Our latest feature comes from the Coda Oslo International Dance Festival of 2019 with Norwegian dance smiths Nagelhus Schia Productions based in Bærum, just outside of Oslo. We know you probably don’t know where that is but it’s very pretty, trust us.
The company tell us this much about ‘Orbo Novo’
Invited by artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui created Orbo Novo (‘the New World’) for NY based Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. The performance translates his feelings of freedom, confinement, connection and loneliness in NYC, his confrontation with America, the ‘New World’ and its incredible energy. It also underlines the common ancestors and the common heritage between Europeans and Americans.
Orbo Novo thrives on the direction the U.S.A. was taking politically in 2009, when the piece was created, the sense of a new found openness for the rest of the world. Still, in this piece, the hope is translated through a certain feeling of melancholy and through meditation. It speaks as much about coming together as of breaking away from one another. Szymon Brzóska’s complex scores give soul to the intricate flowing movements of the gifted dancers.
The text of A Stroke of Insight, a book written by Jill Bolte Taylor, is used in the piece to speak about the contrast between immediate sensory experience (the now) and memory and projection (past and future). It explains how through immediate sensory experience one can be more in sync and more at peace, more at one with the universe around you.
The set is composed by 4 movable structures on which the dancers can climb or crawl through. The borders are there, but permeable. You can’t make them disappear, but you can move them anywhere you want. And if you can’t get through something in order to move forward, take it along until you CAN get through. Resilience happens by doing, not only through thinking.
‘Orbo Novo’ is performed by Guro Nagelhus Schia, Vebjørn Sundby, Navala ‘Niku’ Chaudhari, Jon Filip Fahlstrøm, Catharina Vehre Gresslien, Matias Rønningen, Klara Mårtensson, Shintaro Oue, Hanne Elisabeth Svenning, Daniel Sarr, Ida Haugen, Jens Trinidad, Vilja Kwasny, Stian Bergdølmo.
Music Szymon Brzóska, Barbara Drążkowska, Linda Jankowska, Emanuel Salvador, Emilia Goch-Salvador & Izabela Buchowska.
Filmed at Oslo Opera House, Oslo, Norway on October 25 2019.
Photo by Antero Hein