GAME CHANGER

GAME CHANGER 
A Commission for Bildmuseet in Umeå Sep, 2022  https://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/utstallningar/2022/bildmuseets-performancehelg/
Also shown at Malmö Gallery Weekend Sept, 2022 
Duration: 2 h  
Concept and idea:  LILITH Artist Duo
Music: Siri Jennefelt

Rebellious individualism, compliant group belonging, and collective grief processing are explored in the public interactive performance Game Changer. Actors and visitors move within an uncertain borderland, in a dim club environment, all respectfully coverd with anonymizing hoods adorned with carnival feathers. Longing for intimacy, solace, and self-expression are tested and processed through gestures, rituals, dances, and impulses. 

A group of actors and dancers follow a predetermined choreography, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group. 

A ten-year-old girl leads the game, occasionally moving the audience and actors around the room  into new choreographies. The work dissolves and shifts the boundaries between visitors and actors as each visitor chooses how to participate. 

Game Changer lasts for a loop of 2 hours, guided by the 10-year-old girl. At all times, there are about 25 participants in the room following a predetermined choreography. Everyone in the room, actors and audience alike, are equal. Visitors are dressed with hoods and feathers before individually entering the playing space with 30-second intervals and staying as long as they wish. The room constantly fills with new uninitiated visitors who find it difficult to distinguish between actors and audience, as several audience members who have been inside longer choose to join the choreography. The audience, like the little girl, becomes the Game Changer of the performance. When the audience chooses to create their own spontaneous choreographies, it is impossible to say whether it is scripted or happening in the moment, as the predetermined choreography also includes movements and events that can be interpreted as reactions to what is happening or the absence of what is happening.

Press and conversations aboutGame Changer

Conversation with LILITH about Game Changer  https://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/utstallningar/2022/bildmuseets-performancehelg/

Review by Sara Meidell in VK  https://www.vk.se/2022-09-18/mer-svarartad-performance-till-folket
“In a chanting soundscape, I partake in an experience that, stronger and more invasive than I’ve experienced in a long time, intimately engages with questions of individual power versus collective power, authority and protection, resistance and submission. In an uncertain borderland of choreographed rituals, interaction, improvisation, and coercion, I linger driven by a desire to understand the undercurrents; to de-identify the people and situations around me. Then I quickly leave the room, realizing I need to let all the questions remain..”

Review in mezei.nu  “The dancers detach themselves sporadically from the audience, they wrestle, fight, struggle against perpetrators, collapse as if shot. Occasionally, the audience seems to participate, by invitation, or of their own accord? Can I try to change what is happening and become a game changer? It’s an uncomfortably thought-provoking experience where social movements, power plays, and emotions, collective impulse and individual responsibility are formulated in an unpredictable process”