About a fascination

While I was there it occurred to me that Denmark, of course, has a very special relationship with the world’s largest island. And suddenly this idea came to me: I wanted to spend time on this ‘continent’, a place which was totally unfamiliar to me, of which I had absolutely no knowledge – nothing but an excited idea. 

When we (Anna Viebrock, Nicolai Vemming, Knud Erik Solvad, and I) then travelled to Kangerlussuaq, Iluissat and Nuuk, I discovered that none of my preconceptions and images had anything to do with the reality of Greenland. But I was nevertheless overcome from the very first moment by a sense of liberation and tranquillity that I had only rarely experienced in my life. And it was this joyous arrival that I wanted to be the theme of a stage work: a theatre piece created in Greenland and embodying the wide range of experiences the ensemble and I would have there – experiences with ourselves as well as with the stories and music we would encounter during our sojourn.

It would not be a work about Greenland, but rather about a fascination. About conditions and emotions transformed into sound, emotions that are vague and inexplicable and – for this very reason – oddly precise.

My reduced method of working is referred to more often as a ‘rejection of theatre’, a description that I rather like. And I hope very much that my international ensemble (actors and artists from Greenland, Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain and Switzerland) and I in inverting a very special form of this kind of ‘rejection’, one that tells of our fondness for a land whose future is made precarious by climatic changes. This is a blank space that has significance for us all. For this reason we have given our project the title ±0, the seemingly simple sign representing the slightly ambiguous point on the Celsius temperature scale at which water melts and freezes. This minimal but nonetheless all-decisive fluctuation is the point of departure for our project – and almost certainly its very heart.