Foreplay is Agora’s Performance series that promotes the collaboration of a Performance artist and a Berlin based chef. Its primary intention is to create proximity between the audience and the artists’ work by creating a familiar context, a dinner. This way the artist have the opportunity to translate his/her work into the dynamics of the traditional practice of dining, playing with its rules and elements to develop a direct dialogue to the burning questions driving his/her current creative process. The role of the chef is equally important in the event with its important contribution of  aromas, textures and flavors that smoothly help to compose the evening.

Our next edition invites Stina Nyberg, from Stockholm to build upon her recent solo Horrible mixtures.

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With Stina Nyberg as the host and the audience as the actor, this edition of Foreplay plunges into the potential of the spiritual to create a space for shared experiences. Based on Nybergs solo “Horrible Mixtures” she creates a dinner situation to communicate with the minds and suspended disbeliefs of a limited audience.

Recognizing herself as deeply limited by natural explanations, Nyberg wonders what might be learned from the supernatural side. It’s a question of personal experience and private dilemmas, and also one – according to Nyberg – for an overly rationalized world.

“Horrible Mixtures” dives into the middle of belief and scepticism, mashing up experiences, knowledges and sciences usually held distantly apart. “Horrible Mixtures” uses a dilettante approach to mentalism – assuming homemade methods for mind reading and mediation. Nyberg uses these methods to look for the capacity to imagine different connections between thoughts,
language, fantasy, the future, bodies and spectators.

Let’s not ask ourselves whether we believe in magic, or if it really works, but what magic can do. Can magic help us blur the boundaries between words such as natural, unnatural and supernatural?

Can the physical effects of thought help bridge the imaginary gap between the body and the mind, the known and the unknown? Can revisiting ritual, communal, and mental experiences create new shared fantasies between strangers? And can such experiences help us to stop knowing, stop understanding, and stop making sense?

In collaboration with a chef (TBA), Nyberg will use this dinner ritual in order to orchestrate a meeting in between the live performance, the sense, the marketing investigation, the treatment and the research.

Menu TBA

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Dinner and performance – 20 Euros (prior payment) / 25 euros (payment on arrival)

For any further information and reservations, please contact : event@agoracollective.org