Twelve talking dolls – the subjects

On December 3, 2019 Art Inside Out and Nyxxx invited us to the performance Twelve Talking Dolls – The Minions.

Twelve Talking Dolls: The Minions

You take care of the dolls. The dolls take care of you.
They scream, cry and comfort, threaten and plead, seduce and command, invoke and pray, explain, hypnotize, confess and terrorize. As an audience member, you can pick up and hold the puppets, answer them, care for them and manipulate them. Or just listen. Together with the other participants in the work, you create the conditions for the dolls to appear as part of your human community.

The doll is an object, but it is also a body. It has arms and legs, eyes and a mouth. When you look at the doll, the doll also looks at you. It speaks and sings. It becomes one of all objects that makes a sound, that require various forms of response. We can develop feelings for the doll, tenderness and care, but also feel nervousness or worry. It is in a borderland between life and death. The doll is undead. And it wants something from you.

In the performance Nyxxx presents unique handmade stoneware puppets equipped with responsive but pre-recorded voices, originating from twelve different actors. The voices form a polyphonic soundscape that visitors enter, shape and are shaped by. They can also choose to listen and observe.

In Twelve Talking Dolls: The Minion, Nyxxx opens the gate to a playful and eerie world where the dolls, as dolls, set the tone.

Idea, text, composition, puppets: Nyxxx (Elize Arvefjord, Tova Gerge, Ebba Petrén, Kerstin Weimers, Albin Werle, Gabriel Widing)
Carpenter: Johan Andrén
Costume designer: Sofia Luna
Voices: Nyxxx, Adriana Aburto Essén, John Alexander Eriksson, André Nilsson, Ellen Norlund, Benjamin Quigley, Francisco Sobrado, Ylva Törnlund & Malou Zilliacus.