Still Life

Alan Lucien Øyen’s Still Life is a nature-infused duet with mirai moriyama and daniel proietto, exploring our fractured bond with the natural world through butoh, minimalist movement, and elemental stagecraft.

We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

Andy Goldsworthy

Still Life is a new creation for MIRAI MORIYAMA and DANIEL PROIETTO, two incredible performers who both have ventured far beyond contemporary dance in search for new physical expressions – together they share experience from working with kabuki, butoh, contemporary theatre, film and television. With Still Life is a work that innately deals with nature – within and without – exploring how we can mend our relationship with ourselves, and in turn each other and the living world around us.

Still Life, translates into French as Nature Morte – dead nature. Butoh is often described as living death, brought forward by distress. A state of dying, still alive: a suspension of grotesque dilapidation. What better image to describe our time? Nature is dying, and all the while we’re rendered immobile, stuck in our still lives – living, but dying. Through the windows of our little chambers, we watch forest fires and torrential floods tear away at the landscape – we stare life in the face – transfixed by the constant echo of our desires, what we think we want – predicted for us, on the basis of our fractured selves, millions of data-points re-hashed and sold back to us as advertisements for lives we wished we were living: connected, disconnected.

There’s a terrible monotony in chaos. As we sit, wide awake and transfixed, trapped in a terrifying stop-motion time-lapse, a white noise trembles underneath our still lives; humming, burning and screaming behind the mask of sophistication that has become modern social interaction.

Alan Lucien Øyen

Videos

Info

Year: 2024

Duration: 70min (No interval)

The choreography is created in close collaboration with Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto

World premiere DANSENS HUS, Oslo may 23rd 2024.

Credits

Choreography, Text
Alan Lucien Øyen Mirai Moriyama Daniel Proietto

Set and Costume Design
Aida Vainieri Alan Lucien Øyen

Light Design
Martin Flack

Sound Design
Mathias Grønsdal

Composer
Henrik Skram

Technical Director, Lights Technician
Chris Sanders

Stage Manager
Danny Hones

Scenography Assistant
Ayana Ishihara

Ocean Backdrop
Christof Beck Celina Fuchts Anatoli Detzel

Additional Music
Olafur Arnalds Richard Skelton Hanan Townshend Alex Kozobolis Sylvian Chauveau Goldmund Daniel Hart Thomas Newman

Still Photography
Mats Bäcker

In co-production with
Biennale di Venezia, Venice Dansens Hus, Oslo ITA Julidans, Amsterdam Rum för Dans, Halland

Funded by
Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde Airk Kobe The Norwegian Opera And Ballet Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern

Still Life

Julidans, Amsterdam

  • 13 July 2025

  • 14 July 2025

  • 15 July 2025

Dansens Hus, Oslo

  • 23 May 2025

    Premiere

  • 24 May 2025

  • 25 May 2025

  • 26 May 2025

The Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts, Washington D.C, USA

  • 9 April 2025

  • 10 April 2025

Rum for dans, Halland, Sweden

  • 9 February 2025

Dansens Hus, Stockholm

  • 5 February 2025

  • 6 February 2025

Venice Biennale

  • 23 July 2024

  • 24 July 2024