OVERVIEW GRANTS - ROUND C

OVERVIEW GRANTS (STIKK)

ROUND C - OCTOBER 2023

Information about artists granted travel support from STIKK.

Avdals Produksjoner/ Fieldworks 

Carry on

When: 24.0.24 - 03.03.24 
Where: Hong Kong/China 
Venue: Tai Kwun, https://www.taikwun.hk/en/ 
Webpage:  https://www.hk.artsfestival.org/en/ 
Contact: Heine Avdal, heineavdal@gmail.com 

 

About the Perfomance (Carry on): 

A site-specific performative installation, re-created for each new location, interacting with the architecture of the building; and transcending its past, present and future functions. carry on is the latest iteration in a series of works, which began with distant voices in 2014, evolved into the installation-performance versions of carry on presented in the lobbies of Spiral Hall in Tokyo, Japan, and M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, in 2015, and now continues in this, radically site-specific format, entirely refigured for every new location where it takes place. This history/process speaks to the way in which movement, choreographic strategies, modes of creation or collaboration, fascinations, concerns, and other “material,” in dance, is carried over, from one presentation or event to the next, and takes on different forms and guises along the way. 

About Fieldworks

Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki's work is concerned with “performativity” and allows for an open interpretation of movement as a heterogeneous combination of a variety of media. Consequently, the artists draw on a broad range of disciplines and expertise: performance, dance, visual arts, video, music, and technology. They collaborate with various artists, who each contribute concepts and ideas to the artistic process, using their own individual approach and medium of choice. 
Every performance plays on the tension and contrast between the body and objects, the body and the mind, fact and fiction/representation, the tangible and the invisible, the organic and the artificial. Recurrent themes in Avdal and Shinozaki’s productions include the relationship between performer and spectator, the non-hierarchical approach to the various elements of a performance, and the exploration of both theatrical and non-theatrical environments. 
Fieldworks is the successor to deepblue, the collective in which Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki, along with sound artist Christoph De Boeck, have realized their projects between 2002 and 2012. The organization is based in Brussels, Belgium.  

Photo: Christine Grosche, Carry on, Avdals Produksjoner/ Fieldworks 

Photo (top): Heine Avdal, Carry on, Avdals Produksjoner/ Fieldworks 

When/where/venue:  

  • 18.2.24 Edmonton/Canada, Mile Zero Dance

  • 21.2.24 Calgary/Canada, Springboard Performance

  • 23.-24.2.24 Vancouver/Canada, Dancehouse, Vancouver  

  • 28.-29.2.24 Ottawa/Canada, National Arts Centre

  • 3.3.24 Peterborough/Canada, Public Energy Performing Arts

  • 6.-7.3.24 Toronto/Canada, Harbourfront Centre

Webpage: www.ellesofe.com 
Contact: Maiken Garder, maiken@ellesofe.com  


About the performance: 

Community and kinship between people, with nature and with the earth we all share, are the main themes of Vástádus eana/ The answer is land. The choreography is inspired by demonstrations, Sami spiritual practices and formation dance. 

Written specially for the performance by composer and professor of yoik, Frode Fjellheim, the polyphonic yoik works as a supportive pillar throughout the work. 

About Elle Sofe Sara: 

Elle Sofe Sara (b. 1984) is a choreographer, director and filmmaker. Sara’s work expands upon seemingly mundane, often overlooked areas of Sámi physicality —unspoken rituals that have escaped the vice grip of colonialism. Sara uncovers a space in which the past and the present coincide. While her choreography is known for its playful approach, she also delves into taboo subjects such as trauma, abuse, and suicide. As an Indigenous artist, Sara seeks to create work that resonates as strongly for her community as it does for the art world. Internationally, Sara has created work with Liu Chi (China), Wimme (Finland), and Lana Hansen (Greenland) among others. She is also the co-founder of DÁIDDADÁLLU, a Sámi indiginous contemporary art collective. Hailing from Guovdageaidnu, Norway, Sara holds an MA in choreography from the Oslo Academy of Arts (2010) and studied dance at the LabanTrinity school, London. She is the featured artist of the Arctic Arts Festival in Harstad (2020, 2021), winner of the Moon Jury Award at the Imagine Native Film Festival (2019) and one of four artists selected for Talent Norway’s emerging filmmakers program (2020 -2023). When she is not working with choreography or film, or traveling for work, Sara can be found marking reindeer calves with her children or reading animal tracks in the snow. 

