PERFORMING ARTS
Barents Spektakel would not be complete without a healthy selection of the performing arts within its programme. From spooky midnight gatherings, to therapeutic courses to help you get a good night’s sleep, to alternative bus tours, theatre that takes place in the intimacy of ordinary homes, as well as sweaty sauna sessions and critically acclaimed experimental audiovisual performances, the results cover an entire spectrum of memorable experience.
Verdensteatret presents Trust me tomorrow, a show that takes an entrypoint in blindness from both a lack of light and too much light. A floating composition ranging from the quiet, elegant and introspective to a disturbed and fuzzy mindscape. An occurrence sequence staged in a calm room. Seeking to reveal an alternative time. The work is a sensorial and diffracted experience where rendering is happening between the actual space and memory. It speaks to the ability or failure to get into each other’s heads. So it speaks to self-consciousness, subconsciousness and other consciousnesses. Trying to find the railing, a guide, something to orientate by in the groping darkness. In a world that is folding back into itself.
With a clear resonance with this year's festival theme, Pikene på Broen are delighted to welcome Verdensteatret to perform for the first time in Kirkenes!
Witch Club Satan is a neo-feminist black metal performance in 4 acts. It is a musical, dramatic ritual of unknown effect. Witch Club Satan will awaken within you the primal scream that has been building up inside us, and together we will transform. The goal is simple – you will never be the same again.
Evoking the ghosts of mining past, during Barents Spektakel 2023 this special show will take place in the unique industrial setting of Lokstallen - the old locomotive repair station for the Sydvaranger’s railway line. Witch Club Satan is a concert, a theatre performance, a high mass service, and a climate summit. You don't come here to sit back, but trust that the witches want you and the world to be well, and that the time we have together will be a profound celebration.
TBA G (Linn Haldrup Lorenzen and Per Magnus Barlaug) present ZøvnZaun - an interactive theatre performance about the loss of sleep. The performance deals with sleep deprivation as a symptom of a modern society which is demanding that we are available and productive 24/7. At the same time, ZøvnZaun explores having control and giving up control in an uncontrollable control-obsessed society. With help from audiovisual and vibrating elements, the performance raises questions about society’s capitalisation on our health.
Pauliina Feodoroff presents Steer the way, Njâuddam - a guided bus tour into invisibilities. It introduces the places, families and routes mapped by the lands and waters but missed by the Norwegian guideposts. We will be visiting the Njauddâm siida and hear some loose-end stories of its neighbours Paaččjokk and Suõ'nn'jel siidas. Hosted by Pauliina Feodoroff on her family lands. Snacks and grievances will be served.
Steer the way, Njâuddam takes place on Sunday 26. February as part of the "B2B: From the Baltic to the Barents Sea" artistic research project, co-curated by Pikene på Broen and Baltic Circle festival (Helsinki) and supported by Nordisk Kulturfond. Tickets are limited, and will be sold as a package. Includes food, drinks, travel, and sauna.
Pia Lindman introduces And then there are silences that speak of something else, still there: A work that is based on the treatments given to people in Sør-Varanger in January 2023 and the artist’s engagement with the “subsensorial”. During the event, performative conversations will be exchanged inside a 70-seater sauna in the village of Bugøynes. Saunas are fermenters and redistributors of relations for both human and more-than-human communities, and this collective performance will be an invitation to start an embodied sharing and process of learning to care differently.
And then there are silences that speak of something else, still there will take place on Sunday 26. February as part of the "B2B: From the Baltic to the Barents Sea" artistic research project, co-curated by Pikene på Broen and Baltic Circle festival (Helsinki) and supported by Nordisk Kulturfond. Tickets are limited, and will be sold as a package. Includes food, drinks, travel, and sauna.
Home Theatre
In cooperation with the Theatre of resistance platform that unites Russian theatre artists against the war in Ukraine, Pikene will stage several theatre performances in private homes in Kirkenes, as well as in other festival satellite towns. Our homes are considered safe places - a territory with doors and windows as borders. Imagine a theatre company doing a performance in your home, or going to a stranger’s home to watch a performance. It is in many ways an exercise of TRUST.
Through the performances, stories will be shared from a female researcher in the Arctic, argue with “The Propaganda Machine”, read letters to FSB officers, find out how corridors are important for communication, learn about a father that took part in the Chechen war and study the Russian-Norwegian “Moja på Tvoja”.
Moja på Tvoja
Moja på Tvoja is part of the Barents Spektakel series of Home theater performances, taking place in private homes in Kirkenes, this performance takes place - potentially - in your own, digitally via Zoom. Performers: Ksenia Meri - theater and film actress, in 2013 graduated from Russian State University of Cinematography. Runa Sætervoll - contemporary dancer and performer, Samovar Theater, Kirkenes.
To the FSB Officers Who Attended My Events
Open room between 17:00 - 20:00
No ticket needed
Adress: Klavenessgate 4
What happens when an authoritarian state comes to your art venue blending with theaudience? Do you censor yourself, set a trap, or see a potential for communication? To the FSB Officers Who Attended My Events is an immersive installation that tells the story of Barents Spektakel venue that opened in Saint Petersburg in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. It explores the experiences of independent Russian artists and organizers, challenges the notion of safe spaces and addresses the fact that Russian security agents are regulars at certain artistic occasions.
Author: К., social researcher, curator, Saint Petersburg, in collaboration with artists and organizers from Saint Petersburg and Murmansk. The Home Theatre series is organized in cooperation with the platform Theatre of resistance that unites Russian theater artists against the war in Ukraine.
