It was instantly clear to me that something was broken in a bad way. It was just one hour after we arrived for a four week stay in Stockholm and I was lying on the ice on the street feeling that that structural integrity between my knee and ankle was compromised: so much so that my foot didn\u2019t follow when I tried to move my leg. I felt an immense pain when I tried to move, and when people soon tried to help move me off the freezing street, and fear for what kind of internal damage moving without that structural stability could cause. Later in the hospital we spent 5 hours figuring out a way to move me from lying on the side to lying on my back for x-ray. Stina Ehn held my hand through the most intense pain I have ever experienced. They added morphine through an IV twice, but it didn\u2019t do much. Later they gave 7 deep and big injections around the knee and thigh to put all the nerves of the leg to sleep. And a nurse who had been observing me for hours managed to move my leg to the correct position for x-ray. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Somewhere along the 7 big injections I remember telling Stina that it felt ironic that I arrived in Stockholm to engage in an artistic project which is about deconstructing family structures, and find that my own body structure got compromised so painfully before we even got started. Maybe the existential fear and pain I felt when the doctor wanted to move my leg, and my foot didn\u2019t follow, was somehow resonant with the fear and pain that someone might feel when family structures are fractured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later I thought about the resonance between the injury and our project quite differently. I learned that we had mainly focused on childcare needs and the integration of those into artistic processes and collaborations. But with me differently abled for at least 6 weeks we had to consider both childcare and adult care needs. I remembered the Danish poet Caspar Eric who in the radio explained crip-theory as a perspective where \u2018differently abled\u2019 is understood as well exactly that: Able to do things in different ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that’s it the expectations for everyone to do things in the same ways that are dis-abling. Possibly inspired by his lucidity I felt the desire to integrate the new situation and ask the performance to change to my changed ability, rather than assume that I would now be unable to perform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The situation was already one of integration. Lisa Sch\u00e5man had twins two months before the shows, so we had invited Jennifer Lacey to help us realise the dances. Realising that we would have more work to do transmitting the dances we had invited Oda Brekke to help realise the installation. Now as two of my bones had become four we decided to invite Stina Ehn and Evelina Jakobsson Potenciano on stage as well. A trio would become a sextet and somehow reflect on the day to day situation we had when our \u2018village\u2019 in Stockholm really showed up for us in a difficult moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pontus Petterson, Jennifer Lacey and Sandra Lolax were all coming to the hospital and supporting all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team of MDT: Anne Effraimsson, Unn Faleide, Bj\u00f6rn Kuajara and Cec\u00edlia T\u00fcmler were all incredibly supportive and helpful. There was no pressure to realise the shows. But it felt too artistically coherent to integrate the obstacles, instead of postponing and cancelling And we wanted to contribute to a sense of things being possible in Stockholm at a time when funding cuts meant that so many things became impossible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We built a kitchen for me on stage, if I couldn\u2019t dance, at least I could cook. And we slept on the sofas at MDT, because it was too painful and complicated to get me up and out of stairs and in and out of taxis with my broken leg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was mad, but also beautiful and adventurous. It was also way too much pressure on Andrea. She had to lift extra responsibilities for the production while taking extra care of Pen\u00e9lope. And it was only when we arrived at the premiere that I could see just how exhausted she was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was instantly clear to me that something was broken in a bad way. It was just one hour after we arrived for a four week stay in Stockholm and I was lying on the ice on the street feeling that that structural integrity between my knee and ankle was compromised: so much so that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-round2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1748,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/domesticanarchism.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}