 

FIKSDAL DANS STIFTELSE 

DIORAMA

When: 25.-26.11.23 
Where: Athen/Greece 
Venue: MIRfestival
Webpage: www.ingrifiksdal.com 
Contact: Eva Grainger

About the performance: 

With the Diorama performance series, Fiksdal stages particular views of natural and urban landscapes in different cities and contexts. The word “diorama” often refers to a three-dimensional model of a landscape, such as displayed in museums of natural history. Another use of the word is for the French diorama theatre, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1822, where the audience were sat watching big landscape paintings transform through skillfully manipulated light, sound effects and live performers. 

In the Diorama performances, Fiksdal uses choreography as a lens, through which she alters or interferes with a particular view and its context. The performances reflect on the passing of time, on the slow change in landscape, and scenography as an ecological practice of bodies both human and non-human. 

The music is composed by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval and noise artist Lasse Marhaug, and shift from a drone-like echo, to a punctured, industrial noise, to indecipherable whispering voices drifting into to the landscape. 

Diorama premiered in the fishing village Brixham in England, where the view was staged from an outdoor pool over the sea and the horizon 

About Ingri Fiksdal: 

Ingri Midgard Fiksdal is a choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in artistic research from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts titled Affective Choreographies (2019). 

Ingri’s work on affect has in recent years taken her into discourses on perspective and privilege. She is currently working on a number of projects that research the posthuman and with this hegemonies of knowledge and power. Here, choreography is understood as a format of speculative fiction that can propose complex and manyfold understandings of body, gender, species, ethnicity, knowledge and history. Ingri is concerned with how practice and theory are entangled in her work in a way where neither is perceived as anterior to the other. Since 2020, Ingri has been an Affiliated Artistic Researcher with CoFUTURES at the University of Oslo (www.cofutures.org). The CoFUTURES group led by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay researches global futurisms from non-anglophone traditions. 

Ingri’s work has in recent years been performed at Obscene Festival in Seoul, Homo Novus in Riga, Kunstenfestival in Brussels, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Santarcangelo festival, Beijing Contemporary Dance Festival, Sommerszene in Salzburg, Reykjavík Art Museum, brut-Wien, Teatro di Roma, Harbourfront Centre Toronto, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, BUDA Kortrijk, Tanzhaus NRW in Dusseldorf and Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, alongside extensive touring in Norway. 

Ingri´s work is supported by Fri scenekunst – kunstnerskap from Arts and Culture Norway. 

Photo: Karsten Piper, Diorama, Fiksdal Dans Stiftelse 

Impure Company / Hooman Sharifi

Sacrifice While Lost In Salted Earth 

When: 24.11.23 
Where:  Deinze, Belgia 
Venue: www.leietheater.be 
Webpage: http://moradiensemble.com/about/arash-moradi/ 
Contact: Hooman Sharifi, impure.company@gmail.com 

 
About the Performance: 

In Sacrifice While Lost in Salted Earth, we have been inspired by the Iranian language Farsi, poetry, and the traditional sound of Tambur, but also by Igor Stravinsky's iconic work Spring Sacrifice. 
In Farsi, we use the terms janam (my life), ghorbanet beram (I sacrifice myself for you) and fadat sham (I die for you) often in everyday speech, in all possible contexts. In poetry, dying for love or turning crazy of love is often mentioned as one of the highlights of life. 
I have thought a lot about whether there are parallels in the Norwegian language, and the closest I can come is the original Norwegian term “dugnad”. This may not sound as dramatic or poetic as the Iranian version, but I love how individuals must stand together, work together and sacrifice together for a common good. 
Dance and music have always been, and still are, a big part of Iranian culture. Everyone dances in social gatherings, but today dance as an art in public, is illegal. Nevertheless, there are still many who try again and again to develop the dance as a stage art, while experiencing, to put it mildly, extreme resistance. These people are brave and make sacrifices. 
We are fortunate to have with us the wonderful musician Arash Moradi who has an enormous understanding and respect for Tambur and its tradition. He is also extremely open, and has the ability to experiment and find new ways. For four months, Arash and I have been working on the music for this performance. We have traveled back and forth, up and down between Stravinsky's music and all the opportunities Tanbur's rich tradition gives us. 
 
Our goal is to create a direct, down-to-earth and concrete expression of movement where each individual takes an independent place and exercises their own physical sacrifice. Gradually the group expands, with time we become more and more, and something happens where the sum together is somewhat greater than ourselves. A stage room with 9 dancers, one musician with an ancient instrument that has three strings, and our most necessary partner: the audience. Together we will awaken thoughts, memories and imagination. 
 
