Deed

DEEDs aim is to provide new experiences, encounters, and insight, and to challenge and create debate around contentious themes. Using movement and text which unfolds and evolves intrinsically to create physical pictures 
and emotional undercurrents, they hint at an idea and whisper into the ear 
of the audience making them think and reflect but still leaving room for interpretation and contemplation.

Suzie and Mattias established DEED (compiled from the first letters of their surnames) in 2014, but started choreographing together in 2006 working mainly with small-scale projects and installations. They soon discovered that they complemented each other creatively and were able to utilize their contrasting opinions and ideas, having worked with a variety of different artistic projects and expressions during their careers. 

Since 2014 DEED have created and produced full-length works touching on diverse physical themes, the most recent being disability and identity. They are interested in how the cultural understanding of what constitutes a disability is connected to understandings of time, ageing, and the idea of a normative life course. These performances helped to trigger questions around key concepts and theories in relation to the body which have in turn provoked a need to explore age in dance. By representing their future bodies through dance, they are actively working towards building a new perception of the aging body.

How can we change, inspire, move forward and shape hope?

Method Research Inspiration

They are interested in the meeting points between form and visual imagery, landscape and memory, sound and silence. By championing their own embodied knowledge to expand the notion of choreography they are proposing a performative expression using the possible friction in the staged meeting between dance, text, music, theatre, and more recently climate failure, forming together an engaging symbiosis. 

Writing texts has had a constructive influence on their work. By creating a starting point using text or poetry they have unearthed information relating to the theme and turned it into a conceptual model, which they have then referred to during the choreographic process. They like to experiment with improvisational techniques and approaches to creating physical expression and dance, in order to find a distinctive and original structure. They are interested in the darkly comic expressions of life and humanity, and human behaviour and states of 
mind are very often a source of inspiration. They prefer not to illustrate a story step by step but instead search for a philosophical and emotional landscape, which can help to pose questions for the spectator, rather than give concrete answers.

An interview with DEED from 2014 in cooperation with Dansens Hus.