Stageperformance: Singing Our Place
and Soundinstallation: Hello! How are you? How is your nature?
Singing Our Place is a Nordic cross-genre theatre project about nature, humans, the climate and a paradigme shift.
The project takes starting point in actual places and people in the North
and from there it migrates between people and places in the North.
The project is created by Teater Viva under the leadership of artistic director, actress, storyteller,
composer and singer Katrine Faber in collaboration with musician, multi-instrumentalist,
composer and sound designer Aksel Striim.
We collaborate with artists, scientists and many other people in all ages and places in the North.
The project travels between places in the world and explore the relationship betwen people
and their places. Old and new stories about nature, climate change and climate destruction.
We create and sing new songs and stories for our future through the creation of performances,
concerts, sound installations and community plays.
August 2018:
We did the big tour in Greenland with our Greenlandic music performance Pinngortitaq Nipiliutsigu
and the ensemble of 45 performers. We are working on the documentation of this marvelous adventure.
Pictures and film will appear in the beginning of 2019 !
April 2017:
Greenland. The works and collaborations in Greenland were so well received, that we are now planning
a tour in Greenland with the performance and the installation we created in Ilulissat.
We are preparing this to happen in 2018 and are looking so much forward to this !
At the moment we are preparing in collaboration with The National Theatre of Greenland.
We hope to arrive to several towns at the coast and then arrive to Nuuk and perform at a festival.
Iceland. We are also preparing Singing Our Place in Iceland. Katrine Faber was an Artist in Residence
in the little village Olafsfjordur in North Iceland in December and January 2016-17.
Here she was researching themes and materials and collaborations.
In August 2017 she returned to Olafsfjordur to prepare more for the arrival of Singing Our Place
in North Iceland. She also presented two performances in Akureyri, North Iceland
at the A ! Performancefestival 30 August -4 September 2017 as a part of the interaction
with the area and local people and artists. These two performances are created in Olafsfjordur
as a part of the research to the Icelandic version of Singing Our Place.
Here below you can read about our works in Denmark and Greenland from 2015-16.
You can see pictures from the works in the gallery.
Singing Our Place conveys stories from person to person
and the project constantly develops in connection to meeting with the different places, people and landscapes.
The performance and installation will continue to develop and transform depending on the interaction
with the places it visits, and exchanges and contributions from guest artists and local residents in the locations it receives.
The project includes performances, installations, dialogue meetings , workshops,
together with guest artists, lectures, barter, concerts and exchange.
We addresses us to everyone; children, adolescents, adults and old people.
Singing Our Place is on the one hand a call into our time and on the other a tribute to the planet we share.
Singing Our Place gives room for the interaction where we can create new stories about our common future together.
So far, the project has been supported by the Project Funding Committee
for the Performing Arts/Danish Arts Council, NunaFonden and Nordic Culture Fund.
In the production phase in Greenland we have received the vital support of Napa, Air Greenland, Lions Club Ilulissat,
Unnusiarfik Ilulissat and Ilulissat Art Museum. Thanks a lot !
Disaster or transformation?
Ice melts. Water flows. Temperatures rise. Soil dries out. A changing world.
In the cities and in the most remote locations.
The project started in Denmark in 2015 and continued on to Greenland in January and February 2016.
From Greenland we will continue to Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Norway before we land back in Denmark.
We create links and collaborations between the people and places we meet.
We invite artists, scientists and other residents in the North to join Singing Our Place:
with songs, sounds, texts, performances, rituals, stories, lectures, dance, photographs, sculptures, collages and music.
We want to hear voices from different places and from different angles in order to create
a nuanced picture of a future world we live in together.
We are curious to explore the modern persons sense of belonging to nature.
We ask people if they want to share a place in nature
which they have a speciale connection to or memory from.
We want to connect the stories from the human body to the stories about nature,
stories about global climate change to the individual's perception of place and nature.
The project consists of:
Singing Our Place is a cross-genre theatre installation travelling from place to place in the Nordic region
and is created in new versions in dialogue with the people and the nature of the places the project visit.
