Yaniv Cohen is a dancer, choreographer, and professor of contemporary dance at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where he has taught since 2014. He holds an MA in Choreography from the Art Academy in Oslo. Cohen explores the fundamental human desire to communicate and the interplay between personal responsibility and societal norms.

I work with the potential that I might be a DOG
Based on his personal experience of being diagnosed with ADHD, Yaniv Cohen merges an addiction to training and his love for dance into an intimate, intense and informative performance.

The work addresses themes such as self-image, shame and cultural constructs of psychiatric disorders. On stage, Yaniv performs an intentional practice of impossible multitasking where muscular exercises and bodily sensitivity are woven together with a constant flow of text. Yaniv plays with neurotypical rhythms, exploring the emotional spaces that open up through exhaustion of the body and mind.‍‍ ‍

Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt is one of Norway's leading dance companies, whose work continues to influence the Nordic dance scene. Ingun Bjørnsgaard's strong visual approach and unique combination of formal precision and everyday pathos has been awarded several prestigious awards over three decades. She has also done several commissions for renowned companies such as the Norwegian National Ballet, Carte Blanche, Ballet de Lorraine, Tanztheater Bremen, Komische Oper Berlin, and GöteborgsOperan.

Object and Desire: A poetic and ambiguous exploration of everyday catastrophes

Together with dancers Catharina Vehre Gresslien, Ludvig Daae, and Edith Strand Askeland, choreographer Ingun Bjørnsgaard investigates human fallibility, relational misunderstandings, and the desire to do what is right. Inspired by a Norwegian etiquette manual from the 1960s, the work offers a playful approach to social behavior and shame, subtly and elegantly exploring how we try to navigate the many social codes that shape our daily lives.

Visually, the piece is characterized by sculptural movement, shifting tempos, and ever-transforming tableaux. Composer Jan Martin Smørdal’s music interacts with the choreography in a precise yet fragile world. The result is a quietly layered performance experience, rich in humor, control, and chaos – where imperfection becomes a quality in its own right.

Corentin JPM LEVEN is a Franco-Norwegian scenographer, performer and multidisciplinary artist based in Oslo. His work merges visual theatre, scenography and live performance to explore queer histories, HIV, heritage and community. Notable works include the solo +- (2020), Birds of Ill Omen (2022) and DIWRIZIENNET – Lost Genealogies (2025).

DIWRIZIENNET – Lost Genealogies investigates queer identity through the lens of roots and heritage. “Diwriziennet,” Breton for “uprooted,” explores the tension between belonging and emancipation. Growing up queer in rural Brittany, where queer lives were absent or silenced, the performance reflects on what is left behind when leaving home to define oneself. It builds an archive of memory, silence, and resilience, blending rituals, folk dance, and scenography. Diwriziennet is a celebration, a space where body, ancestry, and sexuality meet. The performance premiered at Black Box teater, Oslo, 2025. Co-created with Ulf Nilseng, Kim Reenskaug, Ann Mirjam Vaikla, and Ane Reiersen.

T.I.T.S. is an independent performance group that explores the possibilities of hybrid theater forms, blending choreography, play, sound, visual imagery, and body physicality. Artistic leader Nela H. Kornetová initiates most of the projects with her international team of collaborators, with themes that audiences from all walks of life can relate to instinctively.

Let My Hand Be The Hand is the final part of the “Tumor” trilogy, a series of strongly physical performances that delve into our relationship with illness through striking audiovisual and theatrical expression. With both tenderness and intensity, it guides us through the final chapter of life – where emotions run deep, magic shimmers, humor surprises, and epiphanies crackle like sparks in the dark.

Inspired by personal experiences in hospice volunteering and conversations with experts and patients in palliative care, the piece opens a dialogue about our fear of death, our longing not to face it alone, and the role of spirituality in it all. A shape-shifting theatrical experience blending performance, dance, musical, and storytelling –like a mystical meditation on dying, with just the right touch of adrenaline.

LiLi Re is an international artist collective, working across contemporary theater, performative installation, and site-specific projects. Founded in 2020, they explore the troubled ways humanity connects with the environment, seeking an ambiguous middle ground between science and emotion. Recent work examines the human drive to idealise Nature, creating performative and textual landscapes that shift between the non-human and the affective. Moving beyond linear narrative, their performances reflect inner and outer worlds, accessing ecological crises through grief, transformation and mental health. Their work aspires to the panoramic, audiences becoming both witness and participant.

