Thank You Very Much, I Don't Dance

THANK YOU VERY MUCH, I DON'T DANCE (2011)

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With Oscar Mangione and Fredrik Ehlin.

This script was a performance in and of the exhibition “The Spiral and the Square: Exercises in Translatability” at Bonniers Konsthall in 2011. It was on the one hand a live radio performance taking place in the exhibition halls, and on the other hand a publication. It was a performance of an exhibition in the exhibition.

Like so many other stories, this one begins with an invitation. The curators Daniela Castro and Jochen Volz were planning an exhibition on the theme translatability. The insoluble relationship between a spiral and a square in the novel “Avalovara” by Osman Lins became the basis for the work.

Even though you may occasionally find the presentiment of a discussion of translatability in this act, the relationship between exhibition, manuscript and radio is in the foreground, and Cecília can no doubt be seen as a translator. She is the one that sustains the relation between text, exhibition, and audience; she is both inside and outside the manuscript, inside and outside the exhibition to which the actor belongs. Cecília is a translator to the extent that the actor and the role are translators, and to the extent the manuscript of which the role is a part — and the exhibition the actor roams through — are of a kind that they can leave their alleged attributes such as text and exhibition behind and become something else: voice and motion, a body that acts.

Cecília, played by Thérèse Brunnander, arrives at the exhibition, in the evening. Besides a sound engineer and a small group of people that follows her, she is alone.

Written and directed by Fredrik Ehlin, Andjeas Ejiksson, Oscar Mangione.