DARK – Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company

Coded Clairvoyance

DARK premiered in the 13th edition of Trouble, a performance festival whose central theme this year revolves around invocations, evocations, magical or shamanic rituals, political actions in public spaces, and dialogues with the unseen. Kris Verdonck continues his exploration between the oppositions of being and non-existence in this three-part performance. The first one deals with unseen entities behind screens; the second is a Beckett recital in memory of Johan Leysen, a Flemish actor who passed away two years ago; the third and last part is a short musical act, with sounds coming from three sousaphones hanging on the ceiling while no one seems to be playing them.

Ugnė Noreikė

review 24.04.2025

Score for a Recipe: Mlukhiyeh

Samah Hijawi

column 31.03.2025

Everything brings us back to the body – Ehsan Hemat

A heavy blanket

While watching my Everything brings us back to the body by Ehsan Hemat, my body relaxed. The heated room loosened the muscles, the light was never too bright. Seeing him carrying the weight of an 18-kilogram brass sheet gave a physical release, as if I was the one covered with a heavy blanket, and my hand just scribbled on to the page. What did it write? It turned to myths of Icarus and Sisyphus, people whose non-human counterparts – wings and a boulder – have extended and thus completed their physical form. And now Ehsan and his sheet are here before me, merging and fighting, inseparable in their opposition.

Ugnė Noreikė

review 24.03.2025

Sabah – Tomas Pevenage/Antigone

Take a drag

After having travelled through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, Tomas Pevenage comes on stage inspired by divas he heard, people he saw, and places he visited. He creates a fragmented, searching drag character who is stunning and never loses their composure, remains shining and charming. Sabah is a show that’s easy to love, funny, beautiful and entertaining. It delivers all you would expect of a queer cabaret. However, it kept me wanting. Can a show that comes from a place of conflict remain untouched by it?

Ugnė Noreikė

review 17.03.2025

Secondhand Knowledge

De-centering Dance Knowledge through Peripheral Voices

For almost a decade, choreographer Rósa Ómarsdóttir has been obsessed with the term ‘secondhand knowledge’. Where does our knowledge derive from? How is knowledge about dance passed on between places and people, from the past to the future? What role does geography play when it comes to knowledge production and distribution? These questions sparked a research project on dance practices in 2016, through which she explored how secondhand knowledge shapes dance practices in places that in some way are peripheral to the Western canon.

Rósa Ómarsdóttir

essay 25.02.2025

Notes on Conflicted Embodiment

What do ‘folklore’, ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ mean within the different dance contexts of the global North and South? What mother tongues inhabit dance and performance? And what role can translation play? Embracing the complexity of the untranslatable, caterina daniela mora jara (and also Thalia) explore how Conflicted Embodiment can be a research tool for how a body navigates through migration, colonialism and dance.

caterina mora daniela jara

essay 25.02.2025

Six short stories on being a performer and what we (don’t) own

Over the past year, heated discussions about plagiarism, copyright, and ownership have taken centre stage in the Norwegian performing arts world. In these debates, artistic and legal perspectives on authorship often clash. Ilse Ghekiere explores the performer’s role in this context by highlighting the perspectives of other performers, allowing their insights to guide us through this labyrinth.

Ilse Ghekiere

essay 25.02.2025