In today's society, we need some kind of collective sacrifice. Everyone must sacrifice as an independent choice, because if sacrifice is to work today, the victim must choose for himself. Sacrifice is a constant. You do not sacrifice yourself to death, but you continually sacrifice something of yourself in life. 

About Homan Sharifi/ Impure Company (fra Wikipedia) 

Art = politics. This is the idea behind Impure Company as well as the starting point of all Impure Company's performances. Politics in this sense means social consciousness, awareness, and commitment. Impure Company's project is to always keep asking questions about its own work. The company wants to continue researching the artistic method, the format and the content within each production as well as the company as an institution. 

Impure Company was established by Hooman Sharifi. Since the beginning in 2000, Impure Company has produced 18 productions, performing in Norway and abroad. 

Yngvild Aspeli - Plexus Polaire 

Moby Dick  

When/where/venue:  

Webpage:   http://www.plexuspolaire.com 
Contact: Claire Costa, clairecosta@plexuspolaire.com 

About the Performance: 

My grandfather was a sailor. He had a naked woman tattooed on his upper arm, and I remember him as a smell of tar and tobacco. He came from an island on the west-coast of Norway, a tiny harbor filled with foreign ships and languages, fishermen, sailors and children waiting for fathers who never came home from the sea. A landscape of wind, vast ocean and women standing looking out at the horizon. Weathered faces, sore hands and churches with boats hanging from the ceiling in hope of protection. My ancestors were buried in Portuguese soil, because the churchyard on this island didn’t have enough earth to bury their own dead. I like how the sea somehow draws invisible lines between the different corners of the world, how it creates points of connection. How, facing this force of nature, we are all the same. And no-one captures the battle between man and nature like Herman Melville in Moby Dick. An ancient white whale, a captain steering his ship into destruction and the inner storms of the human heart. Moby Dick is the tale of a whaling expedition, but also the story of an obsession or an investigation into the unexplained mysteries of life. To quote Melville: “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” 

So, with seven actors, fifty puppets, video-projections, a drowned orchestra and a whale-sized whale, I am currently working on a visual adaptation of this wonderful beast of a book. 

About Yngvild Aspeli: 

Artistic director of Plexus Polaire, Yngvild Aspeli, develops a visual world that brings our most buried feelings to life. The use of life-sized puppets is at the center of her work, but the actor’s performance, the presence of the music and the use of light and video are all equal elements in communicating the story.  

Director, actress, puppeteer and puppet-maker, Yngvild Aspeli studied at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris (2003-2005) and at ESNAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette) in Charleville-Mézières (2005-2008).  

Within her French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire, she has directed six shows: Signals (2011), Opera Opaque (2013), Ashes (2014), Chambre noire (2017), Moby Dick (2020) and Dracula (2022). She is currently working on an adaptation of A Doll’s House that will premiere in Autumn 2023. 

Yngvild is currenty an associated artist at CDN Dijon-Bourgogne (France) and companionship-artist at Théâtre d’Auxerre (France). 

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage, Moby Dick, Plexus Polaire 

Kate Pendry

Little Wolf

When/where/venue:

Webpage: Kate Pendry www.katependry.com 
Contact: Camilla Svingen, camilla@syvmil.no 

About the Performance: 

Kate Pendry explores the themes of love, parenthood, sex and death in Ibsen's Little Eyolf with this new vocal theatre interpretation.  

Together with composer Audun Aschim Steffensen, she brings the play's very modern themes to life, with newly written music (Steffensen) and libretto (Pendry), in a concert that takes the audience into Ibsen's rich, quirky and supernatural world of shaky family life.  

The music can perhaps be described as a sonic avant-garde film in a dark dreamscape, with a hint of StgPepper and Disney.  

We get inspiration from contemporary rock, film music and experimental jazz. Everything we do is extracted from the core of Ibsen's supernatural universe, and we also bring the gothic and grand bourgeois into the mix, minced through our own palette of expression. 

About Kate Pendry: 

Pendry has written and produced over fifty pieces for the theatre, many of which have been performed internationally. She has a reputation as a political and controversial artist because of the red thread of social commentary in the work, and her signature use of dark humor. 

