Balder’s father disowns him and kicks him out of his childhood home. Balder must pack his lute and some few belongings and go to the big city. Within the walls, the king, and the bishop reign. Balder cannot find work and is hungry and desperate, but then a curtain is drawn aside, and he sees the beautiful princess. Balder sits down and plays romantic tunes; the princess hears him, and they fall head over heels in love.
The next day, there is a knight tournament. The prize is the princess and half the kingdom, but first a fearsome dragon must be defeated. The tournament’s winner, Sct. Niels, chooses Balder as his squire, and soon Balder is on his way to slay the dragon…
INFO
Duration: 1 hour
Age: From 6 years
Two clowns are waiting for a bus. One is a bit lost and confused, the other in a hurry and impatient. They discover something – is it a billboard? a vending machine? artificial intelligence? or a virtual world …? Driven by curiosity, they are drawn into the screen and actions unfold somewhere between the physical world and the virtual. Meanwhile, their distinct individual personalities create peculiar interactions and mesmerizing musical performances.
Without words but with plenty of technical and physical precission and a contageous clownesque humour, set in a “timeless” retro-futuristic universe, inspired by silent movies.
INFO
Duration: 50 min.
Age: From 4 years
A humble musical band organizes burial ceremonies, but this time the priest and the deceased never arrive. The trio shares an uncomfortable and disastrous waiting with the relatives. With trumpet, euphonium and marching drums, the trio transforms a dramatic situation into a comedy of accidents and takes the opportunity to make us laugh at life. And death.
INFO
Duration: 50 min.
The performance is always adapted site-specific and is designed to be performed by local performers in a busy public space, using a simple, yet complex collective choreography of sound and movement.
DO YOU WANT TO BE A PART OF THE WORKSHOP & PERFORMANCE? MORE INFO BELOW
READ MORE UNDER WHAT DOES IT INVOLVE?
„The key of the piece is the spot on dramaturgy – how it generates doubt and curiosity in the audience and then how it creates surprises. (…) It takes some time until we realise how the piece invisibly changes our relation to the space, each other and ourselves.” Králl Csaba, Élet és Irodalom
During the piece, twenty performers move along concealed pathways carrying portable speakers that each play one layer of a composition, enveloping the public setting in a mesmerising aural sphere.
As the sound sources are completely hidden from the audience, it’s the spatial movement of these subtle, continuous tones that gradually unravel the piece’s choreography – and morphing the public space into something that is about more than solely transit.
These layers of interaction between performers, audience and passersby create a playful, intense presence at a large, busy public space. At the same time the constantly moving surround composition and the emerging organic choreography create a hypnotizing and unique audio-visual performance experience, for both participants and audiences.
It promises delights of Heaven on Earth but acknowledges that every Utopian possibility has a Dystopian result… A hilarious mashup of ludicrous promises and fatuous plans, experience the withering slabs of realism that the ideals of Utopianism fail to acknowledge.
A participatory, theatrical experience, co-created in local workshops in Helsingør.
The performance moves through 5 different Utopias, hosted by the right, honorable Dr YaYa, benevolent dictator and natural leader, who was discovered as a discarded baby in the reedy marshes of Lake Titicaca in Peru.
His small enthusiastic squad of young ‘Thought Police’ patrol the surrounding streets checking on passing people’s minds…
The 5 different Utopias
ARCADIA: Et in Arcadia Ego – even in Paradise there is Death. The idyllic utopian timeless vision of unspoiled wilderness. A worldly Shepherdess with some humanoid sheep.
AVALON: An up-to-date, Monty Python’sk take on The Knights of the Round Table and the Saviour Complex
SHANGRI-YAYA: Dr YaYa’s wild cabaret. Starring Dr YaYa.
YOUTOPIA: Lady YaYa guides a blindfolded audience on a Journey to Your Inner Space, a self-realisation with poignant music.
HOPELAND: Word games, graffiti wall, prizes, gifts and hopeful speeches.
You will exit in contentment, older, wiser and refreshed.
INFO
Duration: 60 min.
Age: From 12 years
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
TICKET PERFORMANCE
Click the TICKET icon to the right: next to TIME + LOCATION or buy a festival-wristband and get free tickets to all ticket-performances. There are different categories of wristbands – for families or individuals. READ MORE and buy PASSAGE FESTIVAL WRISTBAND HERE.
„The key of the piece is the spot on dramaturgy – how it generates doubt and curiosity in the audience and then how it creates surprises. (…) It takes some time until we realise how the piece invisibly changes our relation to the space, each other and ourselves.” Králl Csaba, Élet és Irodalom
Twenty performers move along concealed pathways carrying portable speakers that each play one layer of a composition, enveloping the public setting in a mesmerising aural sphere.
As the sound sources are completely hidden from the audience, it’s the spatial movement of these subtle, continuous tones that gradually unravel the piece’s choreography – and morphing the public space into something that is about more than solely transit.
These layers of interaction between performers, audience and passersby create a playful, intense presence at a large, busy public space. At the same time the constantly moving surround composition and the emerging organic choreography create a hypnotizing and unique audio-visual performance experience, for both participants and audiences.
INFO
Duration: 35 min.
