gröpt
A choreographic installation with two dancers and seven tons of clay.
In gröpt, friendship and fleeting intimacy are placed in relation to geological time, in a world full of hollows, and passages are dug through temporalities and places; at the core of these cracking surfaces, something porous, rough, and alive emerges. The dancers listen to what rests just beneath the surface: in currents, sediment, and movements still unfolding.
A temporary architecture is constructed within the performance space using clay and excavated masses from the Stockholm region. Bodies, sound, and materials mutually affect one another; they leave traces, collide, change consistency, and wear each other down through actions that move betweenfriction and affection.
Jennie Bergsli and Molly Engblom are developing a shared practice between dance, choreography, performance, and visual art. gröpt is their first work as a duo, created together with the composer Vilde Tuv, the architect, clay researcher and artist Vincent Dumay and light designer Christoffer Lloyd.
Mini-concert with Vilde Tuv
On Thursday 12 November, following the premiere of gröpt, Norwegian artist and composer Vilde Tuv presents a mini-concert. The setlist will include songs that inspired choreographers Jennie Bergsli and Molly Engblom early in the creative process for gröpt, alongside original music composed for the performance that didn't make the final cut. Free admission. At MDT's foyer.
Jennie Bergsli
Jennie Bergsli (b. 1991) works across dance, sound, choreography, installation, and spatial practices. Through collective and intuitive processes, she works with listening and explores intimacy, friction, and subtle relations between body, material, and architecture. Her practice attends to small shifts in voice, breath, movement, and spatial relation, often unfolding within dark and sonic situations where bodies, materials, and spaces become entangled through proximity and interdependence.
Recently, she performed in choreographic and sonic pieces by artists such as Olivia Rivière & Lisen Pousette, Lisen Ellard, and Dries Verhoeven. Since 2022, she has co-run the performance platform Kafé Mix at Höjden in Stockholm, and initiated Damfoss, an artist-run festival for dance, sound, choreography, and music at Spriten Kunsthall in Skien. Bergsli’s projects have been presented at venues including Black Box Teater, Weld, Skogen, Kunstnernes Hus, Les Urbaines, and Spriten Kunsthall. She is based between Stockholm (SE) and Skien (NO), works internationally, and holds a BA in Dance and Performance from Stockholm University of the Arts (2019).
Molly Engblom
Molly Engblom (1994) works with dance, choreography, poetry, and place within the expanded field of choreography, based in Stockholm. Through experimental, site-responsive, and collaborative methods, she explores relationality, intimacy, and the conditions of existing under and beyond capitalism. Drawing from the flickering flow of contemporary images, situations, and characters, she creates choreographic collages of chats, bags, dogs, slippers, nail salons, abandoned charter beaches, and dusks exploring femininity, commodification and power.
Engblom holds a BFA in Dance and Performance from Stockholm University of the Arts (2019) and has continued her education through the research-based course Tusen Kulturhus at the Royal Institute of Art / Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus. Her interest in social and spatial choreographic thinking is reflected both through her engagement in artist-run initiatives such as Höjden Studios and in her artistic practice, where places — as well as the people and materials moving through them — take on an active role in the making process.
Her choreographic work has been presented at venues like Färgfabriken, Weld, and Konstnärshuset, and her poetry has been published in Ordkonst and Pralin Magasin. As a dancer she has performed in pieces by for example Malin Elgán and Stina Nyberg.