Glacial landscape comes alive through dance

Enchantingly beautiful, imaginative, poetic, humorous and precisely choreographed were attributes with which critics praised Tina TarpgaardÂ’s Frost when it premiered in October 2009. The piece was choreographed for Dansk Danseteater whose dancers also perform FrostÂ’s revival in Dansehallerne this autumn.

After its premiere Frost won the prestigious Reumert Performing Arts Award for the year’s best dance performance. “Dancers don’t tend to resemble young

polar bears. Just as the stage floor doesn’t usually resemble ice floes,” noted the jury. “But that’s how it was in Frost. And the dancers got wet paws, while the glacial poetry melted into this season’s most beautiful waltz.”

The 39 year-old choreographer Tarpgaard was educated in both classical ballet and modern dance at the Swiss Rudra-Béjart School and the Rambert School in England. She is a founding member of the Copenhagen-based Recoil Performance Group. Together with a composer, Tarpgaard established the group in 2003 to facilitate collaborations between different art forms. For Frost, as for other recent works, Tarpgaard has focused on the meeting between dance and digital visual art and worked with the ‘software artists’ Ole Kristensen and Jonas Jongejan.

“Through dance, live video and electronic sound”, it is the Recoil group’s declared aim to create performances that “explore technology as an equal and interactive partner to the performing artist”.

“We work with tracking technology and the intricacies of interactive software on stage because it enables us to create dynamic places and environments that depend on human presence,” explains Kristensen.

Jongejan insists that while software programming can be a powerful tool to serve a certain purpose in art, he has no interest in it as an end in itself. In creating a performance, Tarpgaard and her collaborators look for a balance between the motion responsive space and the more direct physicality of bodies dancing in it.

For the choreography of Frost, Tarpgaard makes use of the dancersÂ’ versatility in both ballet and modern dance techniques. And the use of technology adds another dimension to the choreography: graphic projections trace motion in space and thus visualise them beyond their fleeting moment of performance. A specially developed software freezes imprints of the dancersÂ’ movements and lets them remain in space like digital sculptures.

This is quite an addendum for dance: the art form is traditionally characterised by its ephemerality and has no widely-established notational systems for movements. Given this specificity of dance, it is unsurprising that Tarpgaard and her collaborators are in illustrious international company when they work with visualising movement independently from the dancersÂ’ bodies.

But movement isn’t just traced in Frost. Rather, the graphic projections develop a life of their own and interact with the dancers as independent entities. And sound is yet another element that both the video scenography and the dancers’ movements respond to. Jens Hørsving has composed most of it, but Tarpgaard also choreographs a duet to Leonard Cohen’s Take this Waltz.

Frost
Dansehallerne, Pasteursvej 14-24, 1799 Cph V; performances at 20:00 on Fri, 17:00 and 20:00 on Sat; tickets 175kr, 105kr for under 25-year-olds; www.dansehallerne.dk

TOP STORIES

  • Bestselling author of ‘The Year of Living Danishly’ Helen Russell on why she moved back to the UK after 12 years

    Bestselling author of ‘The Year of Living Danishly’ Helen Russell on why she moved back to the UK after 12 years

    After more than a decade living in Denmark, Russell shares why she made the move, how she’s coping, what she already misses, and the exciting new projects she’s working on. “It’s been a very tough decision. I love Denmark, and it will always hold a special place in my heart,” she says.

  • Denmark launches first AI supercomputer

    Denmark launches first AI supercomputer

    The new Gefion AI supercomputer is one of the world’s fastest and will accelerate research and provide new opportunities in Danish academia and industry.

  • Navigating big love, big moves and big feelings

    Navigating big love, big moves and big feelings

    Experts believe it takes seven years to move into a new culture, according to leading Danish psychologist Jette Simon and therapist Vibeke Hartkorn. For expat couples, the challenges of starting a new life together in Denmark can put pressure on relationships, but emotions-focused therapy can help.

  • More and more Danes are working after retirement age

    More and more Danes are working after retirement age

    Politicians debate a lot these days about when you can retire. The reality shows that an increasing number of Danes like to work, even if they can withdraw from the labor market. Financial incentives help.

  • Environmental activist fears death in prison if extradited to Japan

    Environmental activist fears death in prison if extradited to Japan

    Canadian-born environmental activist Paul Watson has been in prison in Greenland for almost 100 days awaiting an extradition decision for a 14-year-old offence against a Japanese whaling vessel that he calls a “minor misdemeanor”. The 73-year-old had previously passed through Ireland, Switzerland, Monaco, France and the USA without trouble, before Greenlandic police arrested him in July.

  • Denmark too slow to ease recruitment rules for non-EU service workers, say industry associations

    Denmark too slow to ease recruitment rules for non-EU service workers, say industry associations

    When the Danish government in January presented the first of its schemes to make it easier to recruit foreign labour from outside the EU, it was hailed by the healthcare and service sectors as a timely and important policy shift. But while healthcare changes have been forthcoming, the service sector is still struggling, say the directors of the industry association Dansk Industri and one of the country’s largest private employers ISS.

Connect club

Connect Club is your gateway to a vibrant programme of events and an international community in Denmark.

Sign up here

Career

  • Come and join us at Citizens Days!

    Come and join us at Citizens Days!

    On Friday 27 and Saturday 28 of September, The Copenhagen Post will be at International Citizen Days in Øksnehallen on Vesterbro, Copenhagen. Admission is free and thousands of internationals are expected to attend

  • Diversifying the Nordics: How a Nigerian economist became a beacon for inclusivity in Scandinavia

    Diversifying the Nordics: How a Nigerian economist became a beacon for inclusivity in Scandinavia

    Chisom Udeze, the founder of Diversify – a global organization that works at the intersection of inclusion, democracy, freedom, climate sustainability, justice, and belonging – shares how struggling to find a community in Norway motivated her to build a Nordic-wide professional network. We also hear from Dr. Poornima Luthra, Associate Professor at CBS, about how to address bias in the workplace.

  • Lolland Municipality launches support package for accompanying spouses

    Lolland Municipality launches support package for accompanying spouses

    Lolland Municipality, home to Denmark’s largest infrastructure project – the Fehmarnbelt tunnel connection to Germany – has launched a new jobseeker support package for the accompanying partners of international employees in the area. The job-to-partner package offers free tailored sessions on finding a job and starting a personal business.

Want to advertise your job with CPH Post?

Contact us

Jobs