Julidans - Still life - Alan Lucien Øyen and Winter Guests

Dance, movement and stillness

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

Øyen returns to the analogue purity of the natural world and explores it through dance, movement and stillness. Through human voices – whispering, humming and singing – he explores the essence of human expression.

In Still Life, the roles are played by Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto, who specialized in the ultra-physical and hyper-aesthetic butoh dance form, which emerged in response to the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the title underlines the duality of life and death.

'Silent lives'

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

Øyen strives 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 embellishment.

One of the most remarkable and leading artists in Europe, Alan Lucien Øyen is known for his multidisciplinary works of deep emotional, cinematic and dramatic power, collaborating with renowned companies such as the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Paris Opera Ballet and Tanztheater Wuppertal.