Helena Franzén MIRAGE 12-14 October 2023

Programme

Helena Franzén

Helena Franzen has been a leading figure in modern dance for several decades. After 35 years of activity, she has created nearly 100 stage works that have been performed nationally and internationally. In 2011 and 2014, Helena Franzén was awarded the Swedish Theatre Critics' Dance Prize and the Gannevik Scholarship. Helena Franzén is a sought-after teacher and mentor and regularly teaches at many different dance programmes around the world.
In 2019-2020, Helena Franzén presented an extensive retrospective exhibition at the Dansmuseet in Stockholm, My Dancing Life. The exhibition included films, photographs, photobooks, interviews with experts from the dance field, two writings by Cecilia Malmström Olsson and Sinikka Neuhaus, and excerpts from her stage works.

Helena's world of movement consists of different physical landscapes. Through scenography, costume and music, she creates experiences of the sensual, the tactile, what the body experiences. Her work is often described with words like physical intelligence, movement poetry with nerve and presence, descriptions that clarify her place in the Swedish dance landscape.
Recurring themes include memory, how they take up space and what they do to us, the impact of place and phenomena related to our exhausted time.
In the latter part of the 1990s, Helena was in New York on a long-term residency grant through the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Movement Research. This time is still reflected in Helena's choreographic work with her absolute focus on movement.
Helena Franzén's work testifies to a deep security in the belief in the ability of movement to express the human being, to tell a story about the human being, her outer and inner space. Carefully mapped details, shifts, moments. Her works tell of being in motion, of existing in time and space, of being a body in its entirety and in its parts - the outer and inner landscapes interact, change places, repeat themselves, disappear and reappear.

Her concrete observations in the form of dance offer resistance through small shifts and become an artistry on her own terms.
By Sinikka Neuhaus from the book about Helena's work, "It makes me shake".

For twelve years, Helena Franzén has collaborated with filmmaker and photographer Håkan Jelk, who has designed the stage and lighting for several of Helena's performances. Together they have created dance films, most of which have been presented at international dance film festivals.

Helena has in recent years created works for other places and spaces and her solo, Reverberate at Norrköping Art Museum, is the latest of these collaborations (2022).