These photographs were made at MDT during the general rehearsal, the day before the premiere. The last full run-through before the work opens to an audience, when everything is in place but nothing has been fixed yet by public scrutiny. The photographs were made in available stage light, tracking the work as it unfolded.
Dolly is a production by OR/ELLER, the choreographic collaboration between Anja Arnquist and Madeleine Lindh, who have worked together as an artist duo since 2018. OR/ELLER's work is defined by a highly visual scenic language in which dance is the driving force: precise, image-conscious, and committed to physicality. Dolly was performed by Arnquist, Lindh, and Sam Huczkowski, and premiered at MDT, Moderna Dansteatern, in Stockholm in November 2024.
The piece takes three figures named Dolly as its entry point: Dolly the sheep, the first mammal ever cloned from an adult somatic cell, a life manufactured rather than conceived; Dolly Parton, the artist and icon who has continuously authored and reinvented herself across fifty years of public life; and the classic doll, a figure dreamed into existence by others and handed an identity before she can form one of her own. Through these three, the work opens a question about originality, identity, and transformation. What does it mean to become? What is the relationship between the copy and the original? How much of a self is constructed, performed, inherited?
All life begins within the body, in the interval between first heartbeat and first breath. Dolly is an investigation of that threshold, and what it costs to be made.
