Lampefeber

For the first minute of Lampefeber, nobody dances. A spotlight fades up on an empty stage, then travels out over the seats and stops on one person in the audience, then another, then a third — bright, and deliberately uncomfortable. The opening question is not what the dancers will do. It is who the light will land on.

Only then does the spot find the door at stage left, where a dancer is waiting, and the performance returns to where it is supposed to be. One by one, each spotlight along that crossing uncovers another dancer already standing in the dark.

A body on autopilot

Stage fright is not shyness, it is a cascade. A perceived threat trips the sympathetic nervous system: the hypothalamus signals the pituitary, the adrenal glands push adrenaline into the blood, the neck and back tighten, the hands shake, the mouth dries, the pupils widen into tunnel vision. Body temperature drops, because as far as the oldest part of the brain is concerned, you are now prey.

The work takes that involuntary sequence as its choreographic material. The room warms, then cools; the light pulses slowly, on the keyword breathe; the stage closes in around a single dancer until there is almost nothing left of it.

The wall

The space opens again into something cold and smoke-filled, and a wall is brought forward. It is lit so that the wall itself stays nearly invisible — what the audience sees is arms, reaching out of the dark, for a single dancer to move in front of and with.