Espen Hjort Scenekunst

Stonework

When:  18.-19.11 23 
Where: Leuven/Belgia 
Venue: STUK - Playground Festival STUK* Playground*
Webpage:  http://www.landmarkscollective.com/            www.espenhjort.com 
Contact: Espen Hjort, espen.hjort@gmail.com 

About Stonework 

Stonework is a playful and primitive physical duet between a human performer and a stone from the Hallingskarvet mountain range in Norway. The starting point for the work is the wish to collaborate as equals with the stone and to create a work that is just as engaging for a stone as for a human. This forced us to rethink our approach to theatre and our means of communication. Stonework is about vibration, temperature, force and gravity, and about two bodies trying to become one another. But how do you entertain a stone? 

Even if the work is stone-centred, we would like to invite a human audience to witness this duet, in the hope that we can all be infected with a bit of stone-ness. Perhaps the stone can teach us about softness? Eventually, our aim is to learn how to coexist with nonhumans in a more empathic way. 

The work is gentle and playful, part physical performance, part theatrical installation and part composition. Composer Seán ó Dálaigh creates a sound work based on the unique frequencies of the stone performer. 

Stonework marks the beginning of a series of works created together with Mees under the name Landmarks. This work for stones will be followed by Treework, Mountainwork and several other works. Site-specific editions of Stonework will happen in 2023. 

About Landmarks Collective:  

Performing artists Mees Borgman and Espen Hjort are working together as Landmarks Collective. Together they create works that aim to go beyond human perspectives. They are driven by the need to make sense of ecological disasters and more importantly: to contribute meaningfully in this moment of ecological crisis. How can art help us live on more equal terms with the planet? How can art be a laboratory for the future? 

Espen Hjort (Norway, 1989) is working as director, stage designer, playwright, dramaturge and co-creator of the works of Landmarks. 

In 2016 he graduated the directing department at the theatre school of the Amsterdam University of the Arts and he has been working ever since producing his own performances and collaborating with institutions and theaters in the Netherlands, Norway and Ireland. 

For him theater is a space to investigate how to live and how we create the world we live in. He often departs from the encounter with the unknown, the other, that which is radically different from ourselves. The body, landscapes and 'spatial music' are returning points of interest. The relationship between human beings and nature (whatever that might be) is the focus in his work. 

Photo: Anna van Kooij, Stonework, Espen Hjort Scenekunst 

T.I.T.S. og Kornetova

Badman 

When/where/venue:

Webpage:   T . I . T . S . - Performance group (titsperformancegroup.com) 
Contact: Nela H. Kornetova,  nela.kornetova@gmail.com 

About the performance 

Badman is an audio-visual physical performance about masculinity and its power, reclaimed and twisted by a single female performer. 
 
Dear Badman 
It's that pop and oomph I desire 
To wear your gestures as my garment 
To rip off your faces 
To taste your manners 
To drink your spirit 
To pet your ego 
 
When you burn at the stake 
I'll rise from your ashes 
 
Come to get under the spell of our distorted celebration of virility and new visions of manliness. Let's break that charm.

About T.I.T.S. 

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. 
Between 2019 - 2022 Kornetová was awarded Arbeidsstipend for Performing Artists in Norway. In 2020 and 2022, she was repeatedly nominated for the Thalia Award for Best Actor in the Alternative Theater category. She won in 2022. The Divadelní Noviny Awards 2020 nominated Kornetová & T.I.T.S. in the categories Dance and Physical Theater for the production of the year for Tumor: Carcinogenic Romance and in the Alternative Theater for the performance Badman. She received the prize for the Badman.  
To date, T.I.T.S. have presented their work at multiple venues and festivals in Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Czechia, and South Korea. Currently, Kornetová and her colleagues are preparing the US premiere of Dave&Golly in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Further, a dance piece about the breath and the fall of the human empire There is Something in the Air and the final part of the trilogy about love and cancer Tumor: Oh God with expected premieres between 2024-2025. 

Photo: Jan Hajdelak

When: 18.-21.1 24 
Where: Tokyo/Japan 
Venue: Theater Xcai, http://www.theaterx.jp/ 
Webpage: http://www.grusomhetensteater.no/ 
Contact: Lars Øyno,  larsoeyno@gmail.com 

About the performance: 

This anti-war play, written during exile in Stockholm in 1939–1940, is considered one of Brecht's most perfect examples of epic theatre.  

