Charlotta Öfverholm
Artistic director / Dancer / Choreographer
Artist Biography
Since the founding of Compagnie Jus de la Vie in 1995, Charlotta Öfverholm has created more than 30 productions that have toured throughout Europe, North America and South America. Her work is rooted in physical dance theatre, combining depth, irony, brutality and humour. Since 2015, she has focused on creating opportunities for mature performers and promoting their visibility through her project Age on Stage.
Charlotta works with the body as an archive.
After more than forty years as a performing artist, I have learned that the body remembers more than language. It carries experience, resistance, humour, loss and desire. My artistic practice moves between physical dance, spoken word and music, where rawness meets poetry and the existential is always present.
My international journey has taken me across Europe, New York and Los Angeles, working with companies and artists such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Complexions/Dwight Rhoden, Roberto Galvan, Robert Poole, Joseph Tmim, Corinne Lanselle, Martin Harriague, Sharon Fridman, Metros, NGC25, Farm in the Cave, Scottish Ballet, Sol Picó and many more. These encounters have shaped my artistic courage.
In Sweden, she has danced in several works by Björn Elisson, in Dramaten’s production of Cabaret by Dorte Olesen and Rickard Turpin, and extensively in Alexander Ekman’s KUCKEL, both on tour and at Orionteatern.
Her leading roles include Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal at Uppsala Stadsteater, by Hugo Hansén and Benke Rydman; Shakespeare’s Hamlet at Landestheater Linz, by Robert Poole; Alice in Alice in Wonderland at Stadttheater Giessen, by Roberto Galvan; and Lola in Lola and Mr Talk at Divadlo Archa, by Jan Kodet, for which she was nominated for a Thalia Prize at the National Theatre in Prague, Czech Republic.
She is currently touring internationally with Scottish Ballet as Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots by Sophie Laplane and James Bonas.
Since 1995, she has created her own works, presented nationally and internationally. Her work refuses the separation between movement and voice, technique and lived experience.
In 2015, she founded Age on Stage to challenge ageism in the dance world and to redefine the ageing body as a creative force.
I want to see mature artists standing beside younger, brilliant dancers with less experience. The meeting between generations is essential, both on stage and for the audience. When experience and youthful energy coexist, a deeper humanity emerges.
I do not believe in youth as a norm.
I believe in experience as momentum.
I believe in the encounter.
I work with what has already been lived.
And I let it speak.
Charlotta has created commissioned works for companies such as GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Norrdans, RTV Borås and SPIRA in Sweden, as well as Vertedance Prague/CZ, Ballet Linz/AU, Tanztheater Münster/DE and Peridance CDC/NY.
She has choreographed two operas directed by Mellika Melouani Meloni at Folkoperan, as well as Mikael Karlsson’s newly written opera MELANCHOLIA at the Royal Swedish Opera.
Together with filmmaker Anders Larsson, Charlotta has created four documentaries and two dance films. Some of them can be seen on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage.
In 2015, Charlotta initiated AGE ON STAGE, a project that presents maturity on stage and questions norms concerning age and bodies within the field of dance. The project creates and presents international productions with mature dancers, as well as workshops and productions for people over 65, festivals and seminars on the subject. Age on Stage was the Swedish part of the European project Dance On, Pass On, Dream On, which included nine dance companies and institutions in eight different countries in the EU.
Öfverholm studied dance at Balettakademien Göteborg and at Alvin Ailey ADC in NYC. She is also a theatre graduate of UCLA in Film/TV/Video and of The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles.
She teaches and choreographs for schools and universities all over the world and enjoys meeting and giving to new generations of dance. Since 2005, Charlotta has been the coordinator and programmer for Balettakademien’s International Summer Festival.
I reckon that very few of those, who came to the Ponec theatre to see a performance entitled Pas de deux sans toi by the Swedish choreographer and dancer Charlotta Öfverholm were expecting anything close to the show that was performed there that evening.
Baroque cantata, tango, folk song Oh, love… English, French, Spanish… singing and spoken word, screams and whispers… anything from chaînes to physical theatre, Pinocchio on a leash… passion, brutality, despair, humor, anxiety.
This extravagant, burlesque piece, too raw and painfully present to be surreal, and yet too surreal to be grasped with pure reason was inspired by installations and sculptures of French artist Louise Bourgeois, whose influence is truly ubiquitous. Take for instance the impression the stage makes – an empty, plain, yet expressively dismal space with shapeless hanging objects made of cloth, or the gradually increasing sense of tension and fear, the paralyzing sort of fear that turns the once self-confident human being slowly into an embodiment of apathetic despair. Both artists also share the same passion for almost physically perceived vulnerability of an individual facing the stark reality of the outside world, both study to an utmost detail his or her coping with betrayal, abandonment and loneliness and in relation to that of course his or her need for shelter and protection.
That said, one can also feel from the whole production this peculiar nordic undertow of anxiety, loneliness and unease, the awareness of transcience and triviality of human life in the ancient order of nature that more than a hundred years ago Edvard Munch enriched expressionism in painting with. All this is then melted into an original duet with (occassionaly) present partner and a fresh movement vocabulary. It oscillates somewhere between a circus performance and a very raw movement (physical) theatre, where climbing a rope up to the light results in the inevitable fall upside down, where we see expressive, almost naturalistically entwined two bodies, male and female, expressing a desperate, even manic dependence of one on the other. These scenes are interwoven by provocative intermezzos where the author herself addresses questions directly to the audience. Yes, there are also somewhat funnier moments, but these are not based on any superficial, sketchy humour, but rather on a realization of the irony of situations that life sometimes brings.
“To call Charlotta Öfverholm an expressive dancer is an understatement… She has a temperament and stage presence that could give electricity to at least the whole of Skeppsholmen,” wrote after one of her performances a reviewer of the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Well, sort of. True, her performance indeed overflows with both energy and tension that radiate from her gestures, facial expressions, voice, from her body that does not necessarily need a dynamic movement to share this energy with the audiences. Still one feels this energy even more in the seemingly calm and relaxed moments that are anyway underlined with latent tension and drama, hidden somewhere deep underneath the bronze-tanned skin of this wild shaman. It feels like a premonition of impending explosion, which could erupt with full force at any time and in unimaginable forms and variants – forms that we do not see with classically trained dancers, forms that can be found only in nature in a muscle tension of a wild animal, ready to flee from us whenever we get too close. And it is this atavism shared with her audiences, the feeling that they participate in something instinctively and deeply human that leaves them breathless in their seats… For those strong enough to enter the challenging, yet miraculous world of Charlotta Öfverholm Pas de deux sans toi may indeed turn out to be a fascinating, unforgettable experience.