Rubicon Re-Visited at Haga Kyrkoplan

A reinterpretation and re-enactment of Dans i träd och kyrka (1989) by Rubicon at the same location.

Who is leaving traces and what is washed away?

Hedemyr explores the format of re-enactment in the research project Dance as Critical Heritage. The case study focus on the dance group Rubicon– consisting of three female choreographers – and their works for public locations in Gothenburg during the 1980’s. Hedemyr’s performance and the research project explore how practitioners, artists and researchers can collaborate in an exploration of the relationship between city space, art, activism, archive and memory.

Concept and idea: Marika Hedemyr
Choreography: Marika Hedemyr in collaboration with the dancers
Dancers: Maria Mebius Schröder, Anna Bergström, Karolin Kent, Marika Hedemyr
Length: 30 min
Commissioned by: Dance as Critical Heritage, a research project led by Astrid von Rosen at the Archives Cluster within Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Produced by: Crowd Company and University of Gothenburg
Presented at: Public performance at Haga Kyrkoplan. Also part of the research seminar and workshop ”Memory, Archives & Rubicon – the city dancers”, at University of Gothenburg 23-24 October 2014.
Photo by: Maja Kekonius.

Premiere: October 2014, Haga Kyrkoplan, Göteborg

Artistic startingpoints

For this work I decided to collaborate with dancers from four different generations, whose experience spans from the original work 25 years ago until today. Maria Mebius Schröder performed in the original work, which was a valuable source of info for us. I approached the idea of an re-enactment as a re-visit: I re-visited the location and worked from what the place contains today. I also re-visited the original work by talking to the choreographers and dancers who were part of it, watched photos and read old press-clippings. I was concerned with how this work, and others by Rubicon, had been more or less written out of history. All these experiences made up the material that we worked with, and created the work out of.

— Marika Hedemyr