Studies of a Figure in Green – Chapter 1 is a multi-disciplinary performance that explores humanity’s confused longing for the natural world. Blending text, video and physical performance, three voices shift between communion and self-interrogation, searching, like tendrils in the dark, for connection. Inspired by 1960s CIA agent Cleve Backster, who claimed to communicate with plants via lie detector, the piece blurs science and mysticism to ask: is love for nature a deep truth or a dangerous lie? This performative installation immerses us in a landscape populated by druids, mushroom farmers, polygraph specialists and wonder woman. Tying them together is the colour green: a colour of life abundance but also toxicity and decay. Both documentary and fiction, Studies of a Figure in Green explores the fine line between intimacy and domination in our desire to reach the non-human world.

the Krumple is an international collective of performers, directors, magicians and musicians with a grounding in visual and physical theatre, whose performances are devised collaboratively, and without anyone taking themselves (too) seriously. Human nature is at the forefront of everything we do, as we strive to look through both ends of the telescope for what usually cannot be seen. We like to tell stories in a nonlinear fashion, with a leaning towards the poetic and the surreal, as we wish to convey a feeling of wonder, hope and consolation to that which might seem chaotic, overwhelming or impossible.

Chimera

“Things have a life of their own. It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude

In a multidisciplinary blend of physical and visual theatre, new magic and live music, the Krumple aims to challenge our perception of the world that surrounds us, and questions human’s role as the planet’s protagonist to suggest an alternative coexistence.

Just like the signification of the mythical Chimera, which is described as an unrealistic, or unrealizable, wild, foolish or vain dream, the six artists of the Krumple keep trying to hybridise and transform through this performance – be it into stone, tree, bird, earth or cloud – intertwining with various forms of life, in an attempt to rediscover their own. With Chimera they invite us to join them in this hypnotic and playful state, where the boundaries between beings become porous.

Maritea Dæhlin is an interdisciplinary artist working across theatre, video, sound, performance, photography, and text. Her practice challenges boundaries and invites audiences into nonlinear narratives and layered identities. Raised between Mexico and Norway, with second-generation roots from Cameroon, her background in diverse languages and contexts informs explorations of identity and shifting perspectives. She holds a BA in Devised Theatre with Digital Arts from Dartington College of Arts, was an associated artist at Black Box teater, and has been nominated for the Norwegian Critics’ Award and the Hedda Award.

Sleep Locks the Bones is a sound performance where text and voice stand at the center of a collective experience around the theme of sleep. Audiences, in small groups, are invited to settle into a warm, comfortable bed and listen to a restless voice drifting in and out of sleep. The work unfolds somewhere between comfort and disquiet.

It intertwines language, rhythm, narrative, and dreams, creating a vibrant scenic and auditory landscape. Sleep ties it all together: as a metaphor for letting go, feeling safe, and giving space to our subconscious and dreams. But it is also an invocation of its opposite, being completely awake, so alert that you constantly read the world around you.

Is it possible to simply be, to let go of that alertness? Does everyone have the opportunity? Some are always awake, among people, in a theatre, at a party, on a quiet road, and even when alone, trying to sleep.

Kate Pendry is a renowned actress and playwright from London, resident in Oslo, Norway since 1995. She has written and produced over fifty pieces for the theatre, alongside numerous electronic artworks and radio productions. Pendry's signature use of dark humour and incisive social commentary has earned her a distinct reputation in the arts community. She often explores the liminal grayzones of human morality, particularly with regard to the idea of being on the ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ side of history. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Ibsen Award for Playwrighting.

 My Dinner With Putin is a critically acclaimed solo performance in which Pendry recounts her sudden brush with Hollywood stardom – a chance to make a film with Robert De Niro, directed by the Oscar winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who is also a close associate of Vladimir Putin.

 Based on a true story, the performance blends Hollywood drama with dark humour and critiques the film world’s hypocrisy with regard to who it demonises and who it shakes hands with.

Through a blend of refined stage and film techniques, we’re taken on a journey of personal ambition, Hollywood hypocrisy and shifting worldviews, as Pendry moves effortlessly between working class Vienna in 1938, to LA in 1956, to Moscow in 2022.

The play is an honest and darkly captivating exploration of dreams, power, and geopolitics, where morality and ideological conviction take a backseat to self-interest.

Direct Action Theatre is a floating international collective of performers, visual artists, activists, dancers, musicians, teachers, choreographers, composers, caretakers and technicians that operates at the intersection of art and activism. D.A.T. works with riot police uniforms as the main visual and symbolic material, recontextualizing the image of police and questioning its authority, explores the relationship between protest and performance, brings elements of protest on stage and the performative and scenic approach back to the public spaces. D.A.T. is serving and protecting things that truly deserve to be served and protected: people, nature, pleasure, beauty, and life itself.

