Maria Nilsson Waller

Between 2012 - 2017 choreographer Maria Nilsson Waller made three pieces all around the theme of our last unclaimed territories – Terra Nullius. The first, Last Land was an imaginary journey to Antarctica and Bir Tawil desert, followed by Founder – a deep dive to our unknown and elusive deep sea floor.

Merry.Go.Round is the last piece in the series and is looking out into space and the unknown future of mankind. In different ways, all three pieces highlight our shifting relationship to nature and environment, and are taking a closer look at the unknown – the borderland where science gives way to myth. Merry.Go.Round weaves this together while also taking a closer look at the romantic myth – the many stories and ideas about love, romance and relationships that have dominated the western world since early medieval days. It is a piece about our shared longing for home and authentic connections. Through loops and orbits, in a dance that is as much cosmic and celestial as it is human and recognisable, the five dancers tumble around each other in a world that often seems to suffer from post-romantic stress disorder.

While the work contains an obvious reference to the movements of celestial bodies, our understanding of the universe, gravity and even time itself, the main concern is questions of a more humane character: What happens when you join another person’s orbit? How can you stay together when your paths are splitting apart? Merry.Go.Round is dance and theatre, movement and poetry, presence and improvisation. The sound score is a mix of Swedish jazz, opera, pop and NASA’s sound recordings of our solar system.

Performed by an international cast of five excellent dancers, the score that is partly improvisation based will be different each time, and hard to put into words. Press has described it as “astronomy for poets and lovers” (Marie Palmqvist, Länstidningen 2017), and as “striking images, pure emotion”. (Seona Mac Reamoinn,The Irish Times 2017)