Durational performance and installation: with sound, objects activated by performers, perspex. To the right: Studio view, 2022

In 'Schwanen', a durational dance piece and mourning ritual by Lene Vollhardt performed as solo and as quartett, the symbolic grammar of Fokine’s classical ballet piece “Dying Swan” is supported with the aid of prosthetic tools constructed particularly for the featured movement representing a swan wrestling with death. 

Vollhardt's installation proposes a reconstruction of several layers of meaning of the animal in language, folklore, and movement. 

The title refers to the archaic german word "Schwanen" (literally "swaning" or "being a swan"). According to fairytale author Grimm, it is an inherited word of the common people, connecting it to the traditional Germanic association of swans with prophecy and fate. On one hand, 'Schwanen' explores what mythology dissimulates as it relays, remixes, re-versions mnemotechnical remnants through movement and the rich language of somatic registers. Simultaneously, the tools' function prompts performers to engage with stretching and gliding of the body, perhaps as if asking, how much stretching a body can endure. The prosthetic tool's stretching function somatically problematizes the way in which the performance of authority or power stands in a dichotomous relationship to support structures, potentially opening up channels between the two.

While 'Schwanen' takes the form of both a solo and collective choreography, both versions connect grief and kinship and rivalry, of endurance and constraint, are embodied through intimate dances.  

Full documentation on request