Image: Siriol Joyner
Siriol Joyner – Libretto for the Future
Work in progress
Fredag 12 juni kl. 18:45 – 19:00
Lördag 13 juni kl. 18:45 – 19:00
SITE:s foajé, Mårbackagatan 5C, Hus H, 123 43 Farsta
In 2020 I invited Yari Stilo, a professional ballet dancer (and dear friend), to create a virtuosic solo for me. I imagined a short, impossibly technical, ballet solo to show my hidden prowess: I would win competitions and surprise people. It would be danced to the audio recording of a performance of ’It’s my body’ by Karen Finley.
Yari refused, insisting that he is not a choreographer and therefore would not ‘sign’ a work, but noting my interest in language and the way I work with arms and hand gestures, he proposed that we turn to Ballet Pantomime. We studied Romantic Ballets, especially Giselle, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, looking at how class, gender, age, body type etc. are expressed through the gesture. We became fascinated by Marie Sallé, one of the first female ballet choreographers. We learnt a detailed glossary of ballet pantomime and began to have conversations in the studio, using this pantomime vocabulary and spoken language. The themes of the conversations were framed by ballet: Mother, Sword, Death, Spirit come up often. We also invented pantomime for words and concepts that don’t exist in traditional ballet, such as ‘Choreography’, ‘Future’, ‘Melting’.
I want to explore the next life of this solo and write what I’m calling “Libretto for the Future”: a written libretto that I will perform in the form of a ballet pantomime solo. The libretto will always be presented before other performances, in the theatre foyer or corridor and will tell the audience about the future. The themes of the material centre around water (the lake in Swan Lake), death (the death of Giselle), ghosts (the second act/white act in Romantic ballet) and ancestors (the Mother figure). The libretto is written around the themes of the changing climate and melting glaciers, of water as a material of life and death in our world and of us as future ancestors.
Performance and choreography: Siriol Joyner
Collaboration: Yari Stilo
Bio
Siriol Joyner is a Welsh artist from Aberystwyth based in Stockholm working across dance, visual art, and language. Her practice explores mutation and translation through movement, text, and objects, with a consistent focus on site and site-specificity. She investigates how place shapes and is shaped by artistic action, often asking what constitutes “the dance of this place.” She is a host to the historical Welsh folk dance ‘Morfa Rhuddlan’, a dance elegy that you are invited to request if you need to cry, grieve or be somber.