Bertolt Brecht's play has the Thirty Years' War in Europe from 1618-1648 as a backdrop. The main character, Anna Fierling, also called Mother Courage, is a wandering marketenterian (seller of food, drinks, tobacco products etc. to soldiers in the field) who together with her 3 adult children moves through a landscape with crossing borders. The sale of goods from the house wagon they haul with them depends on the war, and peace can entail ruin. The audience is confronted with the brutal aesthetics that prevail where soldiers operate. Homes, countries and people are destroyed by the conditions. Mother Courage apparently doesn't take a point of view of what she sees, for her, business seems the most important thing. Two of the children die, and the third gets lost during the journey. In the last tableau, the marketenterian pulls the wagon alone after the marching soldiers. 

About Grusomhetens Teater: 

Grusomhetens Teater makes performances within the physical tradition and draws fundamental inspiration from Antonin Artaud's visions for an anatomical theatre. They create theatre with the body's own musicality, its breath and poetry, as the beginning of all action. Artaud wanted to awaken the inherent life force that exists in nature and that Western man seems to have forgotten. The theatre thus becomes a tool for healing life. Grusomhetens Teater seek not to reproduce realistic reality so that it can be recognized, but to narrate the core of life inherent in every genuine experience. Even if it is based on a dramatic work or a literary text, the word is not regarded as central and often gets lost in the overall stage picture.  

The theatre has performed on stages and festivals in Japan, Turkey, Russia, Germany, France, Poland, England, India and Sweden. At several of these locations, as well as in Ireland and New York, the company has also held workshops. 

The artistic director and founder is Lars Øyno. 

Photo: Grusomhetens Teater, Mor Courage og barna hennes, Grusomhetens Teater

Sagliocco Ensemble  

Bibliotek-Karens bibliotek 

When/where/venue:

Webpage:  https://sagliocco-ensemble.no/ 
Contact: Torstein Seim, tos50@online.no 

About the performance: 

With this performance, we want to arouse young children's interest in books and excite their curiosity for literature through the playful approach of theatre. In an increasingly digitized world, we believe it is becoming more and more important to give focus to the physical book. Books, and the stories that inhabit them, are not only a source of knowledge, but equally a tool for the development of imagination, empathy, and language. 

"I need to investigate that!" says Bibliotek-Karen.  Because in the books there are answers to a lot of strange things. Could it be true that wolves eat grandmothers? Or that monster likes poop?  

In her library there are many books! And just like in kindergarten, there are many different departments. Department for large books and for small books, for yellow and blue, for cookbooks, fairy tales and poetry. There are sad books and funny books and a separate section for scary books that almost no one dares to borrow. 

But then something strange happens. Karen discovers a tiny newborn baby book, which only has completely white blank pages. It's very small and terribly cute.  

 But it can also howl!   

 Is it hungry? Or is it tired???                   

 Getting a newborn book in your lap isn't easy.   

 "I wonder what it will be when it grows big?" wonders Karen as she cradles the entire bookshelf.  

 Throughout the performance, Karen takes the children through an experience where something is familiar, something is new, and with a great dash of humor, this becomes a mix of literature, books as objects, and surprising sounds.   

In Bibliotek-Karen's bibliotek we will not only dive into the world books paint up with words, but still how they feel, smell, and sound. As Astrid Lindgren says "Books need children's imaginations, it's true. But it's even more true that children's imaginations need books to live without books."   

About Sagliocco EnsemBle: 

Sagliocco Ensemble was established in Porsgrunn in 1988 by Guandaline Sagliocco and Håkan Islinger. Sagliocco Ensemble made its international breakthrough in 1997 with The Story of the Fallen Hero, which won Best Performance at the Festival Fringe in Edinburgh. Since then the company has performed in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, France, Wales, Scotland, Slovenia, USA, Canada and Taiwan with various performances.  

Sagliocco Ensemble works in an intimate format characterized by close and direct communication with the audience. With ART trilogy Voff! ART (2008), Tone! ART (2011) and Scene! ART (2014), the ensemble has established a distinct profile. Actress and artistic director Guandaline Sagliocco has over several years developed an artistic language and foundation for the productions and given the ensemble a recognizable signature; An acting style characterized by humor, play and poetry, which appeals to children and adults of all ages.  

Photo: Sagliocco Ensemble, Bibliotek-Karens bibliotek, Sagliocco Ensemble

Simonsen/Straume 

TROLL

When: 26.02. - 17.03.2024
Where:  Adelaide/Australia 
Venue: Adelaide Fringe Festival at the Migration Museum  https://migration.history.sa.gov.au/ 
Webpage: https://www.mariekallevik.com/   https://www.annamariesimonsen.com/ 
Contact: Marie Kallevik Straume, marie.kallevik@gmail.com     

About the Performance: 

Troll is a two-troll clown show about friendship, scape(goat)ing and really, really long noses.  

