ON INSULA
ON INSULA – a conversation between contemporary dancer Dovydas Strimaitis and artist & choreographer Maarja Tõnisson in Marseille.
Insula aims to dive into organic relations of space within and between bodies, where they meet complex identities, natures, movements, clothes and sounds. Transfiguring strangers are constantly defaced or obscured in dance. The space becomes a field of attention and the audience takes an active part in landscape dramaturgy. The bodies that we inhabit, made of seventy percent water, unstable materials and containers, are in constant shift. The fictional and natural merge into affective scenes to challenge the sense of physicality, belonging, the other and intimacy.
Interview setting: September 2020 Dovydas Strimaitis and Maarja Tõnisson meet in Marseille IRL after a few zoom sessions and start working together, testing the borders of their bodies and their work, they start forming their own island, their insula (s). In this conversation you will hear reflections about how does it feel to work together in an unfamiliar setting of pandemic-ridden city of Marseille, which in 2020 commemorates 300 years since the deadly bubonic plague.
Video edit: E/A/Smith
Music: Maarja Nuut & Ruum, a duo will present the work “World Inverted”(LP) Curated by Justė Kostikovaitė, Merilin Talumaa, Maija Rudovska
Interview was conducted by Ryan Galer and Ilze Aulmane
Dovydas Strimaitis is a Lithuanian contemporary dancer, living and working in Marseille. He has been part of Jitti Chompee’s “18 monkeys dance theater” in Thailand, participated in the creation process in Gothenburg Opera’s Dance Company with choreographer Marina Mascarell, and performed in the restaging of Jan Martens’s “Pretty Perfect”. Since 2019, Dovydas has been dancing in Le Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of La Horde, where he works with choreographers Alessandro Sciarroni, Lucinda Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and Tânia Carvalho.
Maarja Tõnisson is an artist and choreographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. In her work, she mainly explores physicality and materiality through choreography. She has created four solo works: bodySHIFTbody (produced by STL, nominated for the Estonian dance award, 2015); bodyBUILDINGbody (commissioned by Tallinn Architecture Biennale, 2015); bodyIMAGEbody (group exhibition “(In)visible dreams and streams”, curated by Maija Rudovska, CAC, 2016)) and bodyWORKbody (at group exhibition “Museum Choreography” curated by Hanna Liis Kont, Tartu Art Museum, 2017). She is also part of a performance collective Olmeulmad.