MAISONDAHLBONNEMA becomes Fondation Love & Orgasm

 

FONDATION  LOVE & ORGASM is again the name adopted by the duo Hans Petter Melø Dahl (N) and Anna Sophia Bonnema (NL).

Composer and performing artist Hans Petter Dahl has been a co-founder of, and for many years a performer with the Norwegian cult group Baktruppen. Writer and theatre maker Anna Sophia Bonnema staged several plays and also wrote a great many before in 1995 Dahl and Bonnema set up Love & Orgasm. Since then they work in a continuous dialogue and have created 14 performances as a duo or with other artists, at the meeting point of composed music, visual art, poetry and theatre. Dahl and Bonnema are constantly redefining themselves: from Love & Orgasm (1994) through L & O Amsterdam (1998) via MaisonDahlBonnema (2003) back to Fondation  Love & Orgasm (2023). Their shows display a radical preference for the autonomous juxtaposition of the various means of stage production. The audience itself has more than once also become part of the overall setting. DIY: Dahl and Bonnema work out everything themselves: the writing, the music, the design and the acting. Even though their performances have a very distinctive tone and vocabulary you could characterize them as intangible, they are playing with the imagination and the imaginary instead of representing reality. The audience will have to put the pieces of impressions  together themselves. As Nietzsche thought, the only freedom evolves from the ability to say no, and since it is very difficult to tell stories without manipulating, we serve bits and pieces that the boy on the first row has to put into his own story. Trying to avoid being manipulative is a new challenge in theatre- & performance-land. HPMD and ASB's latest focus is permeated by the idea of biodivercity. After a long human history of focusing on survival / liveability / sole human needs, we follow the latest sea of knowledge that leads to a swim in the cosmic unified field, where all life carries the same price tag. All is, and all is of equal importance: so as the Beatles sung: Let it be. All life is important. Life is God. Fuck fear.

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Fondation Love & Orgasm explores the concept of Song-Situations.

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In 2007, under the name MaisonDahlBonnema, ASB and HPMD made their first opera/song-situation: ‘The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – a Pop Opera’, followed by ‘Ricky and Ronny and Hundred Stars – a Sado Country Opera’ (2010), and ‘Analysis – the Whole Song’ in 2011. This opera trilogy has been on tour on three continents and fourteen countries with more than 80 performances. Audience has seen their work from Norway to Calgary, over Tokyo, Skopje and Sweden to Belgium, Croatia among many other national entities.

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In 2014 “Rhythm Conference feat. Inner Splits” was realized. This rhythmical-performative-ritual started their ‘goodbye’ to anthropocentrism and placed all the ‘things’ in the universe as a monstrous ‘too-much’ while preparing to leave the planet earth.

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The Moon (2016), could be seen as a perforated Song-Situation for 4 singers conceived as One Big Song shared and sung together by everyone. In this live-group-installation the body becomes the centre of a ritualized universe; the performance practices a physical belief in abstraction, beyond the behavioral laws of social contact. If you sing the hole, it will appear. Disapperance is the last song about being alive.

This Song-Situation was inspired by the mitochondrial-mother theory from the 80'ies:  the powerstation (making energy to live) in each cell, the mitochondrion, has its own DNA (just like the cell nucleus), and all living human beings now have the same mitochondrial DNA: the theory is that all humans alive now are descendants of one woman in East Africa approximately 130 000 years back. Means we're all family. Fuck language-cultural borders. We are different and at the same time the same. 

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Yoga for Theatres (2019) focused on the healing of the pain stored in the the walls of theatres all over the world, and this pain is of course only due to theatre-tradition-humans making theatre focusing on problems, soaking the theatre walls in negative energy. In quantum theory, any vibrations caused by anything are real, so we like to try to sing this realness of everything. All being are. So-long anthropocentrism.

 

Dahl and Bonnema have been a part of the stage productions of Needcompany (B) between 1999 and 2020, worldwide .

In 2006, MaisonDahlBonnema was part of the side program of The Theater Festival in Antwerp with the show "Not The Real Thing". Their first virtual theatre piece.

In 2008 MDB was selected for The Theater Festival in Belgium and the Netherlands with "The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny - a pop Opera"

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