Det Frie Felts Festival

Little Miss Beast Mode & Melodrama
Andreas Haglund & Camilla Lind (SE/DK)

A performance evening with two choreographic works: LITTLE MISS BEAST MODE by Andreas Haglund and MELODRAMA by Camilla Lind.

ON LITTLE MISS BEAST MODE
SSSHHHH!!!! SOMETHING IS MOVING IN THE BUSHES! Something artificial? Something gorgeous? Something monstrous? Something natural?Little Miss Beast Mode dances in the blur between animals and humans, between the natural and the supernatural, the organic and the artificial.

Choreographer and dance artist Andreas Haglund moves through a cavalcade of creatures, tracing the ideological tensions behind staged biomimicry. What ideas of nature do portrayals of the natural world reveal? And who is welcome in that very nature?In Little Miss Beast Mode an array of beasts—grotesque, cutesy, confused and unhinged —frollick through the hazy maze of the black box. These constantly transforming apparitions sniff out the promises of queer ecology. What happens when nature is articulated from a position denied access to the so-called "natural”?

With a crack of the whip, Little Miss Beast Mode snaps through the rigid confines of this supposed naturality, leaving behind a wild mesh of beasts that dance out a world where nature is anything but fixed. Something is really moving in the bushes. 

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE CURATORIAL BACKGROUND FROM THE CURATORIAL TEAM OF SELECTED WORKS FESTIVAL 2025:
"The work's investigation, through a series of bodily transformations, of the ideological tensions present in staged imitations of nature."

ON MELODRAMA
For Camilla Lind, performance is a kind of "Lab for exciting illusions". A place to dwell on the impossible, the ambivalence and what is not yet defined by name. She examines the body as a fluid entity that can be weakened and cracked. She is concerned with how the personal can articulate the structural and how mistakes, chaos and humor can be used as tools to push the changing potentials of the body, gender and mind. 

In her new performance MELODRAMA, she takes inspiration from the genre of gothic melodrama, which can be seen both in film, literature and in the TV phenomenon soap opera. Here, strong emotions are mixed with elements of the supernatural, and in the artist's version, supplemented with references to pop and subculture and located somewhere between reality and fiction. Central to the performance is a female character who seems to be in the liminal space, where she through a series of transformations of herself searches for the possibility of communicating with the deceased. As a way to come to terms with his own grief. 

By using choreographed sound elements and movement, a distorted ghost universe arises which exists as a kind of one-woman show for the dead. Interplay with cinematic techniques, as well as the captivating convergence of music and drama, the work unfolds a multi-layered and circular narrative, where nothing is as it first appears. MELODRAMA is a sensuous exploration of what dance and choreography can entail, push and open up.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE CURATORIAL BACKGROUND FROM THE CURATORIAL TEAM OF SELECTED WORKS FESTIVAL 2025:
"The use of choreography, sound, and cinematic techniques in a deep exploration of grief and transformation. It creates a sensory universe where personal emotions illuminate larger structural themes."

ARTIST TALK AFTER THE PERFORMANCE
Andreas Haglund and Camilla Lind in conversation with Andria Nygren Forshage (SE) - January 18th, '25 at 9:00 PM, Aveny-T, Store scene
Andria Nyberg Forshage is a writer, art worker, poet, and curator researching trans aesthetics. She has been part of CuratorLab at Konstfack and has an MA in Aesthetics from Södertörn University. They are a contributing editor of Paletten Art Journal and writer-in-residence at bastard.blog.