Text: The International
Pictures: CPH STAGE
An open theatre festival focusing on Danish Performing Arts: where it's at and where it's heading, and it all begins 27 May – 5 June 2021! CPH STAGE presents its seventh festival with a wide reaching festival programme ranging from performances at The Royal Danish Theatre to the newest discoveries.
From 27 May – 5 June, CPH STAGE brings the public and the theatre world together to celebrate the achievements of contemporary theatre and performing arts. CPH STAGE is the biggest theatre festival in Copenhagen. It presents both Danish and international performing artists, and it's always been a high priority at CPH STAGE to make the festival accessible to both local and international audiences.
With 37 English and Non-verbal performances during the festival, showcasing performers worldwide creates a festival with vibrant diversity! We have chosen to highlight 15 performances, but you can also go to their website www.cphstage.dk to see what else is on their programme.
29 MAY – 1 JUNE
SUN & SEA (Opera)
By Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė
Picture credit: Andrej Vasilenko
Imagine a beach – you watching from above – the burning sun, bright bathing suits, people reading, children playing with plastic toys. Then a chorus of songs: familiar songs, songs of almost nothing. And below them: the slow creaking of an exhausted Earth, a gasp.
Venue: Copenhagen Contemporary
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/sun-sea/
*Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
2–3 JUNE
WALK-MAN (Motion)
By Don Gnu
Picture credit: Christoffer Brekne
You will never cross the street in the same way again. DON GNU digs into the tediousness of everyday life, searching for poetry and humour in a performance with muscular physicality and edgy stunts.
Venue: Teater V
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/walk-man-2/
27 MAY – 5 JUNE
SOUTHERN BEDFELLOWS (Drama)
By Down the rabbit hole
Picture credit: Down the Rabbit Hole
Southern Bedfellows follows two non-binary children as they grow up in the American South, exploring themes such as sexuality, gender, poverty and religion. The play takes us on a journey through their 16-year relationship, where the sparks fly, and the characters are challenged on their identity and willingness to be together.
Venue: Bøssehuset
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/southern-bedfellows/
1–5 JUNE
MY DEER HUNTER (Theatre)
By Betty Nansen/Fix&Foxy
Picture credit: Søren Meisner
A group of veterans tell their story of returning to daily life. They suffer from PTSD caused by fatal experiences that have forever changed them. Inspired by the film Deer hunter, Fix&Foxy asks four veterans to go back in time and revisit the crucial, defining moments to recreate the life that once was. We watch them struggle with shame and lack of confidence while they fight their way back into the world.
Venue: Edison Scenen
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/my-deer-hunter-2/
27–30 MAY
1984: BACK TO NO FUTURE (Performance)
By Gob Squad
Picture credit: Gob Squad
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. The internationally acclaimed art collective Gob Squad is now coming to Denmark. It’s 1984, and the Cold War is in full swing. The Americans have invented a powerful new weapon: the music video. Gob Squad travel back in time to confront themselves as teenagers, the principal targets of this media revolution. They find themselves fearful of nuclear war, enthralled by pop videos, uncertain of who they might become. As the performers remember themselves and reconstruct the media fantasies of that time, they also start to dismantle what may have been written into the programming code underlying this colourful world of commercial pop. Can they re-programme their own story?
Venue: Sort/Hvid
30 MAY – 2 JUNE
WHAT WAS MUST DIE – SAMBA (Dance)
By Uppercut Danseteater
Picture credit: Badi Berber
Welcome to the blood-red arena. Welcome to the blood-red imagination of the porker! A samba arena, show ring, hotbed, a pigsty. A circus of festivities, fellowships, secrets and seduction. SAMBA is raw, urban, pulsates, sensual, and is dastardly deeds and connectedness. SAMBA is everything that arises in the space between us and gets under our skin, behind our masks, and into the ring. It embodies and makes space for everything we are. Nothing is clear-cut: not the cutest piglet or the hunkiest boar. With our snouts in the trough and our tails in the air, we will grub deep into the mire and hurl ourselves into the human fellowship with its misunderstandings, compromises and balancing acts.
Venue: Dansekapellet
28 MAY – 5 JUNE
TWO LIONS AND A CASTLE (Opera)
By Danish Dancetheatre
Picture credit: Raphael Frisenvænge Solholm
A desperate mermaid woman galloping in slow motion, silly songs and Spanish rhythms.
Two Lions and a Castle is a new work by Israeli choreographer Roy Assaf. A master of combining the outlandish with the serious. In his first work for Danish Dance Theatre, we meet several wacky characters in a collage of satirical vignettes drawn from Assaf’s personal experiences of encountering Denmark and Danishness. Roy Assaf describes dance as a ‘filter’ to his own internal world. His approach to his choreographic practice is intuitive. The work is created as an exchange between the dancers and himself. This method is built on mutual trust between the dancers and the choreographer and is crucial to exchange creative ideas.
