Turning Heads in Kista

Artists-in-residence Ann Rosén and Sten Olof Hellström have completed their first sound experiment in Kista. They temporarily placed sound installations in three public spaces in Kista. Choreographer Ingo Reulecke from Berlin was invited to observe people´s reactions.

The experiment is the first in the artists project Sound Inserts in Public Spaces in Kista. Their aim is to find out if and how the sound installations affect people’s movement patterns and behaviour in public spaces.
Different choreographers are invited to observe the installations in action on location. The idea is to let them present the outcome of their observations as performances in Stockholm in February 2008.
Ingo Ruelecke – choreographer and professor in dance at the College for the Arts ”Ernst Busch” Berlin – spent three hours in three different spaces observing peoples reactions, behaviour and relationship to the sounds generated by the installation. The documenting camera as well as the installations technical equipment was fully visible in the chosen public spaces. He observed a couple of hundred pedestrians.
How did people react?
– To each space the response was not so much different. People are curious when passing by and a lot of them were amused because something is happening in the street. But people do not react in the same way here in Kista as in Dakar, for example
Ingo Reulecke thinks that people here in general unwilling to play and jump around:

– What I mean is that most people are not used to move their bodies and open up. They don’t allow themselves to let go of their body and themselves in the public space. If they do so they are seen as a clown.
People literally turned their heads.
– I saw that sounds changed their walk in terms of twisting the body. The legs were occupied by walking, most people kept walking, but their heads were free to communicate and express some thought of the sounds.
What can you as a choreographer create out of these observations?
– For me as an artist and choreographer I will thematize the head in the performance. The head is in general the place of communication. It was the most vibrant spot in the body on the people I observed in Kista. The heads were like floats on water creating waves through the bodies!

Text: Carina Ruotsalainen

Picture: Ingo Reulecke