The Corporeal Subjectivity of Dance

Camilla Stage (born 1962). Trained as a dancer and choreographer at the Folkwang Staatliche Hochschule fur Tanz (Essen, GE) and the Swedish Ballet Academy (Gothenburg, SE). Founder and artistic director of Living Creatures since 1995.

Artistic Profile
Camilla Stage explores the dancer’s corporeal subjectivity, understood as a sensitive, vulnerable point.  Thus, Camilla Stage demands an intense presence of the dancers, who defy taboos of privacy.  The recurring question in her work is: “What touches me?”  With no fear of pathos, her choreography goes to the core of the dancer’s personality, so physical intimacy and a living presence resonates with the audience.
Her breakthrough came in 1994 with Den glemte abe [The Forgotten Ape], followed up by the great drama of life’s conception Blodstøv [Blooddust] in 1997.   
There is a search in Camilla Stage’s choreography for what is behind of conceptions of human nature.  In a living form of bodily expression, she communicates experiences that transcend our images of the world.  Something inward and different is brought into the works, and various aspects and symbols are seen from a more timeless perspective.  The artistic goal is to allow the audience to be engulfed by a softening of the distinction between dream and reality.  In this state, the dancers communicate to the audience as sensual bodies, open to the physical poetry of dance. 

Current Productions

WoMan Variation
(2005)
A powerful, intense and moving duet – an intimately poetic work for a male and a female dancer.  In a moving, taut aesthetic, the dance shifts between raucous tenderness and quiet brutality.

Sur Real Life – The Rose
(2005)
A staging of eroticism, violence, beauty, killing and death with three powerful dancers.  The instincts and human nature are aggressively displayed in a visually rich and penetrating series of ritual body tableaux.  At once, a reaction to the violence of the times and its denial of the human being’s strongest and most anxious urges.

Corpus Variationer II / Corpus Variations II
(2004)
An abstract and sculptural body drama for three men in which the male body as an isolated form is explored.  The body’s inner space is the springboard for the external.  The dances move through dissolution and substance.  A sublime and intimate encounter with the masculine gender.
Corpus Variationer II is a distillate of Kroppens Ekko [The Echo of the Body], which was the second part of Camilla Stage’s trilogy about the human body, Corpus Homini I-III.

Review Extracts

”With Kroppens Ekko, Camilla Stage has created her most successful and sublime work.   Kroppens Ekko is an extremely aesthetic, enchanting, muted and very moving exploration of the fundamental human condition.  A mature work by a modern artist for a mature audience.”
Weekendavisen (DK), Kroppens Ekko – later re-worked as Corpus Variationer II

“It is deeply fascinating, provoking and problematic, when the choreographer Camilla Stage breaks our culturally-created constructions of gender – and sex – right over our heads … A production on the cultivation of body, gender, dominance and submission in extreme sexuality, sadomasochism.”
DR (DK), Sur Real Life – The Rose