Offsite: Jenny Larsson Performance

I have this love/hate relationship to the real arctic winters I experienced growing up in the north of Sweden. The darkness, the cold, the dangers and what this climate does to the people having to live through it year after year. The stories, the mythologies, certain images that stays with you.

Literal and abstract references to winter, snow and the arctic wilderness abound in this evening performance of Searching for Arctic Winter. Oral histories, legends and stories of the area and its uniquely Nordic environs are folded into the performance, as performers interpret the season through body and movement. All music written and performed by Scandinavian musicians, with a terrestrial soundscape created from on-site recordings in Sweden of snowstorms and forests.

In Searching for Arctic Winter, the search for home, for the familiar, for the way we remember things, is both personal and universal in this haunting performance. As the dancers search for winter, they seek a home that is lost. Referencing loss not only in the nature of emigration, Searching for Arctic Winter alludes to the much larger, marching loss brought on by a changing climate and shifting temperatures felt across the world.

Snow falling on my cheekbone

Tongue outstretched in to the darkness

Lights fluttering by beneath my eyelids

The wind howl like hungry wolfs through the valley

I sense a glistering, sparkling tone caused by extreme temperature

A growling between my boot and the snow, a protest

This winter takes everything in to its possession, it consumes, it paralyze, convince, and re-collets

It eats me whole and then spits me out in little piece, I’m shattered, destroyed

The arctic winter is a beast, frightening but beautiful, a witch I don’t see to often

It doesn’t come around here anymore

And i miss it