A performance by Marcus Baldemar
with Lena Ylipää

Performed at Galleri Syster

Saturday 14 dec  kl 17.00
Sunday 15 dec kl 17.00

Free entry

Valley Sex

a pregnant silence

a collection of sexy things

moss

pine

rapids

people

(is it lust? desire? or is it comfort?)

Valley Sex is an in between

shifting between insider and outsider

Valley Sex embodies a disrespect towards tradition as it simultaneously asks, lovingly, to be part of community

BIO:

Marcus Baldemar is a dancer and choreographer originally from Kiruna in the north of Sweden. After many years in Brussels, Belgium he is now based in Stockholm where he makes work, dances in other people’s work as well as teaches dance and choreography.

Marcus’ work wants to communicate a non-hierarchy between the emotional, the physical and the intellectual. One recurring interest is to find and/or create connections between a poetic/political language and a poetic/political body. This as an open, ever changing, question that accompanies him in the work. Author Leslie Feinberg once said “gender is the poetry we make of the language we are taught”. In Marcus’ work he also sees movement and body as the poetry we make of the language we learn. He often works with text but in the end the dancing body is the main communicator.

His starting point is often queer history and storytelling as well as the ambition to queer history and storytelling.

In his solo GALDR (2019) he looked at nordic mythology through a queer lens and danced/told an alternative story based on the Norse god Odin. With Polari Speaking Sex (2021) Marcus was inspired by a secretive language spoken amongst homosexual men in England from the beginning of the 20th century until the mid 1960s. Together with his collaborators they worked on the idea of a secret mode for communication that made possible to safely live and share queer joy, pleasure and intimacy in public. In the same year, together with Finnish dancer/choreographer Eliisa Erävalo, he created his first ever piece for children (ages 4-7). The work is bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) and is called Markus Lär Sig Finska (Markus Learns Finnish). Finally Fantastic (2022) shows a togetherness that leads all the way to death. How dying coexists with the imaginative, the joyful and the intimate. The piece can be seen as a meeting place and communal burial ground where a collection of people of different generations do and die together.

Credits: 

Idea, choreography, dance, text, spacial design, costume: Marcus Baldemar

Art, spacial design: Lena Ylipää

Text, translation: Meri Alarcón

Production: Johnson & Bergsmark

Photo, documentation: John Artur

Co-production: MDT, Galleri Syster

Funded by: The Swedish Arts Council, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee