Physical, intuitive and condensed

Hagar Malin Hellkvist Sellén is a choreographer who has become known for creating both urgent and engaging works. She has worked with a variety of themes such as workers’ heritage, queer life stories, dansband culture, the movement’s own poetry and the difficulty of letting go. Her work has the ability to always curiously explore the endless possibilities of choreography.

Hellkvist Sellén’s new work Drive Hunger is a stand-alone continuation of The Time It Takes, which premiered in 2023. Like that work, Drive Hunger also takes movement as its starting point to see where it leads. Here, choreography’s very own communication ability is highlighted instead of donning the language of the written word. Without a finished idea, Hellkvist Sellén and the dancers enter the creative process with an open and searching mind. Together, they let the floor become a place for physical and philosophical reasoning. With trust in the craft, the choreographic landscape and the work’s other expressions emerge. A movement poetic act of resistance to the demands of the present in a time where more and more is being measured, streamlined, and distanced.

In Drive Hunger we see the Swedish dancer Elin Hallqvist together with the Norwegian dancer Pernille Holden who participates in several of Hellkvist Sellén’s previous works.

The title Drive Hunger is borrowed from a work by graphic artist Lina Nordenström.

Hagar Malin Hellkvist Sellén

Choreographer

Hagar Malin Hellkvist Sellén is a Swedish choreographer who lives and works in Umeå.

In 2024, she had the opening of the choreographed exhibition We Move Towards the End, which is her most comprehensive work of almost six hours. For three weeks, visitors to the Västerbotten Museum in Umeå were able to experience the exhibition’s choreographic bath. We Move Towards the End was selected for the latest performing arts biennial that took place in Östersund.

Hellkvist Sellén has been a strong voice in contemporary choreography for two decades. She introduced queer perspectives, themes and expressions in the art of dance early on and has with her works both challenged and embraced the audience. Each work seeks its very own format and has moved between thematic deep diving, documentary storytelling and poetic physicality. She has created works for dancers, actors and women with no previous experience of stage work. With her work, Hellkvist Sellén reformulates the boundaries of what is possible.

Hellkvist Sellén was born in 1978 and was educated at the Choreographer programme at the School of Dance (now Stockholm University of the Arts). Among her most acclaimed works are Better People, Pink Promises, The Missionary and Flottarkärlek, where she has lifted lesbians in revival, manual work and Swedish folk culture. She has toured both nationally and in the Nordic countries and her works have been shown on stages such as Dansens Hus, MDT, Dansstationen, Norrlandsoperan and others. Hellkvist Sellén has received several awards, including the Swedish Theatre Critics’ Dance Prize and the Swedish Directors’ Association’s IRIS Prize and this year the Rosenström Culture Prize.

Tickets go on sale August 11 at 12:00 p.m.!