Marie Bergby Handeland is a choreographer, dancer and writer, educated at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and University of South-Eastern Norway - the study of creative writing in Bø.

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Marie's work is driven by a curiosity to explore what happens when people from different social, cultural and political contexts are put onstage, and how this can activate the general public. She works to turn up the volume on voices and bodies she thinks we should listen to, dispute those we have already listened to by placing them in new contexts, and highlight latent choreographies in people and spaces who did not know they had them in them. Movements and physicality can be seen in a broad and playful sense. She often investigates how movements can be transferred from one art genre to another, with a particular interest in the choreography of music and text. In several of her works, she lets people who belong to the field she investigates enter the stage - writers who investigate movements in their own literature, conductors who investigate conducting within choreography, surround sound with running fiddle players and double bassists in box bikes, and environmentalist politicians who dance the UN climate report. She is interested in how physical expertise can be developed in specific groups of performers, and how these groups can challenge and expand the field of choreography.

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In work such as The Church Dancer, New Norwegian Old-dance, Witch practice and Holistic therapy, the audience perform and thereby create the work. Marie is interested in what conversations can arise about power, responsibility, public spaces, impact, closeness and ideals of interpretation, and further onto dwelling upon art as a less isolated sphere and more directly connected to life.

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Marie is interested in how staging already existing materials can find new ways out through body and voice, where they're both embraced and challenged. In collaboration with Morten Liene, she has for several years examined Jahn Teigen's lyrics' directness placed in contemporary art, songs that have received zero points in the Eurovision Song Contest performed by different people, and the musical Grease combined with accordionist Pauline Olivero's method Deep Listening. She often chooses material she wants to work with based on an ambivalence, and from there work her way into a stronger devotion for it.

 

 

"Her works have some sort of long lasting inspiring light weight".

- Maria Landmark, in Snakk

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