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herStay in Youth Magazine VISION SEPTEMBER China 2008:

Give Body to the Future

A 3 page photo & interview presentation on Monica Emilie Herstad, herStay
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Text: Liu Ying, VISION, YOUTH MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2008

"Monica Emilie, one of the most experimental dance & performance artists in Norway, is demonstrating for students with her performance on how to communicate with space via body language. This performance comes from ”Past Is Simulation”, the sub-title of “The Lady of the sea vs. Nora, And Other Stories Of the Society ”, inspired by the writings of Henrik Ibsen, Susan Sontag, and Elfriede Jelinek. The course she directs - On Body and Context - aims to sharpen the students' perception and the awareness of differences between live performance and the projected being.

The traditional stereotype of the photographer waiting, choosing and recording a visual moment has been left behind by contemporary photography. Contemporary photography, instead of entering into the art checklist alongside painting, installation and performance, has turned itself into a multi-functioned platform open to all the art mediums which conjunct all the art forms and keeps bringing out new meanings. As for Monica, a dance & performance artist, the collaboration with photo artists has always been an important aspect in her creation. “The photographs of my performance is produced as powerful imagery that also function independently as herStay photography in addition to documenting an event,” Monica said, “and with the students of photo art I often get a fresh feeling and a fresh brain,” which makes her even more creative."

herSta y i n the world

herSta y i n Hong Kong November 19th - 21st 2008

"A study of the postmodern woman on the stage:

To escape the feeling of unease a woman flees to the seashore over and over again. For hours she gazes at a flying bird. Another woman seems to search for something in dance gestures in the darkness.

While walking a third is suddenly startled. The fourth attempts a
suicide. The fifth shudders abruptly with fear. The sixth, the seventh, the eight, and, in a similar manner, innumerable women appear to do
something since times immemorial. For example: doing housework,
loving someone, rearing children, quarrel with husband, being beaten up, weeping and shedding tears.

These women who had emerged out of the dramas of Norway´s famous dramatist Henrik Ibsen, came together on the stage in the
presentation directed by Monica Emilie Herstad Past is Simulation:
The Ladies of the Sea vs. Nora and other Stories. The staging took
place at the ninth day of the India Theatre Festival at the LTG
Auditorium.

Enacted in India through the generosity of the Norwegian Embassy, this play is important from several points of view. The woman director searched for a new stage language by ways of acting, and the light and music of the dance performance.
Acting happens way beyond words. This is not just Physical Theatre, where, through the agency of body language and the language of gestures a script assumes shape in a formless manner. This is a total experience of dramatic art beyond words.

The audience sees a new kind of dance performance in a new space. It comprises the full potential for a transformation of the
imaginativeness of the audience.

The performance is so attracting that time passed by without getting
aware of it at all. This is a postmodern global text on stage.

Monica Emilie Herstad has - instead of promoting a rather acerb image of the women, or of showing protest, done a deep examination through ingress into the innermost core. She has created an ironic disguise of the texts of Ibsen´s dramas. It is exactly this ironic disguise which develops into a comment on the images of women in the present milieu.

Her actresses appear on the stage with high heeled shoes, contemporary hair-do, and hyper-modern dresses. They show in ironic disguise different matters of concern of the women, and their emotional expressions and body movements in deep white faint light together with mystical music. These matters of concern have been selected from the lives of Ibsen´s women.

The performance has as its background mainly the lives of the chief
character Ellida and her two coeval stepdaughters Ellida-Hilda and
Bolette from the drama The Lady of the Sea, and of the heroine Nora
from A Doll´s House.

An evaluation of Ibsen´s texts has been done by the German feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek in her book What happened after Nora had left her Husband, including the text Pillars of Society. In one scene it is the aura of the unforgettable world famous author Susan Sontag, in which she presented the character of the heroine Ellida of The Lady from the Sea.

The performance with its latent meanings raises, however, several
questions at the level of script and style. On the one hand she
destroys the acerb images of the biographies of the women of the
dramas, but on the other she attempts to overcome the acerb images on the stage by employing the medium of artistic explanation. Words are not presented here. And the music appears slightly segregated.

Together with an examination of the relevance of Henrik Ibsen for the
present times, the performance investigates in addition the question
whether our world has really changed for women during the one hundred years after Ibsen. The decision rests with the audience."

- Ajit Rai, Jansatta/ Indian Express, January 12th, 2008

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Mumbai TimeOut #2 2008

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"From the European segment of the festival, two were dance theatre
performances - Pina Bausch´s Bamboo Blues and Monica Emilie Herstad´s unwieldily titled Past is Simulation: The Ladies of the Sea vs Nora and Other Stories.

Dance theatre works around themes rather than stories. The immediate impact is sensory. One movement follows another working to an unwritten script that the audience must grasp as best they can.

The Norwegian performance piece was dense with references which became significant only if, besides Ibsen, you also knew the work of
the director Elfriede Jelinek and the late Susan Sontag´s reading of
Lady of the Sea.

Otherwise what you saw [in Past is simulation] were incredibly
flexible female bodies that posed, contorted, writhed and grew slack
to express a whole spectrum of emotions, dark to bright, between
male-constructed women and women as they are and want to be.

- Shanta Gokhale, The Hindu Magazine, February 10th 2008

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Hi, yes there is:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YYVsdo1vNx8

http://youtube.com/watch?v=S6RBP8FWgg4

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zu8mOlgSaoc

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