Sensuous operate in the intersection of performance art, research, activism and curation.

In Sensuous we share our visions on what we term a Sensuous society. A vision, or rather a sense, that has been haunting us in our sleep for times and times... Sensuous society

Roskilde Festival

We curate the performance program of the Roskilde festival and have done so since 2013. Below our curatorial intentions and presented performance work since then.

2017

2017 will be the last year that we curate the performance art program at the Roskilde Festival for now. In line with our deep intention to present and unfold the potential of immersive and interactive performance art pieces at the festival we have invited the pioneer performance group Cantabile2 to present their work this year.
The immersive and interactive performance tradition allows for sensuous, poetic and intimate human encounters in the midst of the wild landscape of the festival site and thus, open other mdoes of being and being together.
Cantabile2 will present an original piece – Love Shacks. Inspired by old computer games each participant is led through a series of spaces inhabited by performers who will lead them deeper into the world and potential of human encounters – Also when they are mysterious and unpredictable.

2016

Performance Music Dialogues is a series of performance-interviews, an experiment and a new format, where performance curator at Roskilde Festival Gry Worre Hallberg (DK) and performance-artist Melanie Jame Wolf (DE/AU) interview chosen musicians in an otherworldly frame. It is a sensuous-poetic experiment which investigates how music and art can meet and create closeness between the participants. The purpose of the format is to strengthen the collaboration between music and art at the festival and to create a meaningful dialogue for both musicians and audience.

2015

The performance art at Roskilde festival 15 will zoom in completely. On the smallest part of the essence of performance art – the encounter. Performance art facilitates ’an sich’ a frame for new encounters, for the exploration of new ways of being and being together – to interact on the premise of another universe.

In 2013 and 2014 we chose to present large-scale interactive and immersive pieces, to present the unique otherworldly and intimate potential of this tradition – in The Velvet State, where the performance programme was merged in 2013, one could meet the citizens in a potential more sensuous future, and within this frame a long series of other curated pieces. In 2014 four performance groups explored the essence of sensuousness in The Performance Sense Laboratory.

The Dwelling #2 – Please be here now – Meet me here now (DK)

In 2015 you can meet the performance artist Nana Francisca Schottländer (DK) in her piece – The Dwelling. The Dwelling premiered in Mads Nørgaard’s shop window in Strøget earlier this spring:

“With a real, vulnerable and non-manipulated body the performer gives the spectator the momentary option of a different bodily experience, the situation becoming a possible entrance into a shared moment.” – pleasebeherenow.dk

At Roskilde festival 2015 the exploration continues, where Dwelling #2 – Meet me here now manifests. A 69 hours life research laboratory on The Encounter. In a busy passage outside the main areas you will meet Nana-Francisca and her pure exploration of the encounter – The encounter always depending on the context. Asking questions such as – How can we meet in a site as the festival?

Performance-music dialogues (AUS/DE, DK)

The focus is also put on the encounter, through performance artistic tools, in the big Dreamcatcher by the polish art collective Senna (PL) by the new Rising scene. The Dreamcatcher will serve as a new meeting place, an updated local hall of sorts, which in it self has a sensuousness and poetry. The focus will be on ’change’ – Fx how we can create change though our art.

In this construction unique conversations will take place this year between performance artists and musicians. We have wanted to merge the music and art programme to a greater extend through the art programme for a long time, and this is a beautiful and great step on that path on which we step towards this meeting.

I will as a performance curator step into my poetic self as The Sister (DK) and together with The Link, Sisters Hope (DK) and Melanie Jame Wolf from Savage Amusement (AUS/DE) manifest performance dialogues with chosen musicians from Rising – The Entrepreneurs and The Attic Sleepers. During the dialogue the inner Dreamcather will transform to an otherworldly, immersive, intimate universe, where the sensuous and poetic plays the main part. How does this affect the dialogue? The encounter. The encounter between performance art, music and architecture and the encounter between people – the smallest part of performance art.

http://sensuous.dk/?p=1170

By Gry Worre Hallberg

Photos: Dwelling #2. Photo: Sara GangstedPerformance-music dialouges by Melanie Jame Wolf of Savage Amusement and Gry Worre Hallberg, performance curator at the Roskilde festival in the shape of The Sister of Sisters Hope. Photos from left: Alexander Coggin and Diana Lindhardt/The I of Sisters Academy.

2014

Curatorial intentions, Performance art, Art Zone, Roskilde festival 2014.

Gry Worre Hallberg,

Curator, performance
Roskilde festival


PERFORMANCE SENSE LABORATORY

ART ZONE, PERFORMANCE

ROSKILDE FESTIVAL 2014

Performance Sense Laboratory
The performance-program of Roskilde Festival 2014 focuses on how to activate the sensuous through different, yet related, performance-artistic approaches which all subscribe to an interactive and immersive performance art tradition. In a symphony of installed, intimate parallel-universal rooms, the performance artists Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (DK), Savage Amusement (AU/DE), Sisters Hope (DK) and Kata Halasz (UK) will explore how to evoke the sensuous and poetic mode of being and being together in the otherworldly space. Performers in the shape of Evokers will be present to initiate and facilitate the journey of the festival participants, who will be greeted as Human Research Objects, through Performance Sense Laboratory. Lighting artists from UngtLys create the light staging of Performance Sense Laboratory.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (DK):

In the Performance Sense Laboratory Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (DK) explores the sensuous through the performance pieces Mobile Mirrors, where live mirroring sculptures mingle with the guests and Skin Stripping, where the performer is wearing many layers of clothes made of imitated snake skin. Through her dance the performer removes the layers of skin, or identities, and explores the limits of intimacy with the guests.