Fed up with centuries of misrepresentation, prejudice, vilification and exclusion from non-Troll society, two trolls find themselves in a theatre, on stage for the first time. They are ready and desperate to tell their side of the story, INCLUDING the truth about those three bloody goats. Inspired by Scandinavian folklore, Troll is a hysterical, heartwarming mash-up of music, storytelling, physical theatre and clown.  

About Simonsen/Straume: 

Marie Kallevik Straume (Performer & producer) studied at École Jacques Lecoq and LAMDA. She's taken clown courses with Phillippe Gaulier, Spymonkey and Angela de Castro. Marie is a co-founder/performer/producer of the theatre company MÅGÅ productions. MÅGÅ was founded in 2020 and in 2023 they will open their third show. 

Anna Marie Simonsen (Performer & producer) graduated with BA in Drama & Theatre Arts from Goldsmith University in 2019. She’s a SOHO Theatre alumni and received a 1 year artist grant from Arts Council Norway in 2022. Her one-woman show, Naughty, won Oslo Fringe’s Funniest Moment Award 2021 and described as “flirtatiously disturbing” (Edfringe Review). 

Photo: Hanne Nygaard, TROLL, Simonsen/Straume 

Credit photo: Clémence Rebourg, TROLL, Simonsen/Straume 

Janne Eraker

Movements for Listening

When/where/venue:  

Webpage: http://www.janneeraker.com  
Contact: Janne Eraker, janneeraker@gmail.com 

About the performance: 

Movements for Listening is a wild exploration of sound by Janne Eraker and friends, with borderless worlds of music, widening the horizon and moving outside of all boxes. The ambition of the project was to find ways to use tap dance as percussion in a variety of musical styles, genres and collaborations, and to make recordings that represent this in the best possible way. Eraker went to extremes to try different sounds, textures, material, shoes, dynamics, concepts and, of course, rhythms! Sometimes it’ll be hard to know what’s tap dance and what’s not, because the players get so close in timbre, texture and sound. There’s both composed and improvised music, and music that is based on a standard jazz tune, score, groove or melody. There’s tap dance on wood, metal, bubble wrap, sand, in water, with different types of shoes and with bare feet. Eraker plays on a collection of taps hanging from a rack, like a percussionist playing a carillon, and wooden taps bound together in her hands, like a flamenco dancer playing castanets. All of this is also documented in a series of videos, to make it possible to see how the music was created. 

About Janne Eraker: 

Janne Eraker is a tap dancer who works full-time as a musician and dance artist in projects in Norway and abroad. Born in Germany and raised in Norway, she moved on to get her dance education in Oslo, Rotterdam and New York. Also her dancing has many roots, starting with Balkan folk dances, swinging by competition dancing, musicals, contemporary and modern dance, and now fermenting all of it into her tap dancing. Eraker is fascinated by the sound of tap dance, and has worked a long time to create all kinds of music with it. Her work spans from improvised concerts to choreographed dance pieces, collaborating with a wide range of artists. As a performer she also dances in the Sebastian Weber Dance Company in Germany. 

Both out of practical necessity and artistic curiosity, Eraker investigates the possibilities of amplifying, modifying and recording the sound of tap dance. Much like an acoustic guitar becoming an electric guitar, this results in new sounds and ways of using the instrument. In the duo Øy and the performance installation Tap Noir she goes further to trigger samples, sounds and light via contact microphones on the floor. She has also “played” the full size organ of Stavanger Concert House via wireless microphones attached to her shoes. In 2022 she released her first album Gol Variations with the trio One Small Step. In 2023 Eraker is releasing the album Movements for Listening, recorded with 11 musicians in 10 different locations.  

Eraker received a 3 year Artist grant from Arts Council Norway (2015-2017), and is the first tap dancer to be included as a musician in the Norwegian Jazz Forum and to be employed by the Alliance for Actors and Dancers. She's also leading the studio collective Dansens Haus, which resides in a 70m2 studio in the heart of Oslo.

Photo: Janne Eraker Ensemble, Movements for Listening, Janne Eraker Ensemble 

Photo: Morten Minothi Kristiansen, Movements for Listening, Janne Eraker Ensemble 

Danse og- teatersentrum er støttet av Kulturdepartementet og Utenriksdepartementet