Contemplation #2 - Hjalti Jón Sverrisson

She was climbing up a pole, and then hanging from it. Blonde, muscular, shaky tattoos. She was not doing much, but for the first time during the entire performance it seemed to me as if she wasn’t all that confident and for a moment she seemed to be okay with that as well.

I was at a performance in one of the amazingly many theatres in Tampere (there seem to be approximately 3.000.000 theatres in this town of 200.000), called Sister – although I couldn’t stop calling it Sisters when talking about the show with my friends. To be fair, there were two of them there on stage.

While the aforementioned sister was hanging from the pole, the other one was walking on four feet, her hands folded in some high heels. I didn’t really get that. Sure, I could’ve started thinking it was in choreography a commentary on sexual labor and dehumanization and start trying to dissect the whole thing. My rational mind just couldn’t be bothered as it was being overwhelmed by a sentence that was hanging in the air, from the song playing from the speakers.

“One day I’ll grow old, I’ll feel the power in me”

I felt a release of tension within myself and a sense of understanding towards myself. Maybe what this performance all came down to was the subject of self-empowerment and how tricky it can be to truly take ownership of yourself. Saying words you want to say, doing what you want to do. Not having someone else’s morals, but the kind that really resonates within you.

“But for today I’m a child, for today I am a boy”

Just a few days earlier I had gotten the hairdryer treatment from an old man from the countryside of Iceland. He was a figure of authority and had no trouble inhabiting as much space as he pleased, never doubting himself or the conclusions he had drawn. He was old and he sure seemed to be feeling the power in himself.
So there I was, in Tampere at a documentary-theatre performance detailing the life of a young woman who had gone from being a porn star in London, to being a prostitute in Berlin, to being the central figure in a theatre piece performed in Tampere, Finland. And there with me, taking space in my mind, was this old man whom, I now realized, I had empowered. How ridiculous!

It’s easy to be a little boy.

“One day I’ll grow old, I’ll feel the power in me”

Me and Björn Leó had just been joking around when she entered the elevator in our hotel at Hameenpuisto. It was the porn star turned theatre artist, Rosana. I gave a sheepish smile. We landed at the lobby and me and Björn started walking towards Halla, the theatre we’d be showing Petra in just a few hours later, until we stopped at some lights and I turned around and said to Björn that I had to go back to the hotel and I’d catch up with him later. I ran to the hotel and met up with Rosana, interrupting her previous conversation I thanked her for the performance and just as quickly went back outside. It felt good to have done that.

“But for today I’m a child, for today I am a boy”

My penis was the size of a raisin as I swam in the little lake right by the resort we had been taken to after the first performance of Petra. In my mouth was still a bit of smoky sweat after the sauna session we had just completed. I was laughing, more like giggling, with Björn, Kolbeinn and Pétur as we swam together like a flock of ducks. Again I felt like a little boy, but this was different. I was uncontrollably happy. While I associated the power of this moment to the setting; the trees, the lake, the sunset, the stars, my friends, I could also feel a surge of power from within. It’s taking a lot of time but it seems as if, little by little, this little boy is growing old.

Contemplation #1 - Björn Leó Brynjarsson

Note: Dance For Me was supported by the Kulturkontakt Nord mobility fund to travel to Tampere Theatre Festival in Finland in August 2015. This post revisits that experience.

I was sitting in a circle of friends around a middle aged, portable plastic table at a camp site on the southern, sandy side of Iceland. That weekend you could feel that the short summer would soon turn to autumn and the night went dark for the first time since may. Light is a very dynamic force in Iceland.

My friend Atli said that we as Icelanders might have missed out on many things as children. I asked him what he meant and he explained that because of the cold climate we had never experienced jumping into a tree surrounded lake and dried off on warm stones afterwards as the sun went down. He was right. Over here the outdoors is a foreign environment and Icelandic nature is the deep side of the pool - you can go there, but it takes effort to stay there. The human body is a visitor in Iceland and virginity is something you lose inside a heated house, never in the nature. It’s too barren, too hostile, too alien. We debated for a while the pros and cons of having grown up in Iceland and then went to our tents in the cool summer night.

Three days later I was in Finland with the company Dance For Me, preparing to show the very Icelandic piece Petra to the locals. When showing foreigners your own material you realize that you are the foreigner yourself. You never know if the language and mood will translate the way you want it so we felt the same way when we were premiering the show for the first time in Iceland. Since laughter can sometimes be the only tool a performer can use to measure the impact of his performance on the audience, and the Finnish audience at our show that night sat quiet like a crowd of petrified trolls, I assumed our play just didn’t work in Finland. But as the house lights went on and the audience walked out after a decent applause, I could see their watery eyes. There was obviously a connection, the Finns liked our show and I was extremely relieved. Our creation was not just something that the local Icelandic crowd could understand but also our far neighbours in the east. I can’t remember exactly which Icelandic author said that in order to go global, you have to make something extremely local.

Later that night the festival organizers invited our company to a sauna party of some sorts. Because we had spent the day before rehearsing and I myself had gone overboard when sampling the local alcoholic beverages I almost didn’t go. But thanks to modern medicine I murdered my headache and threw myself in the minibus with my friends and a short drive later I stepped into Atli’s missing childhood dream that I mentioned earlier. The Tampere smoke sauna was something cut out of an Astrid Lindgren’s fantasy and me and the gang took round after round of broiling in the dark, mystical, wooden house and then jumping into the amazingly fresh lake surrounded by tall birch trees. I thought that even though I missed out on losing my virginity somewhere between a smoke sauna and a lake as a teenager, I was thankful that I was able to experience that moment with my friends just for one night.