“Unknown Pleasures” – Kulturhuset & Orionteatern, Stockholm; Pusterviksteatern, Gothenburg; NorrlandsOperan, Umeå; Gävle Teater; Dansstationen, Malmö; Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg; Jönköping Teater; Varberg Teater; Konserthusteatern, Karlskrona ; Sagateatern, Linköping; Västerås Konserthus

We theme-parked the future just as we theme-park everything. We theme-parked the past. We theme-parked the future, and visit it only when we feel we want some sort of glittery gimmick. -J.G. Ballard

The third part of our “Melancholy Cycle” trilogy, has been given its title after an album by Joy Division, whose singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in the early 1980s, a time period boiling of new aesthetics in music, fashion and dance. This period has characterized our creative tastes with dystopian aesthetics, existential blackness and the breakthrough of deconstruction and the culture of sampling. The actors in “Unknown Pleasures” are in the remains of an wrecked amusement field. They are left in the backwater, in a no mans land between town and countryside. Even as characters, they are a forlorn ballast in a culture of innovation, in which every individual who is unable to “realize” herself becomes a social rest product. These people have lost the feeling of loss because they don’t even have had missed one in the first place, nor do they see the future as an opportunity to lose.

After the audience is seated and the lights have been dimmed, a young woman asks someone in the audience for a coin. She puts it in a jukebox, the source of all music in this performance, and then performs an 18 minute long solo to the epic song By the time I get to Phoenix by Isaac Hayes. This is the start of Unknown Pleasures, a collage based on the Joy Division debut album from 1979 with the same name, on scenes and conditions from the Werner Herzog film Stroszek, emotions from films such as Paris Texas, and inspiring horror from psychological thrillers such as Rear Window and Body Double.

The performance evocates the image of the abandoned Pleasure Ground; a sad, redundant amusement park in the darkness of the night. This is the third part of the Reich+Szyber Melancholy Cycle; about people who are missing something, but don’t know what that something is.

Idea, choreography and staging: Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber

Texts: The ensemble
Poetry: Björner Torsson

Performed by: Sandra Medina, Dag Andersson, Piotr Giro, Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber

Sound, lighting and costumes are created in collaboration with three final year classes from the Dramatiska institutet in Stockholm: Siiri Eriksson, Norunn Standal and Bente Rolandsdotter
Choreography assistent: Cecilia Roos
Management: Loco Motion, Magnus Nordberg, Åsa Edgren

World Premiere: Pustervik, Gothenburg November 4 2009

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