Die Performance dauert ca. 70 Minuten.

The duration of the performance is approx. 70 minutes.

Mapping the Unknown
On Constellations, Collective Practice, and Imagining Futures

With Constellation #4 – Shows for Futures, the Animalarium Dance Collective brings a performance to Vienna that is never the same twice. At the intersection of dance, language, improvisation, and ritual, “constellations” unfold that grapple with urgent questions of our time: countdowns, extinction, and future dreaming. Each constellation responds to its specific environment—local histories, ecologies, and voices—transforming them into a sensorial, living cartography.
In conversation, the artists share why they see improvisation as a radical practice of listening, how they navigate threat and hope, and why for them, the collective has become much more than a mode of production.

Your piece is titled Constellation #4 – Shows for Futures. What lies behind the idea of a “Constellation” – and what makes this way of working unique for you?

Animalarium: The term “constellation” signals a refusal to center the individual. In Animalarium´s Constellations we are interested in exploring interdependence beyond the human: in the ways bodies, stories, and ecosystems are entangled.

We’re not building a fixed composition. Instead, we set up conditions for encounters. Our constellations bring together different elements—questions, experiences, places and its people—in a space where something unexpected can emerge. These “topics”— such as symptoms, societal movements, collective dreams, players from the past, present and future —meet one another through the performers’ bodies, voices, and choices in real time.

Each Constellation we create—whether it is in Vienna, a central European capital, Sápmi with its indigenous community and Arctic surroundings, or the post-industrial community around Ställberg mine—responds to its environment. We work with local habitats, local performers, local topics, and local histories, making each constellation a site-responsive event.

With “Choreo-Constellating” you’ve developed your own practice. Can you explain what this means – and how it expands your understanding of dance?

Animalarium: Choreo-Constellating is both a choreographic method and a ritual of shared attention. It is our term for a hybrid, evolving practice that brings together systems theories, constellation work, dance improvisation and spoken language. It becomes a site for collective relational inquiry. 

There’s no script, no predetermined meaning. Improvisation is central, not as spontaneous display— but as a form of deep listening and unstoppable emergence. There’s a particular pleasure for us in this approach: it activates the body as a site of perception and action, and—in Animalarium´s Constellations—brings it into dialogue with social and ecological questions. 

It invites the audience to witness not a finished product, but a living, unfolding process. We hope they enter their own active process of meaning-making — as for us, that’s where the excitement lies.

You address some of the urgent issues of our time: countdowns, extinction, and future dreaming. How do you approach this mixture of threat and hope artistically?

Animalarium: In this work we begin with what we call symptoms—something unresolved, unsettling, or calling for attention. These might be concrete issues like ecological collapse or more subtle tensions like dislocation or a longing for future kinship. 

What we’ve found is that the body knows how to hold contradictions. It can contain grief and joy, collapse and resilience. That’s why we approach these large-scale urgencies not as themes to be illustrated but as experiences to be inhabited and explored through Animalarium´s Constellations. 

One of the surprising things about working with heavy topics is the aliveness it can generate. The work doesn’t stay in despair. It moves. It breathes. There is absurdity, laughter, and even joy.

In a way, Choreo-Constellating can be a speculative practice. We are not just reacting to crisis—we are rehearsing and connecting to futures. It is a dance between mourning and dreaming.

Your work is always a collective process. What makes this way of collaborating fruitful for you – and what challenges does it bring?

Animalarium: We’ve worked together for nearly a decade, and over time we’ve built a deep trust that allows us to take risks and stay fluid. Of course, working collectively also means navigating different perspectives, rhythms, and needs. But we’ve found that by really investing in the group dynamic, we create a space where we can let go and explore. That’s a success in itself. 

Our long-term collaboration is not simply a structure for making work—it’s a practice in itself. One that weaves together friendship, art-making, and a belief in shared growth over time.

The project is presented internationally and engages with different places, histories, and communities. How do these contexts shape your work ?

Animalarium: We did not want to tour with a fixed performance—we came with an artistic method and a structure that requires local input. We have our main themes of countdown, extinction and future dreaming, but each place has a specific ecology and its own current and historical relationships to these themes. Besides working with local performers, it was our local collaborators who chose topics and therefore shaped the dramaturgy of each Constellation. 

Our process tool for this is the “map” we use—whether you call it a map, a cloud, or a topic matrix— and it is our way to visualize and organize the layers that exist in a specific place. It helps us find tensions, contradictions, and connections. It’s a bit like finding tectonic plates—where something could shift, crack open, or collide.

We are also working with multiple languages— so far English, North Sámi and Swedish— and cultural translation, which adds yet another dimension to both the map and the performance event.

Animalarium’s Constellations is a live, unscripted performance weaving together dance, language, gesture, and song. Guided by a performance host, the performers respond in real-time to themes selected together with the audience. The work explores urgent questions of extinction, countdown, and its relationships to future dreaming. Each event becomes a unique, living cartography: a sensory sculpture, a contemporary ritual, and an intense but fleeting act of collective reflection and meaning-making.

Selected for Perform Europe 2025, Animalariums’ Constellations utilises workshops and performances to talk about interdependence and climate emergency in connection to its locality. 

The project visits underrepresented areas and communities that situate themselves between city and rural periphery - including the arctic surrounding of Guovdageaidnu/Sápmi and its indigenous community, the abandoned iron ore mine Ställbergs mine and the Future Farm on the outskirts of the city of Vienna. 

At the center of the project is the artistic practice Choreo-Constellating—a method for artistic expression, research, and collaboration. Developed within the framework of contemporary choreography and systemic inquiry, it serves as a practice of collective meaning-making through embodied storytelling. 

Together with their local collaborators, the project explores topics, symptoms, language, memory and fiction — grounded in the experience of the nature, culture and history of a specific place. Making Animalariums’ Constellations a site-responsive performance event always changing, never repeated.

For Constellation #4 Shows for Futures, Animalarium brings their journey from the Nordic periphery to Vienna’s city centre, to culminate the project in the season opening of WUK performing arts on the 2nd and 3rd of October, 2025.

The projects’ participating artists are Ina Dokmo, Siri Anna Flensburg, Elle Sofe Sara, Liv Schellander, Emma Elliane Oskal Valkeapää, Alexandra Wingate and North Sámi interpreter Ellen Oddveig Hætta Gaup.

Constellation #4 Shows for Futures is performed by Ina Dokmo, Siri Anna Flensburg, Liv Schellander and Alexandra Wingate.

Animalariums’ Constellations tours Norwegian Sápmi, Sweden and Austria as part of Perform Europe 2025, in collaboration with Elle Sofe Company, Ställbergs gruva and WUK performing arts. This presentation is happening with the support of Perform Europe and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.