ONE DROP

New, spectacular work signed by Sonya Lindfors attempts the seemingly impossible: To kill the immortal.

What kind of bodies, narratives and stories can our stages facilitate? And what kind of ghosts  are we dancing with?

We perceive the world largely through various social constructs, categories, divisions, representations, and narratives. We have been taught that there are “natural” categories  such as man and woman or black and white, nature and culture. However, many of the categories that now determine our identities date back only a few hundred years.

Categories have changed over time and can also be actively changed.  Often, however, our memory is short and the  power of the narratives enormous.

The narratives about the world gain validity as we continue to retell them.

ONE DROP is a new, mindblowing work from Sonya Lindfors & company that continues to interrogate questions around the  spectacle of otherness, the intricate relationalities between modernity and  coloniality and the myth of art as independent, apolitical and free .

Art has never been free in its history, Lindfors acclaims. We always dance with the ghosts of history,  and now with polarization, the rise of the far right, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo  movements, those ghosts have become even more prominent.

The work’s title is based on the “one-drop rule” – a widespread practice in the United States that established that anyone who had a black ancestor should be considered black. Despite the fact that science has proven that there is  only one single human race, the racializing practices have wiped out whole cultures, killed  millions of people and subjugated a large part of the human population to a subordinate  position.

ONE DROP explores the potential of art to change the narratives of the surrounding reality –  to make existing hierarchies of power visible as well as to shake them. It  strives to dream of coexistences that we do not yet know how to dream of.

Lindfors & company tries the impossible, which is to imagine the death of the immortal – the  destruction of oppressive structures. After this there will be a new world.

The work has its Norwegian premiere during har CODA 2023.

Sonya Lindfors is also one of the Scaling Up artists for the Big Pulse Dance Alliance.