Paloma Madrid: Dans i lejlighed

Swedish dancing safari in your living room

Local dancers, who draw on their personal stories in their dance, perform “Dance in Apartment”.

Dance in apartment is an unusual dance project, which takes the dance out of the theatre and directly into the audiences’ living rooms. It is a show you can borrow at the library in the same way you borrow a book. The dancers will then come and perform in your own home. The dancers are locals from the housing projects of Elsinore and Kokkedal.

Each performance will last for approximately 30 minutes and will be uniquely designed for the individual home from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom. The dancers are expected to do a large part of the performance without the use of music. In other words, the dancers are to be perceived as their own instruments. The voices will also be used for recitation of poems.

“When you speak of dancing in housing projects, people are often prejudice and think it is all about street dance. Why not make an artistic dance project with these people, I wondered, “ says the woman behind the initiative, Paloma Madrid, who is herself is Chilean descent but grew up outside Stockholm. She has experienced great success with a similar dance project in Sweden.

Dance in apartment is rooted in the so-called community theatre. It is about creating positive change by working closely with people and their personal stories. According to Paloma Madrid, “Dance in apartment” tells the stories of people who rarely gets mentioned in the history books. Typically, most of the dancers she works with come from a background of immigrants.