Traveling Bodies

Dance and sound performance at Tarnby Park Performance Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023.

Embodied experience of sound and dance encounter with a natural reserve the island Saltholm, Copenhagen

Second performance, based on the field research was performed at the TPF Stage

Performers: Simonida Zarkovic (SR), Nevena Radulovic (SR), Neda Kovinic (SR), Neil Luck (UK).

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I was commissioned to create the performance at TPF exploring topic about ecological careful traveling and environmental concerns.

I have invited performers from Serbia and a fellow artist I met at the Academy Schloss Solitude.

As international guests, a group of performers taking part in the Tarnby park performance Festival, we traveled to bring our performance from far away – from our homelands Belgrade and London and from our temporary artistic residency in Stuttgart. This position triggers us to think what stories from the past and present concerning environmental issues could we bring with us to the Festival in Copenhagen, but also tackling the questions of imagining possible futures. What embodied experience or gesture we can we bring from our cultures, previous lives, specific personalities to Denmark, Copenhagen or a little island Saltholm, which we identified by scaling the online maps of the city. How does the imaginary, motivated by virtual presentation, fit into real experiences? We will discover by first making visits to the dreamed island, a symbol of a natural otherness.

As traveling is already performance it self, we would start tour as a performative journey as a joint group of diverse performers while telling and entrusting personal and historical stories to each other. We would listen to our bodies and react on the space while traveling, raising the awareness of the impacts of our bodies on the environment.

Imagining the potential spot of performing around the Festival area, I had noticed the island of Saltholm in google maps, studying it, a tiny marshy island that sits in rural isolation in the middle of the Øresund, which sparked my imagination and the dream to make research and perform there. The island is described as a haven of absolute tranquility, if you can ignore the planes coming in to land at nearby Copenhagen Kastrup airport.

But, does the reality of a place fit to the fantasies projected by the online gaze?

The island is the place for the migratory birds, traveling all around world, bringing songs from Africa, Asia, the Balkans, UK... Artists are traveling for their cultural and networking reasons, and as being from different countries and cultures, we also are carrying diverse content. Stories, songs, rituals, like embodied relations to the spaces and earth.  

 

Thinking about sustainability and care to the environment, there is a question about whether all approaches and relations with nature are actually anthropocentric? If mankind would disappear, would the planet still flourish and feed the animals? If the airport in Saltholm wouldn't have any more people to maintain it and use it, would the birds over there still sing?

What if we switch the hierarchy between the non-human and human and start to learn and listen to non-human?

 

With our presence in the island we will try to learn from the environment, to create together with it, from the experience, feelings, perceiving the elements, exposing our bodies to it. We will constantly question what do we bring there from afar. Can we take natural knowledges from the place? We are going there to exchange. We will create our unique body/sound ritual of the elements of the songs we have chosen while preparing for this travel. Folk songs from Serbia with its organic rhythm and animal symbolism in its lyrics, as well as Britain folk song with themes around sexual relation through animal human-comparisions, will serve as an elements for the matrix of our new ritual we want to give to the place.

 

Four guests performers will collaborate within the period of two weeks, researching the possibilities of somatic and narrative communication in relation to natural environment, questioning what do we carry with us traveling through time and space, that can stand in opposition to impending human and climate crises.