When Marcellus uttered his immortal line about the state of Denmark in Act One, Scene Four of Hamlet, he wasn’t strolling through Frederiksberg Have on a summer’s day, hand-in-hand with his lover, contemplating an afternoon of leafy bliss and sinful is.
No, he said it overlooking the battlements of a fog-engulfed castle, freezing and fed-up, on a day not that much different from today. And to be fair, nothing’s changed in the 400 years since the play was written. February continues to be a month in which winter overstays its welcome and the aptly-named SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) takes over.
Short of going on holiday, until three years ago there was no known remedy. But then an idea that started as a whisper in empty hotel rooms, half-filled smoky jazz venues and backstage fashion parties metamorphosed into an extremely good reason for staying put and enjoying your February in Copenhagen.
Welcome to Wondercool, the festival that is redefining your least favourite month and transforming this city of ours into a beehive of activity, as hundreds of venues put on events attended by thousands of revellers.
Shakespeare also wrote the line: “If music be the food of love, play on,” and there in a nutshell is what Wondercool is all about.
The Copenhagen Cooking Winter Edition is taking care of the food side. We will see around 100 events over the whole month, and on page 12 we have selected some selected highlights alongside a few events that might appeal to the gastronomic bargain-hunters among you.
The music is a joint venture, shared by the winter edition of July’s Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see page 11), which features around 400 concerts at 75 different venues, and the FROST Festival (see page 10), which will present close to 20 distingtively alternative concerts spread over the month.
Which leaves the Copenhagen Fashion Festival (see www.cphpost.dk for selected highlights) to provide the love – after all, don’t all the men out there get enough love at home, and there are no football or lager components at Wondercool. The biannual fashion festival plans to hold close to 50 events spread over the first week of February that the public can attend.
Finally, hidden among the four main components of Wondercool are numerous fusion events relating to art, architecture and video art, and a few specific ones as well.
The finalised details of some of these events – at participating venues including Design Museums Denmark, the Danish Architecture Centre and Nikolaj Kunsthal (the main host of the FOKUS Video Art Festival, Feb 6-March 2) – were not fully known at the time of going to press, but keep your eyes peeled over the rest of the month, as InOut will be bringing you a weekly selection of the top events at Wondercool on page G4.