After thorough research and in collaboration with local artists, residents and institutions
we create a music theatre performance based on the themes that are important to the people in the place we visit.
Our work is based on interviews and conversations, sound recordings, video recordings,
workshops and expeditions in the regions. From there we create, in collaboration with local artists,
a theatre production with new texts, old and new stories, music, dance, songs,
soundscapes in close dialogue with the place, space and our audience.
Hello! How are you? How is your nature ? is an interactive sound installation that follows the theatrical performance.
It gathers and shares sound portraits and stories from places and people in the North.
The installation takes the form of a sound-city with sound-domes/igloos/tents which are placed outside and/or indoors.
The audience can crawl into the domes/igloos/tents and experience the sound-works.
The sound-domes give you the experience of going into nature, ice, mountains, the rocks, the sea and the city.
You have the opportunity to contribute your own memories, future predictions
and reflections to a recorder in one of the sound-igloos and these recordings will be included in the sound installation.
You have the opportunity to share your opinion to these four topics:
- Tell us about a place in nature that means something special to you
- How is your relationship with the nature around you?
- Have you experienced long-term changes in the nature around you?
- What are your wishes for nature in the future?
The sound-works and the performance is created with a starting point in texts,
musical compositions, choreographies and sounds from nature landscapes like glaciers, ice,
wind, the ocean, water, animal sounds, human sounds, dreams, myths, cities, machines and states of mind.
The texts are based on scientific evidence of man and nature, creation myths and personal lyrics
about being human and to be either attached or detached from ones own self and the surrounding and nature.
We confront tales from modern civilization with tales from the ancient animism.
What is tomorrow's story? How does it sound?
Teater Viva has for several years been interested in the relationship and resonance between body and nature,
between voice and landscape. We have researched Scandinavians, Inuits, Sami, Tuvanians, Aborigines
and other peoples relationship with the surrounding world and themselves through song, myths and sound.
In Singing Our Place we create a contemporary soundscape on the basis of the old Nordic tradition of singing;
Sami joik, Inuit singing and drum dancing, old Danish and Norwegian magic shows, Faroese music and Icelandic rhymes.
Just like the melting glacier that uncovers layers of history, the composition dives into the layers of singing traditions
from the past and transforms them into a contemporary audio language.
Greenland 2016-2018.
The greenlandic version of Singing Our Place is called Pinngottitaq Nipiliutsigu
and we developed this beautiful performance in Ilulissat in Greenland
in collaboration with stage artists, residents and institutions there.
Katrine Faber was on a research trip to Ilulissat and Nuuk in February and March 2015
and again with Aksel Striim in Ilulissat in September and October 2015.
We then established agreements with many exciting partners In Ilulissat.
In January and February 2016 the sound installation was set up at the Art Museum in Ilulissat.
And in February 2016 we sat up and performed Pinngortitaq Nipiliutsigu -
the Greenlandic version of Singing Our Place at the Cultural Centre Sermermiut in Ilulissat.
In March 2018 we restaged the performance and in August 2018 we toured
with the performance in Greenland.
The following people attended the project:
Varste Berndtsson Mathæussen GL: actor, mask dancer, co-stager
Hans -Henrik Suarsaq Poulsen GL: actor, throatsinger
Katrine Faber DK: actress, singer, director
Aksel Striim DK: musician, composer, video
Jens Ole Nathanielsen GL: musician, composer, sound and light design
34 participants from the theatre group Inuit Hollywood: actors, singers, dancers
The Male Choir Imilik in Ilulissat: singers
Students from SPS Seminarium, Ilulissat, GL: scenography, dance, acting
Ivar Ørn Sverrisson, RukRuk Company, Island /Norge: assistent director
Niels Berglund, GL: dancer and choreographer
Alvilda Faber Striim: dancer and choreographer
10 youngsters from Ilulissat: hip hop dancers
Outi Tervo: whale researcher and audio
Lene Kielsen: climate scientist
We also worked with the Art Museum, the Knud Rasmussen Museum, Isfjordskontoret, Ilulissat School,
and Cultural Centre Sermermiut, and we invited scientists from the Climate Centre in Nuuk
to participate in dialogue meetings.
