Fictioning Hamlet: Dialogues and Diffractions by Mirko Guido

Fictioning Hamlet: Dialogues and Diffractions is my ongoing research shared in room 402 at Linnégatan 87, the 15-16-17 May 2019, as a choreographed environment of situations and relationships. It includes participatory practices, texts, audio-video materials and live performance. These were articulated through a research process I embarked on in the spring of 2018: surprised by the sense of shame I felt when realising I did not know the story of Hamlet, I began dealing with questions about power dynamics between dominant narratives and individual imaginaries. Through the process, I increasingly applied participatory approaches, and staged situations based on strategies of ‘re-fictioning’ as a practice for the construction of alternate realities. My choreographic practice appears via the navigation of the many materials, methods and contexts involved in the process, and in the way they change, respond, and adjust in relation to each other. My idea of expanded choreography begins with thinking the work as a performance device, in which I build-in conditions where response is not only possible, it is what makes the work. My role as author is decentralised in favor of relational thinking. Ethical dimensions of responsivity, responsibility, and inter-subjective relationships lie at the core of this practice. I am committed to working responsively and confronted with and by the complexities each situation and context produce. For this presentation I aimed at making evident, explicit and present the dynamic process of intrasubjective and intersubjective relations that are at the core of this process.

The performance of Alice and Benny consists in telling stories based on personal memories and anecdotes, while reproducing gestures derived from a selection of historical paintings of Hamlet and Ophelia. We experiment with the juxtaposition of these materials, the personal and subjective experiences with the reproduction of images, and with different modes of relation to the public. We observed what kind of dialogues are created by these juxtapositions, how they act towards each other, how they narrate each other, how they merge or oppose each other, and how the production of affects and meanings is based on the social.

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