Patsy Lassbo (b. 1988) is a composer and theatre maker from Sweden, working in the unstable zones between body and machine, music and theatre, presence and absence. Their practice moves through composed theatre, not as genre, but as method: composing the theatre event as a field of forces where sound, light, architecture, flesh and feedback systems co-produce experience.
Trained in sound design for performing arts (Stockholm University of the Arts, BFA 2017), theatre (DAS Theatre / Amsterdam University of the Arts, MA 2024) and audio engineering (SAE Institute, 2008), Lassbo’s trajectory runs from experimental music production and working as a theatre technician to an expanded compositional practice where the apparatus itself becomes instrument, prosthesis and collaborator. They do not treat technology as tool, but as condition.
Rooted in a queer-embodied and trans*aesthetic sensibility, Lassbo approaches transness as a way of organising perception rather than as a theme. Their work resists representation in favour of actualisation, staging intensities that loosen the presumed coherence between self, body and world. Discourses around aesthetics and anaesthetics, dissociation, theatre and art history, critical theory, etc., sit in the background of this exploration of overstimulation, alienation and sensory saturation in contemporary life. Absence becomes generative. The audience is implicated as stage. The black box and the theatre are treated as historical material, sites haunted and resonating with Western ideals of presence, authenticity and embodiment.
Their master presentation fugue (2024) unfolded as an (an)aesthetic experiment in dissociation: a staged feedback loop between performer, apparatus and audience in which theatre operated as thing-in-itself rather than medium for statement. Across works, Lassbo insists on immanence over transcendence: not escaping the machine, but modulating it from within.
In parallel, Lassbo’s work with Sticky Drama extends this inquiry into media archaeology and contemporary myth-making. With Bastard of Allegory (2019), The End of Books (2020) and Lilla Oraklet (2022), the group engages with media history, machine vision, textual culture and political myth through a deliberately hybrid form that moves between experimental music, theatre history, satire and digital aesthetics.
Since 2021, they co-run the production platform Dramageddon with Olof Runsten, and from 2026 also the record label Dramageddon Recordings.
Lassbo is a member of the Swedish Society of Composers and Fylkingen, and has contributed to more than 35 professional productions shown in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and several other European countries.
photo by Peteris Viksna