Verk och dagar

A magnificent and chaotic choreographic investigation

In Works and Days, experiences from a trip to ancient Greece are mixed with fragments of a fifteen-year-old performance. With humor and seriousness, Gunilla Heilborn attempts to sort out how all the disconnected episodes she has collected are connected and whether it is truly possible to understand the world better by reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Works and Days consists of two parts. In one, we encounter grand tableaux with names like “A Place That Is Awful in Winter, Harsh in Summer, Never Pleasant” and “The Rose-Fingered Dawn.” Through fog, haze, and music, two dancers move; let’s call them Dreamy-Eyed Sophie and Wordy Ludvig. With fleeting ease, they wander across the stage and pose questions to themselves and to the audience. Do you get seasick easily? Would you describe me as a typical Renaissance person? That I have many strings to my lyre? Do you know what it feels like to drift around in a ship frozen in ice?

In the second part, Heilborn herself navigates through previous works in her search for a beginning. Drawing on the stories of ancient poets, a recent trip to Greece, and her earlier production This is not a love story from 2011, she attempts to see whether it is possible to link one event to another or whether perhaps it is the lack of logic that characterizes everything we do. She makes lists of ships that have sailed across the seas and of what has been done or should have been done. The room, the light, and the music play a major role in the performance and are created by Heilborn's longtime collaborators Katarina Wiklund, Minna Tiikkainen, Mårten Nilsson, and Kim Hiorthøy. Gunilla Heilborn - Choreographer

Gunilla Heilborn is a choreographer and filmmaker based in Stockholm. She is obsessed with research and spends most of her time reading about memory techniques, medieval cities, or ancient oracles. By combining text, movement, video, and imagery, Heilborn creates a fascinating and captivating expression – that both entertains and challenges her audience. Her artistic career began with studies in radio and film, as well as choreography at DOCH in Stockholm and with Anna Halprin at the San Francisco Dancers Workshop. Since then, Heilborn has achieved great success in both performing arts and film. Ludvig Daae - Dancer Ludvig Daae is a choreographer and dancer, working primarily out of Oslo and Stockholm. He has a penchant for long-term collaborations, unusual performance spaces, and popular culture references. His works often operate on the boundary between the personal and the conceptual – often with a dose of self-irony, glitter, and meticulous research. After studying dance at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and extensively touring as a dancer for, among others, Deborah Hay and Mårten Spångberg, he has created works for Cullberg, Norrdans, and the Royal Swedish Ballet School. His solo performance MM has been performed over 100 times in ten countries and was named one of the best performing arts works of the year in Portugal in 2014. Ludvig Daae has previously toured with Dansnät Sverige with his own works Meningen med livet in collaboration with Tove Berglund (2023 and 2024) as well as The Viral Dance (2020) and Hyperfruit (2017), both in collaboration with Joanna Nordahl. Sophie Augot - Dancer Sophie Augot is a dancer, actor, and choreographer based in Stockholm. She was trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, the University of Dance, and Stockholm University of the Arts and has for many years worked closely with choreographers Björn Säfsten, Cristina Caprioli, Kenneth Kvarnström, and Örjan Andersson. She has also participated in projects by, among others, Anna Koch, Sidney Leoni, Mari Carrasco, and Anna Källblad, as well as worked as an actor at Helsingborg City Theatre, Riksteatern, Stockholm City Theatre, Regionteatern Blekinge Kronoberg, and Turteatern. In 2023, she created the work MISS together with Philip Berlin.