Still Life

In Still Life, choreographer and theatre-maker Alan Lucien Øyen and his company Winter Guests explore how, amid the meteoric developments of communication tools, technology and virtual networks, we can restore our relationship with ourselves, with each other and with the living world.

To do so, Øyen returns to the analogue purity of the natural world and explores it through dance, movement and stillness. Through human voices – whispers, humming and harmonies – he explores the essence of human expression.

In Still Life, the roles are performed by Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto, who specialise in the ultra-physical and hyper-aesthetic butoh dance form, that emerged in response to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the title underscoring the duality of life and death.

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Øyen sees that core of butoh as a metaphor for our times, where nature is dying and we ourselves are stuck in our 'still lives' – alive, but dying.

Øyen aims for the utmost sincerity in a staging that, in his own words ‘does not deceive itself’. He uses simple theatrical means, such as painted backgrounds of landscapes: an ocean, a forest, or nature – without theatrical trappings.

Alan Lucien Øyen, one of Europe's most remarkable and leading artists, is known for his multidisciplinary works of deep emotional, cinematic and dramatic power, performed in collaboration with renowned companies such as the Netherlands Dance Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet and Tanztheater Wuppertal.