Venue: The Opera - The Royal Danish Theatre
3–4 JUNE
NECROPOLIS (Performance)
By Theatre de la Ville
Picture credit: Institut des Croisements
A mapping of a human catastrophe. NECROPOLIS explores one of the biggest human catastrophes of our time: the deaths of thousands of migrants who have lost their lives in an attempt to reach Europe. In this performance lecture, the Israeli-Belarusian artist Arkadi Zaides seeks to map out a digital archive, a virtual city of the dead entitled NECROPOLIS. As drone pilots, the performers take the audience on a death trip via Google Maps, zooming in on the many graves spread all over Europe. In this way, the project insists on the right for the dead to be identified and laid to rest. At the same time poses the question: what is our notion of collective responsibility?
Venue: Sort/Hvid
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/necropolis/
27 MAY – 5 JUNE
RE(W)RITE! (Performance)
By Cantabile 2
Picture credit: Irina Tuminene
Celebrating human connection. What rituals do we miss in our lives today? How can we celebrate the connection to each other across political, religious and moral beliefs? Re(w)Rite! creates a Temple for our Time at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. It is an immersive performance, a ritual universe, an immersive space where guests are taken on a multisensory personal journey. It plays at different times of the day, from early morning to night-long experiences. Each performance is a unique composition of 50 different contemporary rituals.
Venue: Den Frie Udstillingsbygning
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/rewrite/
1–4 JUNE
CHAMPIONS (Performance)
By Himherandit Productions
Picture credit: Christoffer Brekne
An emotional performance installation. Champions is an emotional performance installation that deals with universal parent-child relations, loneliness and individual resilience. The performance features the interview recordings of the artist’s father, mother and conversations with his therapist. Andreas Constantinou faces the audience while a personal story of a strained relationship between a gay man, his homophobic father, a stern mother, and a lonely individual is revealed. The installation is being interrupted by voices on the radio, TV, and gramophone in the room, and the walls suddenly change to a wrestling battle of violence and intimacy between two men. The images tell of a subconscious battle within the self.
Venue: Edison Scenen
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/champions/
28 MAY – 1 JUNE
HAIL TO THE GOOD LISTENER (Dance)
By Danish Dancetheatre
Picture credit: Guido Mencari
A new ensemble work created by choreographer Marie Topp. Five women move in a meditative-like ’slow-motion’ choreography. Time stands still. The dancers are rocks and water, they change and, in turn, are changed by their surroundings. The five women are fixed, they float – in a field of tension of resistance and surrender. Collectively, they lean towards a shared past. They create space for change.
Venue: The Opera – The Royal Danish Theatre
27 MAY – 5 JUNE
OCEAN (Dance)
By MYKA
Picture credit: Morten Arnfred
In a sea full of plastic, we dive into a future sci-fi wave of hope for babies of 3-7 months and their adults. Give yourself and your baby a magical and poetic underwater journey on the bottom of the ocean. Experience how the weightlessness of the sea makes time stand still. Where past and future merge in a utopian universe and in a new wave that moves future generations into the unknown. Here we meet sea plants, luminescent deep-sea creatures and plastic in a new and improved ecosystem. Maybe the octopus can teach us something new about ourselves? Feel the light and sound wash over you like waves on a beach.
Venue: Teater Får302
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/ocean/
27 MAY – 5 JUNE
TOYS OF JOYLESSNESS OR DISTURBANCE & DEBILITY (Performance)
By Live Art Denmark
Picture credit: Otmar Wagner
The Vienna based artist Otmar Wagner has since the 1990’s worked with Europe as a construct; a political, cultural, and physical body. A place divided by walls, penetrated by circuits and political disease. Wagner set up the room as a living body where energies flow. As within a physical body, the materials are animated and transformed in circulatory systems. Friisland art gallery is transformed into this installation for 3 weeks, and you can experience Wagners performing within the installation with VR headsets - one audience at a time.
Venue: Friisland art gallery
27 MAY – 2 JUNE
JOB - A SIMPLE MAN (Drama)
By Off Off Production
Picture credit: Ea Verdoner
A story of an immigrant’s journey from the old world to the new. In an intense and musical dramatisation, J O B tells the emigrant’s journey from the old world – a tiny village in Russia – to the new world in Manhattan, New York. Mendel Singer loses everything and ultimately experiences a miracle. A timely story of encountering a new culture, new life – in a new world. Adapted from Joseph Roth’s novel. A powerful performance in a simple set-up, where music and theatre meet storytelling with award-winning actress Ina-Miriam Rosenbaum in every role.
Venue: Bådteatret
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/job-a-simple-man/
2–4 JUNE
THE LETTER (Theatre)
By Paolo Nani Teater
Picture credit: Gabriele Zucca
Sparkling study in style, creativity and timing. Since 1992, THE LETTER has been performed throughout the four corners of the world. So far, it has been performed over 1500 times in 40 countries. It is already a classic that continues attracting audiences of all ages. Paolo Nani, alone on stage, with props that can be held in a suitcase and without saying a word, brings a simple story to life, playing in 15 different versions: forward, backward, with surprises, in a vulgar way, drunk, as in a western – horror or silent movie, like a circus act. THE LETTER is a sparkling study in style, creativity and timing, filled with details and gags from start to end, provoking constant bursts of laughter from the audience.
Venue: Riddersalen
For more info: https://www.cphstage.dk/en/performance/the-letter-4/
To see what other performances are on offer, you can always visit www.cphstage.dk for more information.
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