The Basics is my on-going exploration of the potential sustainability, ethics, resistance, and beauty of leading a mediocre life. With a specific starting point in the municipal aesthetics of Norwegian social democracy, my hope is for this exploration to reveal new ways of addressing success, failure, value and care, specifically in the practice of artistic and organisational dancemaking, but also for anyone who is grappling with their own mediocrity.

In attempting to perfect mediocrity, I already failed before starting, seeing that anything perfected can no longer be mediocre. So what am I then left with? Can this failure make a shift in what I value as a mediocre experience? Can I find a resonance in my own body that can enrich my understanding and appreciation for the seemingly boring or irrelevant?

The past two years I have tried to pull threads between questions of value, neutrality, standards, and bare minimums, to the history of standardised sizes in fast fashion’s basics sections, to the invisible but irreplaceable mass of the predominantly female work force in the municipality, through «Jantelov» and «Dugnadsånd»- defining elements of Scandinavian behavioural norms. And in the middel of this web of threads we find the Basic Bitch in a sustained collapse between high and low culture, feeling the sometimes melancholic, sometimes liberating irrelevancy of her own mediocrity.

During my process, two main movement scores has taken shape; “The Molasses Collapse” and “Basic Monday Groove”, both working with duration and insistence as main ingredients for reaching an amplified sense of one’s own mass, and the mass of a group. 

The scores were presented in the form of a dance piece at Weld, Stockholm in May 2023, then with a third score for sharing cake and coffee with the audience in a sustained silence, also focusing on duration as material. The dance piece was choreographed and performed by myself together with dancers Laressa Dickey, Alexis Steeves, Valentina Parravicini, and Tove Skeidsvoll. The work was shown with music by DeHendrik LeChat Willekens based on Portsmouth Sinfonia’s “Also spracht zarathustra” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Wachet auf” from Cantata 140. The scenography was inspired by municipal open office landscapes, and the costumes were curated from the basic section of Kappahl, worn together with identical brown wigs and sensible shoes. The cake was served by Sarah Bellugi Klima, light design was by Ronald Salas. The piece was filmed by Maria Ferreira Silva and edited by me.

The Basics was supervised by Ilse Ghekiere and Jonathan Burrows.