Stakes are high and the potential to fall too. Five characters are facing the same fate, dealing with it in different ways. What at first is considered normal is displaced and becomes uncertainty. It’s a negotiation between fiction and factuality, naïvety and cunningness. Any stance is commented upon from another place, another reality, which brings us closer to them, but not more certain about what will happen.
In Bien y Mal we encounter magic and theatricality through casual and punky bodies. The space with its music and lights is fictitious and pompous. The characters are melodramatic and overindulging, lost or indifferent. Together the group is exposed to an unnamed threat and finds strategies to move forward collectively, without, for that matter, having anything in common. Nothing binds them, apart from what we, the audience, can unite them by. It’s a breathtaking place, where it’s not possible to do anything yet, not to protect oneself from anything yet, just to await the consequences.

Ofelia Jarl Ortega (b. 1990) is a Chilean-Swedish choreographer and performer based in Stockholm. Her work centers around vulnerability and femininity, often with a suggestive erotic aesthetic; where questions around power and group dynamics are at the core for her investigations. She holds a diploma from The Royal Swedish Ballet School (2010) and a MA in Choreography from Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola (2014). Her works have been shown at venues such as ImPulsTanz (Vienna), MDT (Stockholm), Inkonst (Malmö), Arsenic (Lausanne), and Moving in November (Helsinki).