Ingri Fiksdal Cosmic Body

About

Presented as part of IN>TIME Festival

Simple yet powerfully affecting, Ingri Fiksdal opens up a new performance plane with Cosmic Body, an interactive event that resists classification and channels writer-artist William Burroughs's Dreamachine. This device, composed of pulsating light, produces complex patterns behind closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, and the user feels surrounded by color. Fiksdal believes in making art that is “utterly useless” and at the same time a motor for change. Part performance and part music event, Cosmic Body is her latest collaboration with electronica/EDM artist Ingvild Langgård and visual artist Signe Becker: a collective and affective event where new experiences, thoughts, and ideas can occur. The collaborators challenge traditional ideas of audience engagement, removing the burden of any expectations to release something in the mind mysterious and wholly alive.

Fiksdal is naturally inquisitive, constructing Cosmic Body as something joyously hypnotic and mischievously spacious. Her expansion of choreography as patterns of social units, gorgeously arranged, flows out of a neo-religious idea about ritual. Similarly, William Burroughs often described the Dreamachine in his novels as a weapon “of unearthly brilliance and color” against mind control. The prototype device was constructed by Brion Gysin, ejected years earlier from the surrealists by André Breton who lived with Burroughs in the Beat Hotel in Paris, along with Allen Ginsberg and other counterculture pioneers. Cosmic Body is Fiksdal's updated pillowy expanse of choreographed lights, illusions, sounds, and bodies. She invites audience members to be seated or stand close to the performers—to experience a transformative visual and cultural complexity.

Late seating is not permitted.

• This performance is designed for a small audience: capacity is limited.
• Running time: 70 minutes