Alexander Ekman and the Royal Swedish Opera launch an artists’ lab during the pandemic

The team will be working in shifts at different locations inside and outside the Opera House. Up until September 4, their work will be documented for Operan Play. Mikael Karlsson participates from his home in New York.

»We constantly need to reconsider and shift from one state of mind to another,« Ekman adds. »Theatres are now forced to create new Corona-adapted works. I'm curious about how the room feels with the audience in a scattered auditorium.«

This collaboration began on Monday when the entire company met up in separate groups at the Opera House for the first time in 13 weeks. The work will resume in August, when the audience will be able to access the it, and it will continue during the Autumn.

»This will be a unique work of art, created in collaboration with the dancers and a new way of exploring dance under the conditions we are facing. Shifting restrictions into a dynamic and creative process as a new way to interact with a difficult situation. The period in which the dancers have been forced to quarantine has been enormously challenging for them, so I’m glad and also proud that we can offer them this opportunity,« says Royal Swedish Ballet’s artistic director Nicolas Le Riche.

The plan is to live-stream directly from the Opera House so parts of the work will be possible to take part in Operan Play.

Alexander Ekman has been busy working over the last few years with Play at the Paris Opera, Cacti at the Nederlands Dans Theater II, Cow at the Semperoper in Dresden and A Swan Lake at the Norwegian Opera. For the Royal Swedish Ballet Ekman created Tyll, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and more recently Escapist.