sound experience, a fusion of voice and movement, where the three dancers Antonia Harke, Emilie Marie Karlsen, Magdalene Solli play with the unfinished, unresolved, and undigested.

The dancers and Bysheim have worked on accumulating material through improvisation and playing with structures and habits engrained in language, the internal conversations in ones mind and transformations of meaning through repetition and associations.

If This | Then questions its own accumulated non-sense through a choreography of layered samples made from open improvisations and exercises relating to language. The starting point of the rehearsal period was a work of deconstructing language and meaning. Early in the process, the dancers and Bysheim read texts together and explored the choreographic relation to poetry, prose and theory. Texts by Sara Ahmed, Anne Carson, Ursula Le Guin and others followed them as they proceeded in the studio space. There’s a faint echo of these texts in the current performance, but it was the phrase «a feeling of something» that has been the leading motive in the studio. This has been an exercise in staying with the discomforts of not knowing what to do and finding ways to lean on each other. What worlds can the dancing bodies’ effort of searching in the dark produce? 

Together with sound designer Mike McCormick, light designer Randiane Sandboe and costumes by Golnaz Adham, they build moods, fictions and actions that are allowed to collide and audiences are invited to fabulate alongside in a joined exploration of possible meanings.