Natten – Holding a Castle is a journey into the night, into nocturnal waiting, and the search for compassion in times of dispossession. In parallel with a series of dark stories, two dancers escort the audience into the shared loneliness where fear and bliss fuse into fantasies without names. Here moments turn into eternities, contours fade into waves of darkness, movements become monuments that dissolve into gestures of somnambule intoxication.

The Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg, already familiar to the audience in Seoul, creates a dance in which layers of reality and fantasy remix, offering the audience a moments respite from the exuberant information intensity of contemporary society. Natten – Holding a Castle is a departure point arguing that active fantasy today is a form of political resistance and that society supported by technology is in a process of suffocating our ability of free fantasy.

Concept and choreography: Mårten Spångberg
With and by: Park Jin Yeong, Lee Minjin
Narration: Kim Shinu
With: Kim Aejung
Costume: HYEIN SEO

Made possible by the support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, The Swedish Art Council, XING Bologna, PAF St. Erme and Kunstenfestivaldesarts.
Special thanks to: Adriano W Jensen, Linda Blomqvist, Emma Daniel, Tamara Alegre, Hana Erdman, Louise Dahl, Alexandra Tveit, Else Tunemyr, Simon Asencio and Marika Troili.

Mårten Spångberg is a Swedish choreographer working and living in Berlin. With an interest in the structural specificities of choreography his work is interdisciplinary spanning from dance and writing to visual media, in particular painting. Thematically his work addresses ecology in an expanded sense confronting Western aesthetics’s correlation with extractivist capitalism and simultaneously arguing against the ongoing culturalization of art. He is a diligent cultural critic and has published several books.