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: 2019
Premiere: Jan. 19, 2019 * Stockholm, Sweden

Choreography: Frédéric Gies
Dance: Frédéric Gies and Elizabeth Ward
Music: Fiedel
Set design: Anton Stoianov
Lighting design: Thomas Zamolo
Costume: Grzegorz Matlag
Makeup (prints for set design): Mario Mendez
Pictures (prints for set design): Yusuf Etiman
Administration: the artists cooperative Interim Kultur

Coproduced by Weld and Skogen / Residence support by Inkonst
With the support of Kulturrådet and Konstnärnsämnden.
Premiered at Skogen (Göteborg) on January 18, 2019. Presented at Weld (Stockholm), RAS (Sandnes) and Inkonst (Malmö).
The video documentation has been showcased at Schedhalle (Zürich) and at Maison de la Danse at Ungdomens hus (Malmö).