Serve and Protect is a physical performance, that transformed public interventions into a stage show, structured around the riot police suits and topics of grief, war, uniformity, and crowd brutality. The immersive nature of the performance allows audiences to engage with actions, dances, and live music in a non-traditional setting.

“Serve and Protect is a bold and challenging work that placed police and state violence in the spotlight and called upon the spectator to interrogate their own attitudes towards the role of police.” Alexander Roberts, Rosendal Teater

“The performance is playful and political. By using personal stories, real life uniforms, theatrical situations, dance and even karaoke, D.A.T. shed light on how we as society are using and misusing power. It's physical and at times frightening, thought provoking and warm.” Thomas Østgaard, Østfold Internasjonale Teater

De Utvalgte is an autonomous theater company that has spent the past thirty years in pursuit of new forms, as well as new content in the performing arts. Today, the company consists of Kari Holtan, Boya Bøckman, Torbjørn Davidsen, Anne Holtan and they frequently collaborate with other artists.

De Utvalgte’s contemporary theater and performances move in the border area between theatre, visual arts and performance. The company is a pioneer in developing technology for using live 3D film scenes and stories as in integral part of performances.

In My Twisted World De Utvalgte are collaborating with time-based artist Snorre Sjønøst Henriksen.

My Twisted World is a performance at the intersection of fiction and documentary about men, sexuality, and violence. The title is a reference to the manifesto of Elliot Rodger who at the age of 22 killed five young adults and wounded 14 before shooting himself: an Incel (involuntary celibate) whose actions marked the presence of a hate fuelled, distorted mirror between increasingly angry and lonely young men, and the perceived sexual liberation of women.

The actors’ personal experiences are reworked on stage, along with authentic material from life online: sex chats and incel forums. Live cameras, pre-recorded video, and live music with Motorsag og Flystyrt are part of the performance.
In an online context where loneliness, polarization and rage constitute extremely profitable forms of engagement, the work navigates drives and taboos, longing for love, powerlessness, and thirst for revenge.

Artistic director of Plexus Polaire, Yngvild Aspeli creates visual theatre that brings our most buried feelings to life. Life-sized puppets sit at the heart of her work, with actors, music, light and video as equal storytellers. With her French-Norwegian company she has staged eight shows: Signals (2011), Opera Opaque (2013), Ashes (2014), Chambre noire (2017), Moby Dick (2020), Dracula – Lucy’s Dream (2021), A Doll’s House (2023) and Trust Me for a While (2025). Her performances have toured in over 20 countries in prestigious venues and festivals and have won many awards.  

A Doll’s House
Yngvild Aspeli plays Nora, a housewife who awakens to the illusions of her domestic life and chooses to break free. A leading figure in contemporary puppetry, Aspeli blends disciplines to create immersive, large-scale productions. In A Doll's House, she offers a bold, sensory interpretation of Ibsen’s classic, merging puppetry, dance, voice, and imagery. This uncanny mix of actors, puppets, and hybrid bodies draws the audience into a charged world where illusion meets reality. Aspeli transforms the stage into a vast web, revealing a woman’s fight for freedom, as Nora battles the constraints of domestic life. With her haunting fusion of human and puppet, she delivers a performance that is both enchanting and unsettling – a Doll’s House that shakes, shatters, and sets ghosts free.

ONLY SLIME is elastic and radically adaptive: a shapeshifting artist duo founded in Oslo by Claudia Cox and Tobi Pfeil, fusing theatre, opera, digital art, and immersive technology into high-impact, genre-fluid works. Since their explosive debut, they have toured their game opera Afterlife across Europe, with their next performance at HAU3 in Berlin. Awarded Work of the Year 2025 by the Norwegian Composers Association, their work has been hailed as a “Gesamtkunstwerk on steroids.” With a bold aesthetic merging motion capture, autotuned opera, electronica, black metal, and game-engine worlds, ONLY SLIME invents a new theatrical language where ritual meets rave, body meets screen.

DRAGONBLOOD
Commissioned by Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival and now running to sold-out audiences at The Norwegian Theatre - DRAGONBLOOD is an explosive, 360° immersive “fantasy opera” fusing cyber-gothic spectacle, medieval-core ballads, operatic rave and Norse mythology. The stage becomes a living game engine with a catwalk cutting through the audience - part opera, rave, tavern, and festival. Julie the Dragonslayer rages on a quest for vengeance after a dragon takes her mother, into a fever-dream odyssey of grief and revenge where vikings, a naive young dragon, and witches twist destiny itself. DRAGONBLOOD was hailed ★★★★★ by Norwegian National Newspaper, Aftenposten as “the nerds’ revenge on theatre.” ONLY SLIME are currently in a year-long residency at The Norwegian Theatre, Oslo where they premiered DRAGONBLOOD in September 2025.