Age: From 6 years
TICKET PERFORMANCE
Click the TICKET icon to the right: next to TIME + LOCATION or buy a festival-wristband and get free tickets to all ticket-performances. There are different categories of wristbands – for families or individuals. READ MORE and buy PASSAGE FESTIVAL WRISTBAND HERE.
Join the newly formed performance company Kajen Company (SE) in their artistic residency in Helsingør
Drawing inspiration and materials from natural environments, Benjamin Black, Tara Jerome-Benabè and Santiago Ruiz invites you to join them by the sea in Hornbæk Plantage for a public showing of their artistic work during their residency in Helsingør.
Benjamin is a musician and sound artist, Tara a fine artist/composer working with natural materials, while Santiago is a physical performer, inspired by his surroundings.
Together they are working on a locally inspired performance, drawing their inspiration from the sea and forest. This is a work-in-progress demo of their time at this part of the residency.
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This residency is a part of the EU funded Green Streets of Europe project (2023-2025), where artists and festivals join forces in exploring and developing new and more sustainable modes of both producing and touring international performance art, with a strong focus on creating local relations between artists and our festivals’ local communities
This first 10 day residency runs from 20-31 May 2024 for two artistic companies; Kajen (SE) and Krista Burãne (LV)
The partners are PASSAGE Festival, Imaginarius Festival (PT), KoresponDance Festival (CZ) and Spancirfest (HR)
Krista Burāne will read letters from Linden trees in Riga, Latvia, to the trees at Wiibroe Plads.
The place, Krista has selected for this is not a random selection:
From Wiibroe Plads, there is a panoramic view of Kongekajen, where the biofuels, in terms of wood chips, that Forsyning Helsingør uses as fuel for our heating systems, is landed. 37 % of Denmark’s biofuel comes from Latvia and Estonia.
As far as we in Denmark are concerned, this is a sustainable heating ressource.
However, Krista Burāne points out, in Latvia, legal amendments have been made on forest cutting, that enforces the ability to forest cutting, rather than protecting the country’s biologically diverse and old forests.
In legal texts in Latvia, trees are regarded solely as cubic meters that bring economic benefit, and as such they are given a relatively high price but little value. The consequence of such an attitude is the very poor and endangered state of nature’s health in Latvia, as evidenced by the data of the Natural Register.
The letters from the Latvian trees were written during a participatory performance, Krista created earlier this May in Riga, Latvia, in the linden avenue of Brīvibas (Freedom) street in front of the Cabinet of Ministers.
More than 130 participants gathered by the 136 linden trees in the avenue, each selecting a tree to devote an hour of their time and attention to the trees, as a public gesture that expresses interest and care for the life of a tree; reading and playing music to them, dancing with them and engaging in conversations.
After interacting with the trees, each participant then recorded the possible reactions and responses of the tree in a letter from the tree. At the end, all the participants branched off in a chain in front of the Cabinet of Ministers in Riga, reminding of The Baltic Way*, only this time in the name of the permanence of nature.
In Helsingør too, Conversations with trees, will be participatory event: everyone is welcome to bring a text, you would like to read for 10 minutes to the trees. An invitation to join Burāne , as she reads the greetings and messages from from the Latvian Linden trees to their Danish relatives.
Linden tree letter from Riga
”I have experienced a lot, but there is little I would want to highlight because this day is more special to me than anything I have experienced so far. You have come directly to me, you just came, you didn’t walk past or through, you are not raking leaves, mowing the grass, or cutting branches – you came to me just like that, to talk, to listen, to say thank you, and to hug. I am happy right now. I truly know what love is, I have experienced it. I have many wounds and scars that are still healing, but this day allows most of my scars, most of the injustices, to heal. Now I will again wait in silence, loving, dreaming, and listening, but above all, believing with hope that someone might come to me just like that.”
*The Baltic Way
or Baltic Chain was a peaceful political demonstration that occurred on 23 August 1989. Approximately two million people joined their hands to form a human chain spanning 690 kilometres across the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which at the time were occupied and annexed by the USSR and had a combined population of approximately eight million.[2] The central government in Moscow considered the three Baltic countries constituent republics of the Soviet Union.
BENCHED is a brutally honest bodily tale about life’s big and very small questions. About settling down. About daring to sit in opposition, about sitting cross legged, about being sat, put off or benched. About taking, creating, and giving space, and preferably remembering to do so before falling on your ass where the bench ends.
A crudehonest story about life’s big and small questions. About settling down. About daring to sit askew, about sitting cross-legged, about being put down, put off or benched. About taking, creating, and giving space, and preferably remembering to do so before you fall on your ass where the bench ends.
INFO
Duration: 45 min
Through an ongoing performance, unexplained encounters may take you on a walk along the border of the unusual and the unbelievable.
When was the last time you stopped to truly observe the world around you? How long has it been since you spoke to your neighbour, talked to a merchant or that same person whose eyes you cross every day on the street?
By creating what may seem a mundane daily experience, far from any artistic creation, our performance is accessible to all citizens present in a specific area. The mundane daily experience is distorted, pushing the frontier of what’s normal and what’s not, walking along the border that separates the believable from the unbelievable.
If you are receptive and open, the theatrical reality may come to light to you some time after the encounter.
We shall push the boundaries of the audience’s perspective and bring dialogue in the public space.
Keep your ears open and raise your eyes from your smartphones, an atypical meeting may be waiting for you around the corner…