In Pinngortitaq Nipiliutsigu we worked with the themes of the ice, the sea,
the great ancient rocks, expanses and infinity and silence.
The at once strong and vulnerable nature, the port and fishing, the airfield and tourists.
Waste, trash and purity. Environmental poisoning, animals that cannot be eaten,
the old settlements where the past is close.
Skull and bones. The sealers experiences, the old myths about transformations and spirits,
and the human stories of crucial moments in nature.
We want to hear the hidden stories and sounds of the ice; melting sounds and memories,
present stories and future foreshadowings.
We play with the possibility of being able to listen to memories of people and nature,
both from our past and present, and also the future and back to our present.
The landscape is a body. My body is a landscape
Singing Our Place also offers a workshop for adults and youth in connection with the performance and installation.
The workshop invites participants to express their view of the relationship between nature and man,
the basic human emotions and the movements of nature in the form of creation, destruction and transformation.
We examine the resonance between our own bodies and the places bodies.
We sing, play and create narratives, texts and songs in dialogue with specific locations and natural elements.
We create music with our bodies, stones, wind, water and the ground.
We make audio and voice portraits from our experiences of nature.
The different expressions from workshop participants are recorded electronically
and are used for audio and/or staged as physical tableaux,
which will be part of an exchange between work and guests.
Climate and dialogue
Climate change and climate destruction is one of the greatest issues today, and climate-anxiety is a reality.
We look at global climate change from a Nordic perspective by engaging with places and people in the North.
Are we, today, experiencing climate change caused by human interference with nature?
Or are we experiencing the climate in a natural change that has happened before?
Or is the reality more complex? And how? And do we still have a responsibility as human beings on earth?
We put solid frozen attitudes and ways of perceiving the world in motion.
We create cultural, sensual and professional insight into the theme about changes in the nature
and its importance to us as human beings on earth.
The ice in the Arctic and the North is in flux. What happens to human consciousness
when there are breaks in the exterior, in nature? How are we affected as a part of a whole in movement?
How do we respond? How do we listen? And how do we answer?
Singing Our Place is about being human in a place, to be associated or not associated with nature;
nature in your body and nature around you. It is about responsiveness, of inclusiveness and hospitality or the opposite,
and about the relationship between the wild nature and the rational civilization - in ourselves and in our society.
With Singing Our Place we invite you to an open and diverse dialogue between people in the North.
We bring the voices and the resonance of the people and nature around different places in Scandinavia.
Denmark 2015
Teater Viva created two work-in-progress performances in Denmark in January 2015
(Det frie Felts Festival in København) and in May (Åbne Scene Aarhus).
The starting point for the performances in Denmark were themes such as:
property, who owns nature, fences and boundaries, the wild and the civilized, hospitality and inhospitality
and the question: in the future equal for all? Or will only the most privileged survive?
Frame Story: A place in Europe in a not too distant future is a luxury camp for privileged climate refugees.
Here, the lucky ones seek refuge while the outside world crumbles.
Hurricanes ravage through the land and the less privileged die on the run.
The audience became a part of the climate refugees in the camp and met among others a woman
who was asleep in his own waste, a foreign minister which was obsessed with the North Pole,
a bear, tense camp hosts who tried to keep up the spirit while mayhem rages outside,
a moose, singing female whales, a disaster-lover, melting ice dripping like lounge music and a Völva with ominous offers.
The performance operates with a montage of physical choreography, lyrics, stories, music,
voice portraits and soundscapes that are very characteristic to Teater Viva.
Durration: 75 minutes.
Starring: Katrine Faber, Lotus Lykke Skov, Trine Sørensen og Aksel Striim.
Big thanks to the contributors to the sound installation in Denmark:
Senior Researcher Rasmus Ejrnæs
Whale researcher Outi Maria Tervo
Musician Eerli Nukannguaq
Philosopher Ole Fogh Kirkeby
Children from Aarhus Friskole