”The wing beat of history” is a kind of umbrella concept for the reminiscences and memories we encounter in everyday life – whether slivers of love or of war: all our experience seems gathered in an inner archive we cannot fully control. Memory is therefore not merely un reliable but al soun governable; an anarchic force within the body that, in periods of grief and loss, can be anything but beautiful. To remember can be to fall, or to rise. If one is fortunate, it may be to drift quietly through the layhers of time that is our home. If unfortunate, one is hunted intensely by anxiety – like an animal fleeing its own shadow.
The word vingslag (Swedish) – wing beat in English – translated into visual form grants memory the freedom to move, rise and fall like a bird crossing the sky, the out stretched wings becoming a canvas for the memory-image, while the movement the wing embodies can swiftly become a strike. Who has not stood close to a birdth at suddenly took flight too near, or swooped close, and felt a sting offear: Am I in danger?
A difficult memory seldom arrives with a feather-light touch. It is more like an assault and for a moment – or a long while – we are enclosed in our pain, until the bird of memory lifts and frees us from the experience of being prisoners of the past.
In the aftermath of Vingslag‘s intensity I find it impossible not to be carried out of the performance space, away from dancer Fanny Kivimäki’s precise movements and the austere scenography, and into the existential depths the piece opens. This even as my erratic notes reflect that during barely an hour I also experienced something entirely concrete: movement, body, stage, light. The scenography is so spare that its three elements are fully saturated with meaning: a bed. A table. A net between us and the dancer.
Let’s begin there: the net. Black, relativly loose stichtes. From ceiling to floor. We are at once excluded and invited – the net effectivly separates the audience from the stage. We cannot reach in, but we see everything. The effect on the audience is implicitly that we experience also the helplessness of our own bodies—trapped!
However, Kivimäki’sintensity gradually dissolves the sensation of distance, yet the netre mains throughout. We never come trulyclose to another person. Howclose do weeven come to ourselves?
These are some of the questions that Kivimäki’s alternately tentative and force ful attempts to negotiate the room’s invisible forces bring to the stage.
Let’s return to the room. A simple table. A bed. These are two attributes we associate with survival. One must sleep. One must eat. Such are the body’s most basic needs. The possibility of survival is thus laid before us. But what if one cannot sleep in the bed? Or eat at the table?
And a bed is also associated with encounters of love, with loving –yet another fundamental need.
The perspective at the opening of the piece is from below. Kivimäki lies beneath the bed. It is dark. Below: what does that mean? To be held down? To hide? We cannot see the dancer until a hand slowly explores their options of visibilty and movement: do I dare? Hand. Then feet.
There is an openness in Vingslag, an avoid anceofany thing didactic or pedagogical, and like wise an avoidance of ”The Correct Interpretation”. This is not a ”story” unfolding but sequences of movement that prove open to entirely different emotional responses. The audience in Kiruna[1], Esperitellsus at the outset, saw the town’srelocation and the significanceof the mine in the piece. I, on the other hand,see a violentreckoningwith the past; a relationship, since the bed is central. A bed whosememoriesexert a powerfulpull, thatonlysometimesmanages to lift, toevaporate. It certainlyrefuses the ideathatletting go is an ”art” – it is a struggle.
By the time hand and foothavedared to moveout from the cramped space beneaththis bed, and eventually the dancer’swholebodyappears, my convictionabout the present pain is already set hard in me.This hurts.
Good.
Franz Kafka held that a good book should be like ”an axe that breaks the frozen sea within us”. The same is true, I would argue, of every work of art. And when the performance ends I do not want to stay with the others and raise a glass: I want to go home. My eyesache – I am shaken. Kivimäki’sstruggle in the cage that beneath the table becomes on stage, is hard to shake off. What is it that truly hold sus captive?
Ph: Per Bornstein
With more and more intensity Kivimäki breaks free; throws herself, rolls, dares to claim space in the room and liberate herself from bed and table. Here is a dancer of power ful physical integrity, as precise as she is violent in her fight to reclaim something that is at times so beautiful it must be caressed with bare hands, and later so destructive it must be castaside. The final scene gather severy thread, and, in its rapid tempo, is razor-sharp. The lighting suddenly shifts and onto the black net is projected a door, a window, the outlines of a room: a lamp takes shape only to be erased just as quickly, lineby line, piece by piece – and then the room is gone.
I read this final scene along side the opening quotations (projected on the net in the beginning) from Rebecca Solnit – who argues that getting lost is necessary for living autentically, that if we never lose our way we have not lived. Solnit concludes with ease that we must dare to find what we do not know weare seeking– and it is in the spaces in between finding the right way and getting los our lives very of tenarise. I fully agree with her and I have cherished Solnit’s long essay A Field Guide to Getting Lost for many years – yet walking home, along the pavement and under the viaduct, I arrive at a different perspective on her light steps across the unknown. Yes, one should get lost in life – but not in one’s own house. Yes, one should be open to the possibility that in the cracks between happiness and despair there is something precious, if one is lucky even life changing and forever shaping – but I no longer believe the injunction to get lost is uncomplicated.
Those who have truly been lost once will know something that runs far deeper than any wish to ”find the light in the darkness” or believe that”everything happens for a reason”. Such a person will due to her or hispain conclude that one ought to obtain an adequate map. The aftermath of Vingslag tells me ”one needs to be careful”– this as Kivimäki’s combative body has depicted precisely how difficult it is to surviveone’s life if one has once had to struggle to climb out from under the bed, from under the table. And at the same time know that parts of that table, that bed, once were what made one want to live.
Vingslag (2026)
Concept, choreography & video: Benedikte Esperi
Dance: Fanny Kivimäki
Music: Cha Blasco
Animation: Jule Goerke
Lighting & scenic design: 3:e Våningen’s Stiltje Asplund
The performance is a stand alone continuation of Det bor inga duvor här längre (2022)
Translated from Swedish. Originally written in response to the premiere of Vingslag at 3:e Våningen, Gothenburg, 2026.
Photos: Per Bornstein
[1]Kiruna, a Swedish town far upnorth is where Vingslag was produced and rehearsed. Kiruna is a town center earound a mine and now, because of the development of old mine, large parts of the entire town needs to be moved. It is a very unusual and big project and alters the town entirely. Every night there is construction work.