More info at:
www.lilibethcuenca.com

Savage Amusement (AUS/DE):

In the Performance Sense Laboratory Savage Amusement will seek to activate sensuousness by immersing and inviting visitors into spaces created within layers of textured sound and fleeting touch which recall and remind us of the animal we dream of. Within two spaces – one under the spotlight and one in the nest – they will create a space of reflective wildness, a site of play within the terrain of anima and animus, a little petting zoo for animal dreaming. Feather, fur, call and chime will combine to realize the skin, the sight and the sound of totemic possibility.

More info at:
www.savage-amusement.com

Sisters Hope (DK):

The exploration and activation of more sensuous and poetic modes of being and thinking is already at the core of the work of Sisters Hope who has recently specifically explored how to evoke this within the educational system, in order to explore a potential future school of a more sensuous society. The Performance Sense Laboratory you will be able to meet The Sisters, The Protector of the Archive, The School Nurse manifest as The Medicine Woman and The Shape-shifter, The I, Yndlingen and the The S who all activate, explore and unfold the sensuous in their own poetic way in a close interactive exchange with the festival participants. Set-design by The Hands.

More info at:
www.sistershope.dk
www.sistersacademy.dk

Katalin Halasz (UK):

In The Performance Sense Laboratory Kata Halasz working in the intersection of art and research will activate The Champer of White in which the potential of the senses and emotions are opened up to connect with the participants, affect them and transmit layers of situations, gestures and encounters with the embodied experience of whiteness, the whiteness of our skin, of our being in the world. A visual and sensual space, The Champer of White is a room of reflection and sensitization to our feelings we radiate in our everyday performance of our race and gender.

More info at:
http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/KataHalasz

******
Set-design: Rhoda ting, Alberte Laursen Rothenborg, Ayo Villum Krogh and Connor Parks

Evokers: Sunniva Løvland Byvard, Dennis Haladyn, Andreas Sølvhøi, Lasse Daugaard Bentzen, Nicholas Halalle Zurita, Fie Fri Nielsen, Erik Rask, Linn Haldrup Lorenzen, Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen aka Triangle Lover, Sound Goddess

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2014

In 2013 the program manifested as The Velvet State.

In Art Zone at Roskilde festival 2013 you would find the major construction The Velvet State. The Velvet State is a large-scale interactive performance-universe developed in an ongoing dialog between performers and architects. The performance part is developed in a dialog between the immersive performance groups Fiction Pimps (DK) and Collective Unconscious (UK). The concept and design behind the structure is the architect Simon Hjermind Jensen of SHJWORKS. The performance of The Velvet State was based in the interactive concept of ‘maintenance’. We worked to involve the festival participants in exploring how eleven different kinds of interactions and ritualized actions could maintain eleven different sensuous modes of being. These ‘beings’ classified as the so-called ‘aesthetic archetypes’, we had constructed after locating some of the personalities, that are typically enhanced and allowed within an artistic frame. Furthermore it functions as a sensuous and dreamy framework for a series of performance acts amongst other performance concerts by Dorit Chrysler and Baby Dee (US), Nielsen Sisters (DK), Tantra clap (DK), intervening performance protest by Triangle Project (US, Cairo, DK) and Voina (RU), performance dance acts curated by Sarah Armstrong – Simulacrum by Kimatica (UK) and Solo/No Title by Emilie Fehrn-Christensen (DK), performances by Anna Petri featuring Ramona Macho and Diana Tørsløv Møller and soundmachines by Florinn B. (DE).

Credits:
Performance concept: Fiction Pimps & Collective Unconsious
Architecture and construction: SHJ-works.
Directed by Inga Gerne Nielsen.

Cast / Archetypes & Maintainters:
Oskar Larsson / Klara Utke Acs / Nina Sigurd / Simon Gents / Trine Mee Sook Gleerup / Blå Stenback / Asbjørn Krogh Nissen / Saga Dorslind
Michael Jonsson / Rebekka Elisabeth / Rasmus Knutzen Nielsen / Sarah Kamille Amininejad Teilbrand / Hanne Westerberg / Flemming Ottsen,
Alastair James Flindall / Christian Gade Bjerrum / Julia M Hagström /
Lenika Hesse / Andreas Ingefjord / Madeleïne Käte / Sara Eddie Östebro,
Victor Nuno / Mark Ellis / Karin Dam Nordlund / Sarah Lhhi / Sune Bjørnvig / John Salquistmouvitz / My Nilsson / Inga Gerner Nielsen

Sound scape:
Madeleine Kate
Victor Nuno
David Eversevers

Scenography:
Charlotte Boyte
Rhoda Ting
Rasha Mallek
Beth Louise
Ray Roa

Costume:
Valeriya Olkhova
Alberte Laursen Rothenborg

Performing guests in The Velvet State:
Dorit Chrysler and Baby Dee (US)
Nielsen Sisters (DK)
Tantra clap (DK)
Triangle Project (US, Cairo, DK)
Voina (RU)
Simulacrum by Kimatica (UK) and Solo/No Title by Emilie Fehrn-Christensen (DK) curated by Sarah Armstrong (DK)
Anna Petri (DK) feat, Ramona Macho and Diana Tørsløv Møller (DK) Florinn B. (DE)

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