Twelve talking dolls: The Subjects

You take care of the dolls. The dolls will take care of you.

Meet the twelve talking dolls. They scream, cry and comfort, threaten and pray, seduce and order, invoke and plead, explain, hypnotize, confess and terrorize. As an audience member you can pick the dolls up and hold them, take care of them and manipulate them. Or just listen. Together with the other participants in the piece, you create the condition that enables the dolls to appear as a part of your human kinship.

The doll is a thing, but also a body. It has arms and legs, eyes and mouth. When you look at the doll, it returns the gaze. It is speaking and singing. It becomes one of all these objects that ting and pling around you, demanding different types of response. We can have feelings for the doll, tenderness and care, but also nervosity or unease. It is in a borderland creature between life and death. The doll is undead. And it wants something from you.

The piece presents unique handmade stoneware dolls equipped with responsive but pre-recorded voices belonging to twelve different actors. The voices create a polyphonic soundscape that the participants enter, shape and are shaped by. They can also choose to just listen and watch.

Here, a door opens to a playful and eerie world where the dolls are in power precisely through being dolls.

Idea, text, composition, dolls: Nyxxx Voices: Nyxxx, Adriana Aburto Essén, John Alexander Eriksson, André Nilsson, Ellen Norlund, Benjamin Quigley, Francisco Sobrado, Ylva Törnlund and Malou Zilliacus. Costume design: Sofia Luna