”Fool’s Errand: an Alchemical Sonata” – premiere at Konträr Stockholm April 4th 2024

04 feb 2024

”Fool’s errand: an alchemical Sonata” combines visual, sound and performance art into a collectively transformative ritual – about artistic freedom, academic fantasies and the poetics of failure, all in a uniquely embodied sensory performance.

It’s a seven-part, exactly seventy-minute stage hybrid at the intersection of traditional alchemical refinement process and a psychosensory performance trip; bathed in the hypnotic sounds of drone music. ’Fool’s errand’ emerges from the power struggle between those who own the issue of academisation of artistic practice, its language and relevance to the freelance field and those who challenge this hegemony. It strives for an incorporation of the personally private into the socially universal and builds on a personal trauma that has managed to create an exceptional cultural debate. It explores the abuse of power, the primacy of interpretation, ’freedom’ in the arts inside and outside the academy, and failure as an opportunity for personal and social transformation.

The very definition of (scientific, social, artistic etc ) research is literally Knowledge Production.

What Knowledge does a painting, a dance piece, a carpet fabric ACTUALLY Produce?

This inherently unanswerable question forms the project’s essential starting point for a dialogue between the work, the audience and the responsible creators. In ’Fool’s Errand’, both the audience and the participants devour artistic knowledge production, literally. ”Fool’s Errand: an Alchemical Sonata” is an exorcism, a visual, sound and performing arts test of the exploring artistic body, both figuratively and here and now physically.

-Script, direction, stage design, live action Bogdan Szyber

-Composer, live action Daniel M Karlsson

-Lighting design, live action Maja Lindström

-Exhibition & communication design Gabriella Roos Redemo & Frank Torsson

-Aesthetic witnesses Carina Reich & Erik V Berg

-Premiere/vernissage at Konträr Stockholm 4 April, 9 performances until 21 April 2024

Preliminary TECHNICAL RIDER Fool’s Errand- an Alchemical Sonata