Organization

Admin

Dansens Hus

Concept

Choreographer (+1)

Mathilde Caeyers

Choreographer

Costume designer

Costume designer (+1)

Line Maher

Set designer

Lawrence Malstaf

Lighting designer

Lighting designer (+1)

Torbjørn Sandnes

Video

Festspillene i Nord-Norge

New Religion is a science fiction dance production in which artificial intelligence achieves a god-like authority over humans. Five dancers move around in a five-metre high labyrinth which continuously changes shape and dictates how much room their bodies have to move in. This is a chilling, dystopian production which pits the organic and the artificial against each other, where the dividing line between reality and fiction becomes unclear.

The labyrinth - or the stage design - is the Nevel installation by the Tromsø-based Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf. After the production, the audience is invited to explore the installation on the stage themselves.

- a strong aesthetic experience, in which the dance art is grounded in the visual art and the music

Nordlys

The production was performed during the Arts Festival of North Norway in 2021, and at Hålogaland Theatre during the Northern Lights Festival in 2022. In 2023 it will go on tour with Dansenett Norge. New Religion generates more questions than answers about the developments in high technology that we are facing, and gives the audience an opportunity to reflect on what influences our choices. In the same way as religion, people are fictions in themselves. We are unable to live without building a fictional story around who we are – but what happens when artificial intelligence does this for us?

Mathilde Caeyers is a Norwegian-Belgian dance artist based in Tromsø. Since getting a BA in dance from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 2018, she has created four dance productions, two of which have been selected to tour with Dansenett Norge. Mathilde works with a close pairing of dance and installation art, and explores themes touching on human existence, such as free will, consciousness, autonomy and transhumanism. In her artistry, her aim is to bring seemingly distant ideas, concepts and situations into our contemporary world, and to provoke more questions than answers about our collective perception of reality. Mathilde is a science fiction enthusiast, and takes her inspiration from the genre’s innate power to evoke philosophical reflection on the future.

Contributors

Concept and choreography
Mathilde Caeyers

Scenography/Installation Nevel
Lawrence Malstaf

Co-creating dancers
Eirik Dreyer Sellevoll
Marit Landfald Meløe
Stian Bergdølmo
Synne Maria Lundesgaard
Karianne Andreassen

Costumes
Line Maher

light and video design
Torbjørn Sandnes

Music
Alexander Aarøen Pedersen

Programming
Einar Ottestad

Photo
Marthe Thu

Grianghraif