Name: When the bleeding stops | Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir
Start: 2024-11-08T21:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-11-08T22:00:00+02:00
Location: Franciska Clausens Plads 27, 1799 Copenhagen, Denmark

$When the bleeding stops | Lov\u00edsa \u00d3sk Gunnarsd\u00f3ttir$

In “When the Bleeding Stops” Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir addresses the silence and taboo that seems to engulf menopause in Western society, as well as her personal experience of aging as a dancer.
After suffering an injury five years ago, Lovísa was forced to reconsider her relationship with dance and the body. This process opened her eyes to the silence around menopause and her own lack of knowledge on the subject. She began researching and posted an open invitation online where she invited menopausal women to participate in her project. Before she knew it, she was working with a large number of women from across the Icelandic society.
Several of the Icelandic woman are now part of the performance alongside local women from Copenhagen who have been invited to participate and share their stories and dance.
“When the Bleeding Stops” invites the audience into a world of vulnerability, shame, empathy and humour. The work transports us into the privacy of the participants homes, and dives deep into the many layers of the female experience associated with menopause and invites us to laugh, cry and celebrate with these women.
The work premiered at Reykjavík Dance Festival in The Reykjavík City Theatre in 2021 and has been touring since. It has gotten excellent critical reviews and the local women participating in the project have described the experience as empowering and even life changing.
When the Bleeding Stops was nominated as the most innovative performance of the year at The Icelandic Theatre Awards and Lovísa was chosen as one of the 20 specially selected Aerowaves artists in 2023 as well as a Crowd artist in 2023.
Lovísa is now on a mission to travel with the performance internationally, connect to local, menopausal women in each place, gather stories and dance videos from them, introduce them to her artistic practice, and invite them to join her on stage. At the same time, Lovísa wants to create a social movement around menopause and take part in changing the narrative on menopause in Western Society.
Credits:
CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY AND TEXT: Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir, LIGHT AND SOUND DESIGN: Brett Smith,
VIDEO DESIGN: Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir and Brett Smith, PERFORMERS: Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir, Ólöf Ingólfsdóttir, Kristjana Stefánsdóttir, Sveinbjörg Þórhallsdóttir + local women, PRODUCER: StepTurnMove - Wim Casier
THANKS TO: SIgrún Ólafsdóttir, Egill Ingibergsson, Alexander Graham Roberts, Brogan Davison, Rebekka Ingimundardóttir, Valdimar Jóhannsson.
The performance is part of Dancing while writing while changing a diaper – an EDN Artists Exchange hosted by Dansehallerne, Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Andrea Zavala Folache
The performance is supported by aerowaves – dance across erurope, Co-funded by the European Union and the Danish arts council
Bio:
Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir is an award-winning dancer and a choreographer. After 16 years of a successful career at Iceland Dance Company she suffered an injury that forced her to reconsider her relationship with dance, the body, and her artistic practice.This process, along with the vivid feeling of an aging body, opened her eyes to the silence around menopause and her own lack of knowledge on the subject. She began researching and interviewing menopausal women in her local community. This led her to a masters degree in Performance Practice at Iceland ́s University of the Arts where she further developed her artistic practice and conducted research that revolved around aging, connecting to the body ́s knowledge, history and to the big taboo, menopause. Out of this research and Gunnarsdóttir ́s artistic practice, the stage piece When the Bleeding Stops was born.