Hormones, pills, white coats, demeaning looks, clear liquids and sterile walls in stiff waiting rooms. Bodies keep turning into what is hard enough to swallow, what is outside their control. Just one more shot, one more pill, one more interview, one more performance. Semblances of control dissolve into surrendering, into bending. Who’s in charge when the nurses offices are already built? When the walls of the institutions lay steady?

surbending is a collaborative performance project between choreographer Andreas Haglund and electronic music composer and programmer Asta Norborg/FASCIA. surbending explores how surrendering can contain strategies of subversion and survival for queer individuals. This is done through the aesthetic translation and staging of their shared experience as queer people navigating institutions of healthcare. A situation where the fate of individual queer lives is robbed of self-determination.

Through developing and exploring tools for motion tracking with webcams, the two artists re-produce artificial scenarios for a black box where this upheaval of self-determination is at stake. Through advanced aural technologies, intricate choreographic methods and work with personal testimonies, the affect of queer alienation is reproduced, examined and processed in public.

Choreography, dance, performance and text: Andreas Haglund

Music composition, software programming, text and performance: Asta Norborg (FASCIA)

March 2025: Performed at EVES #5, a performance event organised by Dance Cooperative, Copenhagen

December 2024: PREMIERE at Inkonst, Malmö

November 2023: YC Festival facilitated by HAUT, curated by Vala T. Fontyn & Jari Malta, Teaterøen, Copenhagen.

March 2023: Early-stage version at Kollision residency showing curated by Inkonst and Page28, Inkonst, Malmö.

Asta and Andreas met through an artistic blind date. In march 2023 they had both applied for the open call ‘Kollision’ that Page28 and Inkonst curated together. The call was looking for queer musicians and queer poets to be paired together by the institution.

After a successful one-week residency at Inkonst, Andreas and Asta decided to further collaborate. Developing both an artistic affinity and a friendship along the way.