The Ambassador is a an enthusiastic «show-and-tell» about Hoppalappa – an hour-long improvised performance.

With Hoppaloppa, Bronja Novak Lindblad (Gothenburg), Susanne Martin (Berlin) and Katarina Eriksson, dressed in folkdance costumes, experiment wildly with the intersection between traditional folk art and contemporary performance culture, and turn phenomena like identity, ethnic belonging, and pride, up-side-down and in-side-out.

Hoppalappa has toured in Europe since 2008, and their next frontier is the San Francisco Bay Area, where Katarina is based since 1999. As a «trailer» (and a comment on the difference in art financing between US and northern Europe) Katarina riffs on the fantasy of being the ambassador of Hoppalappa’s motherland «Cranio Sacria». She invites the audience to create an animal soundscape for folksy ambience, dances passionately to music by local artist Cheryl Leonard for cultural cross-pollination, and performs a ritual/surgery for total presence, all on the proud mission to promote her dance troupe in America.

Press

  • (…) Hoppalappa is an hour-long sample of dizzying threads of associations, skilled collaboration, and the happy courage of throwing oneself into the unknown. The safety net is spelled humor. (…) Hoppalappa is like nothing else and it was a joy to look into the heads of these nutty performers and to be embraced by their warming madness when things outside, for the most part, are so darn cold.
  • Caroline Owman, Skånska Dagbladet

Artist

Katarina Eriksson has been involved with improvisational dance since 1989, collaborating with artists, such as Ray Chung, Cathie Caraker, Karen Nelson, and as a member and co-founder of Swedish improvisation ensemble Floke. She teaches Contact Improvisation and other improvisational forms in Europe and the US, and since 2000 she curates the performance series Moments Notice in Berkeley. Katarina’s traditional dance background includes graduation from The Ballet Academy, Gothenburg and working at The Gothenburg State Theater and Opera, as well as with numerous choreographers and dance companies in Sweden. Recent performance endeavors are; Artist in Recisdence at CounterPULSE, San Francisco, touring in Sweden, England, and Germany with Hoppalappa Postfolki Tanziteatteri, directing inter-disciplinary performances in New York and Massachussetts, co-creating a site-specific dance piece with Siljeholm/Christophersen in Beirut, and performing in a clown piece directed by Christina Lewis at The Arc, San Francisco.

Katarina’s teaching supports collaboration, diversity of expression, and “beginner’s mind. Her main guides in art making are vulnerability, musicality and deep play.