FRACPTURING (2023)

FRACPTURING is a choreography that crashes the black box with a glassy screen world. The work explores the screen as an entity that exists materially, in front of our faces and under our fingers, as well as cognitively, in our thinking and daily world-making, also leaking its presence into the world of dance.

During the process of creating this work we have speculated that the screens have become such a familiar cultural object that their hypnotic content (cultural, political, commercial and social) makes one forget that the world inside the screen is indeed separated through a glassy surface. Screen is always close to the body, extension of the body, and always turned on.

In FRACPTURING we have been interested in several questions. First, how does the presence of screen culture affect dance making and dance viewing? Second, what happens to notions of dance or live performance when they also become part of value creation and a system of attention economy through the screen? Third, what does dispersed attention in spectatorship do to the methods of a dance production?

FRACPTURING experiments with the connection of dance and dancers’ bodies to devices and screen culture. In addition, it explores the black box theater and screen world in relation to each other as places of illusion and world-making, specifically in late capitalist landscapes. 

FRACPTURING captures and fragments bodies, it accelerates and layers flows of images, loops and mixes physical with virtual presences. It injects fluorescent light into darkness, bends time, distorts voices and sounds. FRACPTURING is a performance about dance in the times of screen culture.

Credits: 
Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen (choreography, performance) 
Sini Henttu (media art, performance) 
Oula Rytkönen (sound design, performance)
Zodiak - Center for New Dance (production) 

The work was made with the support of the Kone Foundation, Vivicas Vänner theatre foundation, Arts Promotion Center Finland. Residency support ESKU - live art center in Helsinki, EHKÄ - contemporary art space Kutomo in Turku. 

 Video trailer (you can request the full documentation by getting in touch with us):
 

‘’Fracpturing is a work about life tied to a glassy surface, the culture of screens and a phenomenon that radically changes social metabolism. We are in the connection and entanglement of the body and the machine. For me, fracpturing is associated with the words fractures, frictures, capture, fragmentation. Fracpturing breaks, hijacks, fragments and disperses bodies in relation to themselves and each other. This is life during the culture of screens. I observe the body of the performer present in the real reality of the stage as a whole, open to meanings, and at the same time I see the cinematic machinery that everyone uses to produce their own dance. Works of conceptual art do exactly this. With their expression and aesthetics, they make the phenomenon visible. They practice critical self-reflection, they also problematize themselves and their relationship to power, they are aware, they make us see and understand what our own everyday routines of experiencing and perceiving do not reach.’’

-Hanna Helavuori 5.10.2023