Who doesn’t love Google Translate? It’s not only one of the most useful web tools out there, but probably also the most poetic. It doesn’t just translate the content of an article but adds an almost artistic layer to it. At least to my weird mind.

SUNNY at Stockholm’s Dansens Hus was a big success. We had a great time performing the piece and the Swedish audience was more than welcoming. Have a look at two googletranslated reviews originally published in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. If you’re a native Swedish speaker you can find the links to the original articles at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!

Dagens Nyheter
Svenska Dagbladet

SUNNY – VARIED ABOUT A PLACE IN THE SUN

It’s slippery, free and sunny worse when the last major international guest game of the Spring, the Dance House, Emanuel Gat’s choreography titled SUNNY after Bobby Hebb’s superhit from 1966, recorded by hundreds of artists, ranging from Marvin Gaye and Dusty Springfield to Cher and Boney M. And performed live by Awir Leon on a sober stripped scene while nine dressed up, that is, almost dressed dancers swarm and swarms, play and flirt as playful teenagers on a sandy beach or later at a party. Liberation from adult life’s conventions, uncomfortable tomorrow. Shocked by the apparently perpetual now, of each other, of the unconscious, floating existence.

Art, in the widest sense of the word, without the slightest traces of the soldier, seems to be quite uninteresting, but surprisingly, paradoxically, Emanuel Gat and the nine dancers of the company are completely glittering and glowing in the sunshine for an hour’s performance.

Since Israel, Emanuel Gat, emigrated to France in 2007, it has now established 50-year-old choreographer and his company as one of Europe’s most original and reliable. Certainly, many remember with me the little euphoric guest game BRILLIANT CORNERS at Dance House 2011, and the specially ordered Quartet TIME THEMES for the Royal Ballet 2013. Two works whose tight, closest mathematical geometric compositions appear to be the absolute opposite of SUNNY a choreography that bounces back and forth as well as without a goal or direction that spreads with an almost improvisational feeling.

Each dancer is his own universe as self-evident as they are part of and in the collective. They not only incarnate, they live the otherwise academically dry cultural concept “gay lud”, the playful man. And what superb, varied and carefully thought-out ensemble ensemble. The younger dancers contribute virtuoso compassion and excitement energy, the “elder” (+35) with an overwhelming prestigiousness and motive genius as in Swedish Sara Wilhelmsson and the giant Michael Loehr.

Awir Leon’s song, music and live electronica are good and closely integrated in the choreography, but in comparison with the dancers, the choreography and Emanuel Gat’s bright lighting, he draws the shortest straw.

What SUNNY so to say shopping is anything but sunny, or maybe just that. If everyone’s our potential place in the heat. In the sun. Even when the darkness falls.

von Örjan Abrahamsson
Original Swedish version published on dn.se

THE COMMUNITY’S UTOPIA BECOMES ALIVE IN THE UNIVERSE OF GATS

Danish concert or concert dance, the dialogue between music and dance gives SUNNY in the choreography of Emanuel Gat a special skimmer.

Sunny one so true, I love you … Think that Boney M’s old discodong from 1976, how the sun breaks into existence after a rainy day, would have such a new life. In dance, with individual bodies you do not really know where they are heading. Slowly they shape each other like sculptural puzzles. But that is only the beginning.

It is something of an utopian state such as the Israeli and Sweden-occupied in France (Dance House 2011 and Royal Ballet 2013), the choreographer Emanuel Gat and the eleven dancers on stage, claiming in SUNNY, a work from 2016 that reached Stockholm. But it has two years on the neck does not mean that it’s all about the ensemble routine – on the contrary. Here everything is about a dialogue at the moment based on certain given frames where things can change from evening to evening. It creates a special presence on the stage, a physical conversation that most of all involves live music.

About Emanuel Hole in BRILLIANT CORNERS, the jazz legend Thelonious Monk’s advanced compositions create an implied, invisible idea frame for a complex dance building, so another musician is once again a tangible lyrical power. François Przybylski was a dancer at Gat when he decided to devote himself wholeheartedly to the music. In the best of worlds you can combine the two species of art. And that’s exactly what happens in SUNNY where Przybylski under the artist name Awir Leon drives the dancers with rocking electronic, sometimes subtle echoing, soft beats and inserting soulful songs that provide a kind of skimmer to the whole.

SUNNY is a dance or concert dance, and a work that sometimes reflects on a postmodern icon such as Trisha Brown, as Gat uses the dancer’s own moving material and gives them the freedom to try new ways each performance, affecting the motion chains. The actual creation process, the joints, may appear on the stage. In a very wonderful sequence, a quartet tries to get a technologically advanced combination, with classical attitude and trembling throats. Those who make a mistake call “stop” and everything is taken from the beginning – to accompaniment to Awir Leon’s guitar ballad. It is such a beautiful picture of interaction and effort.

Sometimes the movements appear backward, or as a secret sign language. The dancers laugh, play, even with our association skills. There is also a masking moment, already premeditated when Michael Loehr makes an entrance geared as a multicultural schaman in net suits, worms and footballs – the sun god who starts the whole event.

In the end, maybe SUNNY is about how you can both be overcome by emotions and try to express them through abstraction. A red light square can say as much as a rotating body in black plumes or glitter suit – most important: to do it together. Just what utopia lives.

von Anna Ångström
Original Swedish version published on svd.se

Header photo by Jörg Baumman (from SUNNY @ Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2017)