On 26 September at 3:00 PM at Jam Factory Art Center, Rachel Tess will present two movement performances and speak with the audience about her artistic practice and extensive experience curating Swedish-Ukrainian performing arts residencies.
The Last
Who has the right to be celebrated, where does this celebration take place, and who bears witness to it?
The Last is a kind of quasi-dys/utopian Gala des Étoiles, first presented in an abandoned shoe factory. It is a celebration of dance, dancers, and personal dance histories. Gala performances are traditionally the privilege of the wealthy and powerful—staged at venues such as La Scala, the Paris Opera, or American Ballet Theatre for elite audiences able to afford expensive tickets.
What happens when an experimental dance performance is presented as a gala evening, but instead of grandeur and ceremony, the focus shifts to time, endurance, and persistence in the face of conservatism? What if the event did not tour the world’s stages and grand opera houses, but instead existed and returned time and again—like a tireless locomotive in perpetual motion, insisting on its presence in one place while opening up countless directions for travel?
Choreography, concept, and performance: Rachel Tess
Sound: Uli Ruchlinski
Costumes: Jesse Lakovicz Crozier
Stepping Stones
Stepping stones emerge as symbols and metaphors, while dance becomes a path towards imagination and a poetic dimension. In this new solo performance by choreographer Anna Pehrsson, dancer Rachel Tess excavates the earth, builds mountains, and transforms into molten lava.
Music: Mårten Spångberg
Admission is free with prior registration.
The performance is presented as part of the thesteinstudio x Jam Factory Art Center Performative Programme 2026.
Rachel Tess
An American choreographer and dancer based in Sweden. She is the director of the Milvus Artistic Research Center in Knislinge and served as Associate Curator of Live Art at Wanås Konst from 2016 to 2022. In 2004, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree from The Juilliard School in New York, followed by a Master’s degree in Choreography from the New Performative Practices programme at DOCH in 2013. She received the Birgit Cullberg Grant in 2019 and the Region Skåne Culture Prize in 2023 for developing new models for producing dance in rural areas. Her choreographic works have been presented throughout Scandinavia and the United States. From 2009 to 2013, she was a full-time member of Cullbergbaletten.
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