When the Bleeding Stops

Five years ago, an injury forced Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir to reshape her relationship to dance and her body. The exploration opened her eyes to her own ignorance about menopause, a topic that is still surrounded by taboos in our Western society and, above all, silence. Her lack of knowledge about the subject was confronting, but formed the starting point of a research project in which she involved numerous menopausal women in Iceland.   

With them she began a process in which each of them danced in their own living room – and thus developed their own dance language to put menopause into perspective. The result is a performance in which the dancers invite the audience into a world full of vulnerability, shame, empathy, and humour. We suddenly arrive inside the privacy of the participants' homes, and thus also within the many layers that comprise the experience of menopause. Crying, laughing, and celebrating are central.  

Now Gunnarsdóttir is taking her work international, trying to connect menopausal women all over the world, collecting their stories and their dance videos. Ultimately, they will join her artistic practice and on stage.

• Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir is a dancer and choreographer. An injury forced her to rethink her relationship with dance, the body, and artistic practice. This process, along with an aging body, opened her eyes to the silence surrounding menopause and her own lack of knowledge on the subject. This led her to pursue a Master’s in Performance Practice at Iceland’s University of the Arts, where she further developed her artistic practice and conducted research into aging, connecting it to knowledge of the body, history, and the great taboo – menopause. The play When the Bleeding Stops emerged from this research and Gunnarsdóttir’s artistic practice.