QUEENS OF THE FAUNS 

Queens of the Fauns is a duet danced by Frédéric Gies and Elizabeth Ward. The piece dialogues with a keystone in dance history: The Afternoon Of A Faun by Nijinsky. To the techno beats of a live techno set by Fiedel, the two dancers develop a dance conceived as an incantation in which the mythological figures of the faun and of the nymph merge. While leaving the tradition of ballet to create an experimental dance form was central to Nijinsky’s project, their voluptuous dance collapses the distinction between erudite and popular, traditional and experimental forms of dance, creating a poetics of movement and embodiment in which various opposites coexists, dissolve, unite or merge into one another. Queens of the fauns also echoes the sexual load of The Afternoon of a Faun, as the dance and the dancers bodies are saturated with sensuality. Nevertheless, this dance escapes the paradigm of the hunter and the hunted present in Nijinsky’s piece and proposes another economy of relationships.

Creation: 2025
Premiere: Sept. 12, 2025 * Stockholm, SE
Duration: Part 1 - 85 min. + Intermission - 15 min. + Part 2 - 40 min.

Choreography: Frédéric Gies
Dance: Rachel Tess
Music: Fiedel
Lighting design: Thomas Zamolo
Costumes: Grzegorz Matlag

Co-produced by Inkonst, Skogen and Weld
Residence support by MARC

With the support of Kulturrådet, Malmö stad and Region Skåne