​Untitled Landscape

 

In Untitled Landscape, the audience is taken on a journey through the boundaries of perception and meaning. This solo performance, a choreographic work, shifts from the real to the imagined, from the concrete to the abstract. The figure moves between pantomime and concrete physical actions, exploring the liminal space between recognition and oblivion. He uses both imagined and concrete objects such as microphones, loudspeakers, and lights to bridge the gap between sender and receiver, creating a unique language of sensuality. Objects are deconstructed and repurposed to open up new ways of understanding them, ultimately merging with the environment and creating an illusion of blending. Through idiomatic movement vocabularies, the figure invites the audience to enter a meditative state of creative contemplation. As the work progresses, the figure and objects become correlates of each other, repurposing themselves to create a new identity. The audience is left with visual echoes, an invitation to contemplate the ideas presented in the performance, to explore their own perceptions and meanings, and to question the boundaries between the real and the imagined.

 

Extract from the program notes of ‘Untitled Landscape’ written by Roy Boswell: 

 

You lasso the heifer, or the heifer lassos you. - Texas Jack Omohundro 

 

It would perhaps be a mischaracterization to say that this solo contains fragments of a variety of 'American dreams,' although they do feature: the rancher and their rope, home on the range, the free expanse of the dust bowl, an idealized notion of progress - and inversely, the nightmarish aspects of it, in rampant consumerism, in growing up under the threat of war and its various red scares, in colonialism and the claiming (and renaming) of a continent from people that already lived there. 

 

We come to see that the piece is an American dream itself, a dream of America within a dream: the soloist, Puckish, pollinating the stage and the audience with a potion that on one hand will make us fall in love, but also forget about what came before. 

 

The meanings of things change, the uses of objects are reconfigured. A vocabulary of movement that pries itself away from dance - conflicted, not coming to terms - and then abruptly embracing dance again; dance, and then theatricality, mimesis, representation. When the dust settles, we are left with an image of a landscape, the far edge of a strange continent that we may do well to leave alone.

 

Concept and Choreography: Ryan Mason

Sound Design and Dramaturgy: Roy Boswell

Costume Design: Suvi Kajas

Lighting Design: Anssi Ruotanen

Pictures: Jussi Ulkuniemi