October 11, 2006 – January 14, 2007
Dansmuseet, Stockholm


This fall Dansmuseet greets children and grownups welcome to an exhibition of animals on the stage. Are animals like people? This question has recently been discussed in regards to the film ”March of the Penguins”. It is tradition with us humans to interpret our own qualities as being the same in animals. In the animal story and fable, the animals are given human features and speech ability. Here we meet the characteristic traits for the special animal types – the egotistical, pleasure seeking, the droll, and so on. This way human behaviour is created with moral, humoristic or satirical purposes.

In picture books and fairytales we learn early to know this world of animals. But the animals also have taken place on stage.
How are they represented there?
How do we recognize them?

It can be ”realistic” as in a completely covered bear costume or just with colour and movement as in for example Swan Lake. In this exhibition we meet, among others, pompous cats and cunning foxes, powerful lions, big bears and small rats, comical monkeys and shimmering fish, fairytale birds and white swans, penguins, frogs and insects. On stage we get both to see the human being as animal and the animal as human!


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Dansmuseet - museum for performing arts
and visual arts
Gustav Adolfs torg 22–24
SE-111 52 Stockholm
Sweden
www.dansmuseet.nu