H2DANCE is choreographer/ performer duo Hanna Gillgren (SE) and Heidi Rustgaard (NO), working between Norway, Sweden and the UK since 1999. Their work sits in between performance and dance and can be characterised as interdisciplinary, often taking a humorous approach to serious subject matters. Hanna and Heidi have an ongoing fascination with meetings of differences, exploring ways in which we negotiate hierarchy, conformity, power and manipulation. Taking their own collaboration as a starting point, the work explores two distinct and different characters and voices co-existing, agreeing to disrupt each other during process and performance. Interested in deconstruction, breaking down the hierarchy between performers, light, set, sound and costume, their work is presented in and outside the black box, sometimes with Hanna and Heidi as performers, and other times in collaboration with professional dancers and amateurs.
Their work is often informed by workshops and conversations with people of different ages and backgrounds, and these encounters influence and inform the ideas and aesthetics of the work.
Hanna and Heidi have co created eight choreographic works, eleven touring piece, two dance films and several successful high quality participatory dance projects in the UK and Scandinavia over the last 16 years. Currently they are developing Fest en Fest, a choreographic project in the format of a new international festival of expanded choreography, that the aims to develop new connections and infrastructures across borders, presenting Nordic and British choreographic works. The first edition of Fest en Fest takes place in Deptford London 22nd – 24th of June.
Last year they premiered ‘Strangers & Others, a work that invites a participating audience to look, touch, assume and judge. Alongside Strangers & Others the company is touring their intergenerational performance Staging Ages, the award-winning DUET and their choir work Say Something. H2DANCE have taken up residencies at Dance4, METAL, Laban Theatre, Pavilion Dance, Dance East, DanceDigital, The Place in the UK, DansiT, SEANSE, Union Scene, Bergen Dansesenter and Scenerommet in Norway, Riksteatern Värmlands and Dansens Hus Stockholm Sweden, Nordic House Iceland, Devir CAPa (Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve) Portugal, Taipei Artist Village Taiwan and Gaara Dance Foundation in Kenya.
Visit: h2dance.com