Diorama

Ingri Fiksdal

With the Diorama performance series, Fiksdal stages particular views of natural and urban landscapes in different cities and contexts. The word diorama often refers to a three-dimensional model of a landscape, such as displayed in museums of natural history. Another use of the word is for the French diorama theatre invented by Louis Daguerre in 1822, where the audience sat watching big landscape paintings transform through skillfully manipulated light, sound effects, and live performers. 

In the Diorama performances, Fiksdal uses choreography as a lens, through which she alters or interferes with a particular view and its context. The performances reflect on the passing of time, on the slow change in landscape, and scenography as an ecological practice of bodies both human and non-human. The music is composed by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval and noise artist Lasse Marhaug, and shifts from a drone-like echo, to a punctured, industrial noise, to indecipherable whispering voices drifting into the landscape.

From Fusebox The first time we encountered Ingri Fiksdal’s dance work Diorama was on the tip of a Norwegian fjord in the dead of winter as the sun slipped behind the view of trailing tug boats, gulls, and rocky promontories. As we sat watching, the glittering rock formations on the beach suddenly began to sway and move, some appearing to have agency, while others were at the mercy of the elements, but all still blurring our perception of what were dancers’ bodies, and what were sculptures. The hour long performance takes place at sunset, as the lights come down on the world, and invites us to reorder our perception, see the natural landscape in a new way, and ask: what if, by our act of watching, everything seen was part of the performance?